The Killer Next Door: Unmasking Thomas Whisenhant

Thomas Warren Whisenhant came into the world on January 29th, 1947, in Prichard, Alabama. He was the last and final child born to Willie and Emma Whisenhant, but Thomas’ childhood wasn’t anything like the one his three older siblings had shared.

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When Thomas was born, Emma Whisenhant made an announcement and told her husband Willie that she would no longer be sleeping with him. Willie more than likely didn’t take this statement seriously, or at the very least believed that he could change Emma’s mind about it, but the truth is that Willie wasn’t very good at convincing anyone to do anything.

He was described as a timid and physically weak man. Where Emma was strong-willed and opinionated, Willie was a pushover. He usually ended up being bullied into doing all of the chores at home, but that was only when he wasn’t drinking. The truth was that Willie was also an alcoholic who rarely worked and when he did, he usually ended up spending most of his earnings on drink.

The children spoke of the times that Emma would go through Willie’s wallet as soon as he was home from work and compare what was left in it to his payslip. Whenever there was money missing, the house would burst into a furious argument.

“She would fuss on him so, ‘You stole it,’” Thomas’ older sister Evelyn later recounted one of these fights between her parents. “And he would tell her that he had to pay so-and-so, like union dues… My daddy really had to steal his own money to get anything.” 

Willie also usually found an extra bit of courage when he drank and that was when he believed that he could turn things around with his wife Emma. “Willie, go back to bed!” Emma would begin shouting, waking everyone up in the house in the middle of the night. “Leave me alone! I told you to leave me alone!”

She would then begin beating her husband with anything she could find on hand and encourage the children to join in and do the same until Willie had given up and left the room.

“I can remember a lot of times when my daddy was all bruised up,” Evelyn later said. “I can remember many times I would tell her, I would say, ‘Mama, please just leave him alone. Come on back and leave him alone… But, you know, she always told us, ‘Your daddy keeps you from having anything, because he drinks all the time,’ and I was convinced that that was the case, and I always defended her.”

Essentially, Willie wasn’t allowed anywhere near his wife, but there was someone in the household who wasn’t allowed out of Emma’s sight: her youngest child, Thomas.

Thomas was the apple of Emma’s eye. She forced him to share a bed with her until he was seven years old, but even then, when he did finally get a bed of his own, it was still in his mother’s bedroom. 

He grew up getting everything he wanted, despite the poor circumstances and lack of income that the family had. And this made Thomas quite a happy child at first, but all of that changed when he became a teenager. Overnight, his siblings remember Thomas going from a care-free, if not somewhat spoiled child, to a moody and physically violent teenager. If Emma noticed the change herself, it didn’t encourage her to take a step back and give her son some space to grow. Quite the contrary, Emma began watching Thomas like a hawk.

“She just did not let him out of her sight…” Evelyn said. “(She) would go buy gas with him.”

Never a moment alone and never a moment to himself, but there was a reason behind the escalation in Emma’s cautious and overprotective behavior.

On May sixth, 1963, when Thomas was sixteen years old, their neighbor was murdered. The seventy-two-year-old widow named Lexie Haynes had been shot with a gun that was later found in the empty lot right next to the Whisenhant household.

That was suspicious, but it was certainly not enough evidence to tie the weapon to any one of the Whisenhants. 

The investigators dug a little deeper, but their sights were firmly fixed on one family member in particular: Thomas.

You see, Thomas was already known to local law enforcement. He had just recently gotten into trouble for robbing a blind woman, and that incident had been the last in a very long line of suspected robberies and minor assaults on young girls. Thomas had so far managed to escape justice through legal technicalities or a lack of witnesses, but after talking to some of his friends, the investigators believed that they had him this time. 

Rumors were going around that Thomas and some of his friends had been playing with a stolen revolver. A witness later came forward to say that Thomas had taken one of the bullets out of the gun, held it up in the air and then claimed that it would be used to kill someone in the near future. Upon hearing this, another person allegedly approached the boys and confronted Thomas about his behavior:

That person had been none other than Lexie Haynes.

