Dudley Wayne Kyzer: 10,000-Year Sentence and Parole Denials

Dudley Wayne Kyzer is an Alabama man serving two life sentences plus 10,000 years in prison for a triple murder committed on Halloween 1976 in Tuscaloosa. The sentence, imposed at his 1981 retrial after his original death sentence was overturned, was once recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest single-count prison sentence in the world.¹ He has been denied parole repeatedly over four decades of incarceration.

The Halloween 1976 Killings

On the afternoon of October 31, 1976, Kyzer, then 35, went to the home of his former mother-in-law, Eunice Barringer, at 1232 Thirteenth Avenue East in Tuscaloosa. He and his estranged wife, Emily Diane Kyzer, had been twice divorced, and their relationship had turned violent in the days before. Five days earlier, on October 26, Emily Diane had signed an arrest warrant and complaint against him for assault and battery.² Barringer had also obtained a restraining order against him that week.³

According to trial testimony, Kyzer forced his way into the Barringer kitchen around 5:00 p.m. and immediately began quarreling with Emily Diane.² He told a witness he had come to pick up a jacket. What followed left three people dead.

Emily Diane Kyzer, 29, was shot in the chest while trying to flee with the couple’s six-year-old son, Chris. She collapsed in a neighbor’s driveway.⁴ Eunice Barringer, 54, the housemother at the Delta Tau Delta fraternity house on the University of Alabama campus, was shot at point-blank range in the forehead while in a bedroom trying to call the police. Richard Pyron, a 20- or 21-year-old University of Alabama senior and Delta Tau Delta member who happened to be at the house, was shot while on his knees in the den.³ Pyron, by all accounts, was in the wrong place at the wrong time.⁵

From a Death Sentence to 10,000 Years

Kyzer was tried and convicted of capital murder in 1977 and sentenced to death by electric chair.⁴ In 1979, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and death sentence, rejecting his challenges to the trial court’s finding that the crime was “especially heinous, atrocious or cruel.”²

The conviction did not hold. In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Beck v. Alabama, striking down a feature of Alabama’s capital statute that barred trial judges from instructing juries on lesser included offenses. The Court found the rule created an unacceptable risk that juries would convict of a capital crime rather than acquit clearly guilty defendants when the only alternative was a death sentence.⁶ Applying Beck, the Alabama Supreme Court in Ex parte Kyzer (1981) found an evidentiary basis for lesser-included-offense instructions in his case, reversed the conviction, and sent it back for a new trial.⁷

At the 1981 retrial, with the death penalty off the table, Kyzer was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and one count of second-degree murder.⁸ The jury recommended two mandatory life terms plus 10,000 years. The intent behind the extraordinary figure was explicit: it was designed to signal to any future parole board that Kyzer should never be released. The trial judge ruled the term was “within the statutory range provided by law” and imposed it.⁴ The 10,000 years attached to the murder of Emily Diane Kyzer.¹

Parole Denials

Because the sentence is non-capital, Kyzer is technically eligible for parole. As of the most recent hearing on record, in March 2016, he had been denied parole ten times.⁹

Opposition to release has been consistent. At the 2016 hearing before the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles, Tuscaloosa County District Attorney Lyn Head attended in person and said that “if there is anyone who should never walk free again following the terror he brought to multiple families, it is this inmate.” Kyzer’s first wife and members of the Pyron family also attended in opposition, and former Tuscaloosa County District Attorneys Tommy Smith and Charley Freeman submitted letters urging denial. The Alabama District Attorney’s Association joined the opposition.⁴

Earlier hearings drew similar responses. In 2004, at Kyzer’s eighth parole consideration, District Attorney Tommy Smith personally attended to argue against release.¹⁰ Smith again planned to attend and oppose parole at a hearing scheduled for August 3, 2010.⁵ In 2012, Richard Pyron’s father, Charles M. Pyron Jr., wrote publicly about the case, noting nine denials to that point.¹¹

After the March 2016 denial, Kyzer was scheduled to become eligible for reconsideration in five years, which would have placed the next hearing around 2021.⁴ No public reporting on the outcome of any hearing after 2016 appears in the record reviewed here.

Where He Is Now

As of a 2015 report, Kyzer was being held at Saint Clair Correctional Facility in Alabama. He was 74 at the time and had been incarcerated for nearly four decades, and the report noted his participation in a prison arts education project at the facility.¹² Born in 1941, he would be in his eighties. No available reporting confirms a death or release, and based on the last documented parole denial in 2016, he is presumed to remain in custody.

1
Guinness World Records. Longest Jail Sentence (Single Count)
2
Justia. Kyzer v. State, 399 So. 2d 317
3
Tuscaloosa News. Triple Murderer Up for Parole Next Week
4
Tuscaloosa News. Tuscaloosa Man Who Received More Than 10,000 Years in Prison Denied Parole
5
Gadsden Times. Parole Possible for Longest Sentenced Prisoner
6
Justia. Beck v. Alabama, 447 U.S. 625
7
U.S. Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit. Kyzer Federal Appeal Opinion
8
Tuscaloosa News. Case To Be Made for Truth in Sentencing
9
AL.com. Alabama Murderer Serving 10,000 Years Denied Parole
10
WAFF. The Law and Debate Over Parole
11
AL.com. Your View: True Remorse Means Accepting Consequences
12
ABC 33/40. Inmates Participate in Alabama Prison Arts Education Project