ST. LOUIS COUNTY — Members of the Rowe and Conley families danced in a courthouse hall in Clayton late Friday after a judge read a jury's verdict on the sentence of murderer Leonard S. Taylor.
Death by lethal injection, it said, for the November 2004 slayings of Angela Rowe, 28; her daughters Alexus Conley, 10, and AcQreya Conley, 6; and her son, Tyrese Conley, 5, in their Jennings home.
Before leaving the courtroom, Tyrone Conley, the girls' father and a surrogate father for Tyrese, hugged prosecutors Alan Key and J.B. Lasater.
Taylor, 43, sat stoically as the verdicts were read. He smiled at guards who put him in handcuffs and led him out a back door. He will be back April 27 for formal sentencing by St. Louis County Circuit Judge James R. Hartenbach.
The jury of seven men and five women convicted Taylor late Thursday night of four counts each of first-degree murder and armed criminal action.
Prosecutors said that Taylor was Rowe's boyfriend and that he killed the family, admitted it in a phone call to his brother and fled to California.
On Friday, jurors heard Tyrone Conley sob as he talked about his children. He stared at a photograph of them that Lasater mounted on a courtroom wall, and he continued to stare at it in tears even after Lasater had finished his questioning.
After the trial, Conley told the Post-Dispatch: "I feel good about the verdicts. I feel it was fair."
Conley, his sisters Beverly and Sherry Conley, and other members of his family and Rowe's appeared jubilant at the death-sentence recommendation.
Sherry Conley testified Friday that she has no children of her own and had bought a bigger home so her nieces, nephew and Rowe could spend more time with her. Their deaths devastated her, she said.
Lajuanda Rowe said sibling Angela Rowe was one of five sisters and three brothers, and "was one of the nicest persons you ever wanted to meet."
Also testifying at Friday's sentencing hearing was a woman, 24, who said she had been raped at gunpoint by Taylor in 2000, when she was 16. She told the jury that Taylor had threatened afterward "to kill me and my mom and my sisters and my brothers" if she told anyone.
The woman kept quiet until 2004, when police were searching for Taylor in the quadruple homicide. Taylor is serving 100 years in prison for the rape.
Lasater told the jury that Taylor also has prior convictions in a San Diego County, Calif., rape, and in drug and thefts cases in the St. Louis area. The jury was not told that Taylor is a suspect in a murder in California.
In closing arguments, Lasater said Taylor deserved to die for his crimes.
Taylor did not testify and barred his defense team from making a closing argument. He told Hartenbach that he is a Muslim and that Allah, not man, would determine his fate.
Rowe was shot four times in her home in the 2000 block of Park Lane. Her children were shot and left lined up on a bed.
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