Is This the Wrong Man?

Convicted Triple Murderer Kevin Strickland Says He’s Innocent. So Did the Eyewitness Who Helped Convict Him.

When it came to choosing friends, eighteen-year-old Kevin Strickland did not have good judgment. He hung around with the wrong crowd. And that may have cost him forty-three years of his life.

Four People Get Shot, and One Survives

Mr. Strickland, now sixty-two, was charged with three murders and one attempted murder on April 25, 1978. The victims were twenty-one-year-old Larry Ingram, twenty-year-old John Walker and twenty-two-year-old Sherrie Black. They all lived in Kansas City and were all shot with a shotgun. Cynthia Douglas, shot in the leg, was the only victim who survived. She played dead.

It was Cynthia who helped bring her perpetrators to justice. She knew two of the four men involved; twenty-one-year-old Vincent Bell and nineteen-year-old Kilm Adkins. She initially told police she didn’t recognize the other two.

Police suspected Strickland. He was known to hang around with the identified killers. The day after the murders, Cynthia was talking about what happened with her sister’s boyfriend; he also suggested one of the gunmen might have been Strickland. The next day, Douglas picked eighteen-year-old Strickland out of a lineup. He was arrested and charged with murder.