Man newly released from prison confesses to killing pregnant mother, 6-year-old in 2002

A man who just finished serving most of a 15 year prison sentence in Florida has confessed to the fatal stabbings of a pregnant mother and her son in Alabama in 2002, authorities said Friday.

Lewis Ladon Spivey, 39, was taken into custody after his release Tuesday and accused of murder in the killings of Monica Rollins, 23, and Dalton Rollins, 6, according to prison records and a statement from the Heflin Police Department.

Monica Rollins was 8 ½ months pregnant at the time of her death, Heflin Police Capt. Scott Bonner told reporters Friday.

Spivey appeared to have been released early from a Florida prison, where he was serving a 2010 sentence on unrelated charges of robbery and aggravated assault, according to prison records.

Since his recent arrest, Spivey has cooperated with authorities on the murder allegations "and has since given a complete confession wherein he outlined the events that day and has taken sole responsibility" for the killings of Rollins and her son, according to the police statement.

Bonner said they were killed several days before their bodies were discovered on Sept. 16, 2002, in the rural community of Heflin, roughly 76 miles east of Birmingham.

A 2-year-old son of Monica Rollins' was discovered unharmed in a closet inside the family’s trailer, according to Alabama Cold Case Advocacy, a local organization that tracks unsolved deaths.

Bonner, who led the cold case investigation, described Spivey and Monica Rollins as "acquaintances" and said they had a relationship but did not provide additional details or a possible motive.

Bonner gave few details about what led to the break in the case, saying only that the department was given a grant for DNA analysis and several items were processed by a state lab and private labs in Canada.

One of the most difficult parts of reopening the case was approaching Rollins' family and asking if they approved, Bonner said.

"They’d been through hell for the last 20 years," he said. "I wanted to bring them some closure. Along with that, I had the part of me that was thinking, if we fail at this, we have just opened these old wounds."

Bonner added, “Anybody that has a heart, that has spoken to this family, has seen the pain."

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com