After the discovery of Lexie’s body and the recovery of a stolen weapon near the Whisenhant household, the investigators paid the family a visit. They knocked on the door, and who else should open it but the notoriously weak-willed and feeble Willie Whisenhant.

“They came to the door and asked how long had Tommy been there,” Evelyn recalled. “And my daddy said that he had been there all night. I went along with Mama and Daddy that he was there.” 

For whatever reason, Willie found it in himself to lie to law enforcement that day. Perhaps he’d been too deep into drink to realize that his son could actually be capable of taking a life. Perhaps he’d been more frightened of Emma than he had been of the law.

The alibi that Thomas’ family provided for him kept him out of courts and out of jail, but it did have Emma watching him even more closely.

In order to escape his mother, and any suspicions that would follow him after the murder of his neighbor, Thomas then joined the United States Air Force. He was stationed at a base near Colorado Springs until he committed another crime that would finally catch up with him.

On October 25th, 1965, Thomas was alone with the twenty-two-year-old Rose Covington in the finance office of the base when, out of nowhere, Thomas attacked. He grabbed a metal ashtray from the table and began beating Rose around the face and head until she’d lost consciousness.

The attack came as a total and complete shock to everyone on the base, including Rose herself, who later claimed that she didn’t even know who Thomas was at the time. The beating left Rose with severe injuries, and she was hospitalized for a full two months before she’d recovered enough to be released. The beating also wiped any memory Rose had of her attacker, and she was unable to tell the investigators who had done this to her.

They did, however, find a shoe print at the scene. One that was traced back to Thomas Whisenhant. 

Thomas denied attacking Rose, but he was convicted of assault with the intent to commit murder and sentenced to twenty years in prison with ten years hard labor. Within four years, his sentence had been reduced to ten years, and he was out within seven.

From the outside looking in, it seemed that Thomas’ time behind bars had reformed him. He came out of prison, got a job, a wife and had children, but the real Thomas was hiding just beneath the surface.

About a year after he'd been released, a twenty-eight-year-old mother of two named Patricia Hitt was attacked at the convenience store where she worked in Mobile County, Alabama. She was approached by a man who first beat her and then shot her in the head. She died at the scene of the crime.

About half a year after that, forty-four-year-old Venora Hyatt, another convenience store worker in Mobile County, was also attacked. She was kidnapped and taken to an abandoned house, where she was murdered. Her killer hid her body behind a shack, only to return the following day and mutilate her remains. Her watch was later found around another woman’s wrist, who claimed that her husband had given it to her as a present.

About six months or so after that, Thomas was driving his mother home after his daughter’s birthday party. It’s unclear what it was, but something about this interaction with his mother had Thomas out on the streets within hours of dropping Emma off home.

He approached the twenty-three-year-old Cheryl Lynn Payton at the convenience store in Mobile County where she worked, and he kidnapped her. He drove her out in his pickup truck to a secluded, forested area where they wouldn’t be disturbed. There he raped her in the front seat of his truck before shooting her in the head and killing her.

Thomas then dumped her body in the nearby woods and fled the scene, but just like what had happened with Verona Hyatt, he was back the following day.

Thomas then mutilated Cheryl’s body. He sliced off a piece of her breast and slashed her stomach open, but this time Thomas was caught red-handed.

Police who’d been out patrolling the area found Thomas near the scene of the crime and gave chase. When Thomas was finally caught, he confessed to everything, including the very first murder of Lexie Haynes that had started this all decades ago.

Despite initially confessing, Thomas then tried to escape punishment by pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, but the jury believed that he was sane. He was sentenced to death for the murder of Cheryl Payton. This ruling was later overturned by the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, and he went to court again. A snide remark from the prosecution then led to Thomas’ original sentence being reduced from death to life in prison, but when Thomas went to court again, his death sentence was reinstated. 

Three decades of trials and appeals kept Thomas alive on death row until the spring of 2010 when he was finally led to the execution chamber. He died of lethal injection after refusing his right to make a final statement.