| Joseph Edward Corcoran | |
| Birth Date: | 18 April 1975 |
| Birth Place: | Hamilton, Indiana, U.S. |
| Motive: | Unknown |
| Conviction: | Murder (4 counts) |
| Conviction Penalty: | Death |
| Victims: | Confirmed James Corcoran, 30 (brother) Robert Scott Turner, 32 Douglas A. Stillwell, 30 Timothy G. Bricker, 30 Suspected Jack Corcoran, 53 (father) Kathryn Corcoran, 47 (mother) |
| Date: | April 14, 1992 – July 26, 1997 |
| Locations: | Steuben County, Indiana (1992; suspected) Fort Wayne, Indiana (1997; confirmed) |
| Imprisoned: | Indiana State Prison |
Joseph Edward Corcoran (born April 18, 1975) is an American convicted mass murderer and suspected serial killer who is currently on death row for a 1997 quadruple murder case in Indiana. Corcoran was found guilty of the 1997 murders of his brother, his sister's fiancé and two of their friends at his house in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and sentenced to death in 1999. Prior to this, Corcoran was previously charged in 1992 with murdering his parents when he was nearly 17 but was acquitted of all charges. Corcoran, who had since exhausted all avenues of appeal against the death penalty, is awaiting execution on December 18, 2024.[1]
Born on April 18, 1975, Joseph Edward Corcoran grew up in Hamilton, Indiana, U.S., where he lived with his parents, two sisters and one brother.
Corcoran, who went to Hamilton Junior-Senior High School during his adolescent years, reportedly did not have a good relationship with his parents, who was said to be too strict on him. It was also stated that Corcoran was a loner with no friends despite his "movie star-like" looks, according to his neighbours and family. After his high school graduation, Corcoran worked as a machine operator in New Haven; his high school sophomore year, however, was interrupted by his indictment for the double murder of his parents in 1992.[2] [3]
On April 14, 1992, four days short of reaching his 17th birthday, Joseph Corcoran allegedly murdered his parents – 53-year-old Jack Corcoran (a former Marine) and 47-year-old Kathryn Corcoran (a homemaker).
On that day itself, at around 8.30am, Corcoran's parents were found dead inside their Ball Lake home at Steuben County, Indiana, sustaining gunshot wounds caused by a shotgun. Evidence showed that Corcoran likely murdered his parents with a 12-gauge shotgun, after he believed they were too strict with him, had sold a car he thought would belong to him, burned his music tapes, and made him go to church. The timing of the discovery of his parents' bodies was an hour after Corcoran boarded the school bus to school, and his friends had testified that Corcoran had offered them $200 and a shotgun to kill his parents, and their conversations revolved around killing people and animals. However, the entire evidence against Corcoran was circumstantial and no direct evidence was found to prove Corcoran guilty of the double murder.[4]
On November 16, 1992, after a five-day trial, Corcoran was acquitted after the jury found insufficient evidence to convict him of the murders of his parents.[5] According to Kim Corcoran, one of Cororan's two sisters, Corcoran was relieved with the acquittal and wanted to complete high school and join the Marines like his father.[6] The case remains unsolved, even though it remains open for routine re-investigations.[7]
It was revealed five years after the trial, when Corcoran was arrested for a quadruple murder, the former jurors of his trial in 1992 were actually all convinced that Corcoran was guilty to a certain extent for planning or committing the murders of his parents, but they were unable to decide on his guilt given the evidence was all circumstantial and there was an absence of direct witnesses and murder weapons, which made them opt for a verdict of not guilty. Only one juror voted Corcoran guilty in spite of the majority opinion.[8]
On July 26, 1997, five years after he allegedly killed his parents, Joseph Corcoran would commit the quadruple murder of his brother and three other men.
