From Monday through Friday, Buddy Earl Justus was a model employee.
In his off time, he turned into a monster.
The lanky young man with the deep Southern accent always showed up for work on time and did his job changing truck tires for the Tire Shoppe on Military Road without complaint.
"When he was at work, he was a conscientious worker and a gentleman," says Paul Grenga, whose late father, Paolo, owned the Tire Shoppe when Justus was employed there in the late 1970s. "You just couldn't count on him on the weekends."
Justus always showed up on Monday morning, though, so his availability on Saturday and Sunday wasn't an issue.
Until one day in 1978.
"Buddy hadn't shown up for work, and then the state troopers called us," says Grenga.
Nothing could have prepared the Grengas for what the troopers had to tell them.
Justus was in a Virginia jail, charged with the rape and murder of a woman who was 8-1/2 months pregnant.
It got worse. Justus would be charged with the rapes and murders of two other women, one in Georgia and one in Florida, both within a week of the Virginia killing.
It didn't seem possible -- Justus' work ethic and easy-going manner had earned the trust of the Grengas. He let Paul, then a teen-ager, practice driving his car in the parking lot surrounding the Tire Shoppe. When the Grengas moved from the Town of Niagara to Lewiston, Justus helped with the heavy lifting.
"My dad was so shocked," says Grenga, who added that Justus had never done anything to make his mother or two sisters uncomfortable. "I just remember the look on his face. I was stunned -- this was the same guy who let me drive his car, the same guy I remember helping carry our piano out of the house."
Grenga says his father, a prominent figure in local business and political circles who died in April 1999, never mentioned Justus again until 12 years later, when their one-time employee paid for his crimes in Virginia's electric chair.
As an aide to New York State Sen. John Daly, the younger Grenga helped author legislation in 1982 to strengthen the punishment for injuring a pregnant woman.
Justus was born in Niagara Falls on Christmas Day, 1952. Soon after, his family moved south, and he wound up being placed in a Virginia orphanage.
As a young man, he started building a record of petty crimes, including a breaking and entering conviction that landed him in the Montgomery County Jail.
There, he met Charlie Harris, a preacher who who attended to the spiritual needs of the prisoners, or at least made the effort.
"Some listened. Some did not. Buddy listened," Harris told the Roanoke Times shortly before Justus' execution. "(He was) a fine fellow ... he was kind of quiet. He was the kind of fellow I was happy to be associated with."
Justus married, but his wife, Alice, soon left him. He eventually made his way back to Niagara Falls and went to work at the Tire Shoppe.
"He was tall, thin and lanky with a curly shock of blond hair on the top of his forehead, his hair shaved closely on the sides and short all the way around," Grenga says.
Justus never mentioned his troubles with the law to his employers, and in a time before the Internet, "America's Most Wanted" or adequate communication between even neighboring law-enforcement agencies, they would have had no feasible way of finding out.
Grenga says Justus never spoke of Alice, or any other aspect of his personal life, while on the job.
"The only thing he ever talked to me about was his Chrysler Cordoba," Grenga says. "It was his pride and joy. It was a really distinctive car. It was a maroon and silver two-tone car. It was really decked out."
Driving a signature vehicle would eventually prove Justus' undoing.
On Oct. 3, 1978, Justus broke into the double-wide trailer of Ida Mae Moses. The 21-year-old nurse was due to give birth in two weeks, and had already named her unborn son.
Justus robbed her, raped her and shot her three times in the head. Her child also died.
After fleeing the scene, Justus made his way south. Along the way, he picked up Dale Dean Goins, an 18-year-old hitchhiker. The pair kidnapped Rosemary Jackson, a 32-year-old housewife, as she left a grocery store in suburban Atlanta. They forced her to give them what money she had, then raped and murdered her before dumping her body on a rural service road.
In Florida, Justus and Goins grabbed Stephanie Michelle Hawkins, who was getting ready for her son's birthday party that day, from outside a sunglasses stand in a shopping plaza. Hawkins suffered a fate nearly identical to Jackson's, her body found in a similar location.
In Virginia, authorities were looking for Justus based on a description of his car. Police staked out the orphanage in Grundy, Va., where Justus was raised and where two siblings still lived, and arrested him when he came to visit.
Justus admitted robbing and murdering Moses, but denied raping her. The jury didn't believe him, and sentenced him to die in the electric chair.
The Virginia Supreme Court overturned the guilty verdict, due to a flaw in the jury-selection process, but a new jury also condemned Justus to die.
Justus and Goins were each tried in Florida and Georgia. The Florida jury needed only seven minutes to convict Justus.
"It took them 45 minutes to decide on the death penalty," the Florida prosecutor, Phil Van Allen, told the Roanoke Times. "They told me the only reason it took them that long was because they had to pray first."
The Georgia jury was just as decisive, giving Justus his third death sentence.
"I'm a proponent of the death penalty, and I've seen a lot of people deserving of it in my career," said Burt Blannot, the chief investigator in Jackson's murder. "But none have been as deserving as Buddy Justus."
Goins was sentenced to life in prison for his part in the Florida and Georgia murders.
Justus was one of the inmates profiled in a Dec. 26, 1986 story in the Richmond News Leader portraying Christmas on death row.
"If I could say anything to the people out there, it is don't get involved with drugs or alcohol," Justus said. "Even the nicest in society can turn into a monster with that stuff in their system."
While on Virginia's death row, Justus and his attorneys didn't plead innocence during the lengthy appeals process, instead producing a trifecta of excuses for his horrific crimes -- abuse suffered as a child, a head injury at age 20 that caused damage to the frontal lobe of his brain, and habitual alcohol abuse.
Harris, the preacher, talked with Justus on death row and suggested another motivation.
"He said when he got word (Alice) was filing for divorce, he just went crazy," Harris said. "He wrote a lot of poems, all of them about Alice."
After nine appeals failed, Justus' execution was scheduled for Dec. 13, 1990.
There were only four other prisoners left in the old Virginia State Penitentiary -- the 190-year-old facility in Boydton closed the next day, and the rest of the inmates and staff had already moved into new digs.
Opponents of the death penalty staged vigils in five cities around the state that night, and Justus' attorneys appealed one last time to Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, citing Justus' brain damage in requesting clemency and asking that the sentence be commuted to life without parole.
Wilder, a one-time opponent of capital punishment who changed his stance under political pressure while running for governor, refused the request.
Justus, who at one point during his time on death row had asked to have his execution speeded up, then rescinded the request, gave a Roanoke radio station an interview on his last day of life.
"I want it to be over with, not for me, but for the victims' families," Justus said. "I'm ready to go to a better place. I want it to be put to rest."
Justus' attorney told reporters that Ida Mae Moses' sister had written Justus, telling him she forgave him.
Justus ate a last meal of sirloin steak, french fries, tossed salad, strawberry pie and tea. The 246 people electrocuted before him at the old state pen made their final walk accompanied by other death row inmates banging on bars and yelling as the condemned strolled to the death chamber.
Justus walked in silence. Prison officials granted his last request -- to make the trek alone, rather than with prison guards at his side.
He was strapped into the electric chair at 11 p.m. Six minutes and two jolts later, Buddy Earl Justus, 37, was dead.
Montgomery County Sheriff Louis Barber, who had been the chief investigator in Moses' murder, spoke to the press after the execution.
"Buddy Justus died with a great deal more dignity than he afforded Ida Moses. At least he had his minister present and he wasn't degraded and raped and murdered," Barber said.
"The victim's parents and grandparents should have decided his punishment," says Grenga, the father of six and a former Niagara County Assistant District Attorney. "The electric chair was probably too humane."
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | August 5 2003 |