Judith Ann Neelley's parole denied: Woman convicted in '80s of murdering Georgia girl

The Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles denied parole to the woman convicted in the brutal kidnapping and murder of 13-year-old Lisa Ann Millican in 1982.

Judith Ann Neelley has spent the past four decades in prison for the crime she participated in with her husband, Alvin Neelley, who died behind bars in 2005. On the tail end of a crime spree, the couple abducted Millican from a shopping mall in Rome, Georgia, and brought her back to a motel in northeast Alabama.

There, they raped and tortured her. While Alvin Neelley and the couple's twin children were out to breakfast, Judith Ann Neelley took Millican to Little River Canyon. According to court documents, she injected the child with drain cleaner six times, and when that didn’t kill her, Neelley shot the girl.

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“During the course of the next 24 hours, she called law enforcement three separate times to tell them that they had the corpse of a 13-year-old girl at the bottom of their canyon,” Mike O'Dell, a district attorney who prosecuted Neelley, said on Thursday. “She was bragging about it.”

At the end of Neelley’s 16-day trial in 1983, a DeKalb County jury convicted her and recommended a sentence of life in prison without parole. Judge Randall Cole did not agree. Instead, he sentenced Neelley to death by electric chair.

After she spent over a decade on death row, Gov. Fob James commuted Neelley's death sentence to life in prison in 1999. The Alabama Legislature attempted to prevent Neelley from the opportunity for parole in 2003, but in 2018, that law was ruled unconstitutional.

Alvin Neelley was never tried for Millican’s murder. Instead, he pleaded guilty to another murder and aggravated assault in Georgia, where he was sentenced to life in prison. He died in 2005 at age 52.

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Throughout Neelley’s trial and into her first parole hearing in 2018, defense attorneys argued that Neelley’s husband coerced her into committing the crime.

Alabama’s parole board was not expected to grant Neelley’s bid. In just the past fiscal year, the board rejected parole bids from 90% of eligible inmates, according to agency reports. Critics frequently say the board doesn’t following its guidelines and that many more inmates should be released from the state’s crowded prisons.

Even so, Gov. Kay Ivey sent a letter to the board requesting parole be denied.

“I believe it was a mistake for Governor James to commute Ms. Neelley’s death sentence in the first place — and certainly to do so in the way that allows Ms. Neelley the possibility of parole," Ivey wrote. "Now, every five years, the wounds of these families are reopened as they wait with bated breath for your decision.”

On Thursday, the courtroom was packed full, but no one was present to support the release of Neelley. Relatives of her victims spoke through tears about the family members they didn't get to grow up with, urging the board to deny Neelley's parole.

In 1983, Neelley pleaded guilty in Georgia to kidnapping and murdering 23-year-old Janice Chatman, whose daughter, Deborah Callahan, was present in Montgomery for the parole hearing.

"This monster doesn't deserve a chance to be free, to be able to enjoy her family or her grandkids," Callahan said. "She robbed two families of their chances of this, and she should not get to enjoy what we could not for over 40 years."

Neelley was not present at the hearing on Thursday. She will be eligible for parole consideration again in May 2028.

Hadley Hitson covers the rural South for the Montgomery Advertiser and Report for America. She can be reached at hhitson@gannett.com. To support her work, subscribe to the Advertiser or donate to Report for America.

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Parole denied for Judith Ann Neelley, convicted of killing 13-year-old