On that day, inside his house at Fort Wayne, Indiana, Corcoran was with his 30-year-old brother James Corcoran, who shared the same house with him and two others – their sister Kelly Nieto and her 32-year-old fiancé Robert Scott Turner. Apart from the Corcoran brothers, Turner and their two friends – 30-year-old Timothy G. Bricker and 30-year-old Douglas A. Stillwell – were also inside the house. Corcoran's sister was absent from home and at a nearby store at that time.[9]
According to court and media sources, James, his friends, and Turner were together in the living room, watching television and eating pizza. Corcoran, who was upstairs on the second floor, purportedly overheard the four men talking about him in the living room. Enraged at this, Corcoran decided to confront the men with a gun. Before he did so, Corcoran brought his seven-year-old niece into an upstairs bedroom to protect her from the gunfire and then loaded a semi-automatic rifle and moved to the living room with the weapon. Corcoran first shot his brother, his sister’s fiancé and one of his brother's friends, Bricker. Stillwell was able to evade the initial onslaught and attempted to escape, but Corcoran shot and murdered Stillwell before he could leave the house.[9] [10]
After murdering the four men, Corcoran stepped out of the house and asked a neighbour to call the police. When the police arrived, they found the bodies of the four men, and also found Corcoran's niece unharmed inside her bedroom. Authorities also discovered about 20 to 30 weapons inside the attic of Corcoran's house.[9] [11]
When Corcoran's sister received word of the murders, she told the press that the truth of Corcoran murdering her other brother and fiancé made her completely view the murders of her parents in a different light and she became certain that Corcoran was indeed guilty of their parents' murders back in 1992. Previously, she and James defended him fiercely in court. Corcoran's sister stated that she cried over the case and blamed Corcoran for ruining her life with the loss of their parents and James.[12] [13]
The 1997 Fort Wayne murders were among the most infamous mass murder cases to occur in Indiana.[14]
On July 28, 1997, two days after the Fort Wayne murders, 22-year-old Joseph Corcoran was arraigned in court on four counts of murder, one for each of his victims. The offense of murder carries either the death penalty or life in prison under Indiana state law.[15] [16]
Corcoran eventually stood trial before a jury at the Allen County Superior Court.[17] Corcoran's defense counsel John Nimmo expressed the belief that Corcoran was guilty before the start of trial.[18]
On May 22, 1999, Corcoran was found guilty of murder on all four counts. The jury returned with their verdict in terms of sentence two days later, unanimously recommending Corcoran to receive four death sentences for all the four killings.[19]
On August 26, 1999, Corcoran was sentenced to death for all four counts of murder by Allen Superior Judge Fran Gull.[9]
Since being sentenced in 1999, Joseph Corcoran had spent more than two decades on death row at Indiana State Prison while his appeals against the death penalty, which had been vacated more than once before its re-instatement, were ongoing. At the time of Corcoran's sentencing in 1999, 45 death row inmates were on death row at Indiana State Prison.[20] Since then, 14 inmates had been executed between 1999 and 2009.
By January 2014, Corcoran was one of the 11 death row inmates awaiting execution in Indiana, not including the female accomplice of Alton Coleman who was serving a life sentence in Ohio despite receiving the death penalty in Indiana state jurisdiction (which was later commuted in 2018).[21]
The death row population in Indiana later fell to eight in July 2020, with Corcoran still included in the death row list of Indiana at that point.[22] As of June 2024, when the state was in the process of scheduling Corcoran's execution date, Corcoran was one of the four inmates on death row who had exhausted all avenues of appeal, with the death row population still remaining at eight in total, given that no new death sentences were imposed by the courts since 2014.[23]
On December 6, 2000, the Indiana Supreme Court heard Corcoran's appeal, and while they upheld the murder conviction, the court vacated the four death sentences in Corcoran's case and directed the original trial judge Fran Gull to re-sentence Corcoran in another hearing after requiring her to re-consider if death was really appropriate for Corcoran (which they did not feel so in the appeal hearing).[24]
Justice Gull would eventually re-sentence Corcoran to death for all four charges of murder, stating that the psychiatric evidence of Corcoran's disorders did not hinder him from having the capability to recognize the magnitude of his heinous acts and it did not impair his mental responsibility at the time of the murders, and the balance of both aggravating and mitigating factors in Corcoran's case made Justice Gull inclined to re-impose the death penalty for Corcoran. On September 5, 2002, the Indiana Supreme Court affirmed the decision of Justice Gull to re-instate the death penalty in Corcoran's case and rejected his appeal.[25] [26]
Corcoran would appeal twice to the Indiana Supreme Court on January 11 and May 12, 2005 respectively, but they were all rejected.[27] [28] Originally, Corcoran was slated to be executed on July 21, 2005, but his execution date was staved off due to ongoing appeals.[29] [30]
On April 18, 2006, a fifth appeal to the Indiana Supreme Court was rejected.[31]
