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On this day, February 19, 1999, Billy Jack Gaither was brutally murdered for being gay in Alabama.
NEWS
Billy Jack Gaither was brutally murdered for being gay in Alabama 25 years ago today
Published: Feb. 19, 2024, 7:00 a.m.
Billy Jack Gaither
By Jeremy Gray | jgray@al.com
Billy Jack Gaither spent his 39 years of life caring for family, worshiping God and quietly harboring a second, secret existence. ... Both lives ended 25 years ago today, on Feb. 19, 1999, because Gaither was gay, something two men viewed as a crime worthy of death. ... Gaither’s murder sparked a national outcry and a movement to include sexual orientation in Alabama’s 1994 hate crime law. That still has not happened.
Steven Eric Mullins, then 25, and Charles Monroe Butler, then 21, told Coosa County Sheriff’s Office investigators they plotted Gaither’s death because he made a pass at Mullins a week earlier. They later denied the murder was premeditated, saying instead Gaither was killed because he came on to Butler the night of the murder.
The Fayetteville men lured Gaither from a Sylacauga bar to a boat launch, stabbed him, beat him with an ax handle, put him in a car trunk and drove him to a creek. They beat him again and then placed him on two fiery, kerosene-drenched tires. ... “Billy Jack started talking about some gay issues. . . . wanting to have a threesome, or whatever,” Butler said in a PBS Frontline special in 2000. “Steve jumped on him, and cut his throat there. I didn’t even know the man, for him to be hitting on me. . . . Tempers just flared. It’s like he didn’t have no respect.”
{snip}
On Feb. 26, 2019, exactly one week after the 20th anniversary of Gaither’s murder, Mullins was stabbed to death at the St. Clair Correctional Facility.
Billy Jack Gaither was brutally murdered for being gay in Alabama 25 years ago today
Published: Feb. 19, 2024, 7:00 a.m.
Billy Jack Gaither
By Jeremy Gray | jgray@al.com
Billy Jack Gaither spent his 39 years of life caring for family, worshiping God and quietly harboring a second, secret existence. ... Both lives ended 25 years ago today, on Feb. 19, 1999, because Gaither was gay, something two men viewed as a crime worthy of death. ... Gaither’s murder sparked a national outcry and a movement to include sexual orientation in Alabama’s 1994 hate crime law. That still has not happened.
Steven Eric Mullins, then 25, and Charles Monroe Butler, then 21, told Coosa County Sheriff’s Office investigators they plotted Gaither’s death because he made a pass at Mullins a week earlier. They later denied the murder was premeditated, saying instead Gaither was killed because he came on to Butler the night of the murder.
The Fayetteville men lured Gaither from a Sylacauga bar to a boat launch, stabbed him, beat him with an ax handle, put him in a car trunk and drove him to a creek. They beat him again and then placed him on two fiery, kerosene-drenched tires. ... “Billy Jack started talking about some gay issues. . . . wanting to have a threesome, or whatever,” Butler said in a PBS Frontline special in 2000. “Steve jumped on him, and cut his throat there. I didn’t even know the man, for him to be hitting on me. . . . Tempers just flared. It’s like he didn’t have no respect.”
{snip}
On Feb. 26, 2019, exactly one week after the 20th anniversary of Gaither’s murder, Mullins was stabbed to death at the St. Clair Correctional Facility.