On April 9, 2007, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana vacated the death sentences of Corcoran after finding that his constitutional rights were violated when Allen County Prosecutor Robert Gevers had pursued the death penalty when Corcoran rejected both a bench trial and a plea deal to take the death penalty off the table while favouring the option of a jury trial for sentencing.[32] [33] On December 31, 2008, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the death sentence to stand in Corcoran's case, after they accepted the appeal of the prosecution and cited that Corcoran’s rights were not violated since it was constitutionally permissible for Gevers to pursue a harsher punishment irrespective to the presence or absence of a plea deal and bench trial.[34] [35] [36] This decision, however, was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court on October 20, 2009, after they directed the lower federal courts to re-hear certain arguments of Corcoran's defence counsel.[37] [38]
Upon re-hearing on January 27, 2010, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Corcoran's death sentence to be overturned and a new re-sentencing trial should be granted, after finding that the original trial judge had improperly considered aggravating factors not set out in state law,[39] [40] but the death penalty was once again restored for Corcoran on November 12, 2010, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals erred in overturning the death penalty on the basis that it violated Indiana law, given that federal court should only overturn verdicts that violate federal law.[41] [42]
On June 23, 2011, Corcoran's second appeal to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals was rejected.[43]
On January 10, 2013, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana rejected Corcoran's appeal.[9] [44]
On April 14, 2015, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals turned down another appeal from Corcoran.[45]
On July 8, 2016, Corcoran's final appeal was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, resulting in Corcoran exhausting all avenues of appeal available for him in his case, which paved way for Corcoran to be executed on a date to be decided.[46] [47]
On June 26, 2024, the Attorney General Todd Rokita announced that he would be filing a motion to the Indiana Supreme Court, seeking an execution date for Corcoran, after the state was able to purchase the drugs required for lethal injection executions. At the time when the appeal was launched, a moratorium is ongoing for 15 years on all pending executions in Indiana since the 2009 execution of Matthew Eric Wrinkles for a triple murder case.[48] [49]
The state authorities confirmed that for all subsequent executions in Indiana, including Corcoran's, they would be deploying the use of pentobarbital to execute condemned criminals with a single drug lethal injection. Indiana's governor Eric Holcomb defended the decision of the state to restart executions, stating that he supported the application of the death penalty for heinous crimes and justice should be served. Holcomb quoted, "When such evil is on display, I personally believe in this." Corcoran still had the final recourse to appeal for clemency from the governor to commute his death sentence to life imprisonment; there were only three cases of clemency being granted to the condemned in Indiana since the resumption of capital punishment in the U.S. in 1976.[50] [51]
In response, the lawyers opposed to authorizing the death warrant of Corcoran. Describing the 1997 Fort Wayne murders as "an unspeakable tragedy took the lives of four people who unquestionably deserved to live", the lawyers argued that Corcoran's death sentence should not be carried out on the grounds that he had been mentally ill, and suffered from paranoid schizophrenia for the past several years, and they revealed that Corcoran's symptoms persisted while on death row, including his delusions of being tortured daily by prison guards with an ultrasound machine, his conversations with people whom he saw only in his hallucinations, and his delusions of having an involuntary speech disorder. The opposition to the state's lethal injection protocols was another ground of appeal by Corcoran's counsel to oppose the approval of his death warrant.[52] [53] [54]
On September 11, 2024, the Indiana Supreme Court approved the death warrant of Corcoran, scheduling him to be executed before dawn on December 18, 2024. Corcoran's execution date was the first to be scheduled in 15 years after the state's last execution in 2009.[55] [56] [57]
Corcoran's lawyers confirmed on September 30 that they would be petitioning for clemency from the governor.[58] On October 25, 2024, Corcoran's counsel appealed to the Indiana Supreme Court to overturn a previous ruling that barred him from seeking post-conviction relief in state courts, which was issued due to Corcoran failing to meet the deadline nearly two decades ago in seeking post-conviction review.[59]
On November 15, 2024, Corcoran's lawyers petitioned for a stay of execution, stating that it was cruel and unusual punishment to execute Corcoran due to the fact that he had severe paranoid schizophrenia and could not differentiate between reality and fantasy and hence, it should be sufficient basis to overturn Corcoran's death sentence.[60]
While Corcoran's lawyers were filing their final appeals to the courts, they also drafted a clemency petition to the Indiana Parole Board, but the petition did not go forward as Corcoran reportedly did not sign it, out of his personal intention to die. Corcoran's lawyers argued that Corcoran was not competent enough to be executed and made use of Corcoran's refusal to sign the petition to support their argument that Corcoran believed his death could free him of his mental illness, which purportedly prevented him from making rational decisions to fight his death sentence.[61]