Kevin Foster and the Lords of Chaos: Trial, Death Row, and Appeals

Kevin Foster led the Lords of Chaos, a teenage group in Fort Myers, Florida, that carried out a three-week crime spree in April 1996 ending in the shotgun murder of Riverdale High School band director Mark Schwebes. Foster, then 18, was convicted of first-degree premeditated murder in 1998 and sentenced to death. He remains on Florida’s death row after the U.S. Supreme Court denied his final petition for certiorari on November 24, 2025.¹

Who Kevin Foster Was and How the Group Formed

The Lords of Chaos came together in early April 1996. Its core members were Foster, Peter Magnotti, Christopher Black, Derek Shields, Christopher Burnett, and Thomas Torrone.² Foster called himself “God” and ran the group. Each member took a code name. Their manifesto declared a “campaign against the world” and promised “destruction of Biblical proportions.”³

Foster’s mother, Ruby Foster, and her husband owned a pawn and gun shop in Fort Myers, and the family home was stocked with weapons. Ruby had given Kevin a 12-gauge pump-action Mossberg shotgun as a Christmas gift when he was 13. That shotgun became the murder weapon. Members described themselves as isolated and ostracized, and later characterized the dynamic as one built around Foster’s desire to demonstrate power, with the others serving as an audience.³

Foster did not attend Riverdale High School and had no personal connection to Schwebes. He had dropped out of school roughly two years before the murder.⁴

The April 1996 Crime Spree

Starting around April 12, 1996, the group carried out a series of escalating crimes across Fort Myers:

Smashing car windows and breaking into a gas station.
Burning a school bus and firebombing the historic Coca-Cola bottling plant using stolen propane tanks.⁵
A restaurant fire that killed two macaws.
Ambushing a diner owner at closing time in a failed armed robbery, totaling the victim’s car in the process.
Multiple thefts.

The spree ran about three weeks before ending at Riverdale High School on the night of April 30, 1996.

The Murder of Mark Schwebes

Mark Schwebes was a 32-year-old former Marine and the band director at Riverdale High School.⁶ On the evening of April 30, members of the Lords of Chaos went to the school planning to throw canned food through auditorium windows and set the building on fire with gasoline.⁵

Schwebes ran into them near the auditorium. He found the group carrying stolen items, including a fire extinguisher, latex gloves, and tin cans. He confiscated what he could and told the boys he would report the incident to a school resource officer the next morning.⁷

The group regrouped at Foster’s house. According to trial testimony, they decided together that Schwebes had to be killed to keep him quiet. Foster looked up the teacher’s address in a phone book. The plan was for Shields to knock on the door and for Foster to shoot him.²

Around 11 p.m., Foster, Shields, Black, and Magnotti drove to Schwebes’ duplex on Cypress Drive in the Pine Manor neighborhood. Shields knocked. When Schwebes opened the door, Foster shot him twice with the Mossberg, once in the face and once in the pelvic area. A neighbor called 911 at 11:34 p.m. Paramedics arrived within two minutes. Schwebes was pronounced dead at 11:38 p.m.⁶ In the days that followed, Foster bragged about the killing, describing how the victim’s body had curled into a fetal position.²

How Investigators Broke the Case

The Lee County Sheriff’s Office and the Fort Myers Police Department led the investigation.⁷ The key physical clue was a fire extinguisher left at the murder scene. Its serial number traced back to Hallway C of Riverdale High School, tying the shooting directly to the earlier confrontation with Schwebes.⁶

Several members of the group cooperated. Christopher Burnett, Thomas Torrone, and Brad Young provided evidence for the state in exchange for immunity or leniency.³ A Lee County grand jury indicted Foster for premeditated murder on May 21, 1996.⁸

Trial, Verdict, and Death Sentence

Foster’s trial took place in Lee County Circuit Court before Judge Isaac Anderson Jr. Robert R. Jacobs II represented him. Foster pleaded not guilty.⁸

The prosecution built its case on two things. First, testimony from co-defendants Black, Shields, and Magnotti, each of whom had entered a plea agreement, along with Burnett, Torrone, Young, and Russell Ballard. Neighbors testified about hearing shots and seeing a car with a distinctively loud muffler leave the scene.⁸ Second, physical evidence. The Mossberg shotgun was recovered from the trunk of Magnotti’s car along with a ski mask, latex gloves, and a newspaper clipping about the murder. Foster’s fingerprints were on the shotgun, the gloves, and the newspaper. Spent shells from the scene matched the seized weapon.²

On March 11, 1998, the jury found Foster guilty of first-degree premeditated murder. In the penalty phase, the defense called 25 witnesses to describe his premature birth, unstable childhood, and history of mental health problems. The jury recommended death nine to three.⁴ On June 17, 1998, Judge Anderson sentenced Foster to death, finding two aggravating factors: that the murder was committed to avoid lawful arrest and that it was cold, calculated, and premeditated. The court declined to treat Foster’s age of 18 as a statutory mitigator and gave little or no weight to the 23 nonstatutory mitigators the defense offered.⁹

What Happened to the Other Members

The three co-defendants who went to Schwebes’ door with Foster all pleaded guilty:

Christopher Black pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life without parole.
Derek Shields pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life without parole.⁴
Peter Magnotti pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and RICO crimes and was sentenced to 32 years.²

In February 1999, Foster himself pleaded no contest to six additional charges from the spree, including arson, robbery with a firearm, animal cruelty, attempted armed robbery, and two counts of petty theft. He received four years for those charges, a practical resolution given that he was already sentenced to death.¹⁰

The Plot From Death Row

On death row, Foster began planning to have the three cooperating witnesses, Burnett, Torrone, and Young, murdered. Derek Shields testified that Foster said his mother would arrange the connections.³

Foster and his mother, Ruby, tried to enlist Jim Greenhill, a journalist who had been interviewing Kevin for a book about the case. Prosecutors alleged Ruby Foster provided Greenhill with a handgun and a shotgun for the killings, and that Kevin and Ruby had also discussed targeting Judge Anderson and employees of the State Attorney’s Office.¹¹

On July 20, 2000, both were charged with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. Ruby Foster, then 50, was arrested and held without bond after a judge found her too great a threat to release.¹¹

Greenhill’s reporting eventually became the book Someone Has to Die Tonight, published by Pinnacle Books in 2006.¹²

The Appeals, Through 2025

Foster’s case moved through state and federal courts for more than two decades.

On direct appeal, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and death sentence on September 7, 2000, in Foster v. State, 778 So. 2d 906. Foster had raised seven issues, including denials of change-of-venue motions and claims of improper hearsay. The court acknowledged minor errors but found them harmless, and specifically upheld the avoid-arrest aggravator, finding sufficient evidence that eliminating Schwebes as a witness was the dominant motive.⁹

In September 2001, Foster filed a motion to vacate his conviction and sentence, arguing that his trial lawyers had failed to properly investigate and present mitigating evidence about his childhood and neurological problems. Delays, including Judge Anderson’s death and litigation over disqualification, pushed the evidentiary hearing to 2011. The circuit court denied relief under Strickland v. Washington, and the Florida Supreme Court affirmed that denial on October 17, 2013.¹³

A successive state motion raised two more arguments: that Hurst v. Florida (2016) required jury unanimity on the aggravators, and that Roper v. Simmons should be extended past age 18 based on brain-development research. On December 6, 2018, the Florida Supreme Court rejected both, holding that Hurst did not apply retroactively because Foster’s case became final before Ring v. Arizona (2002), and that the court continued to follow Roper‘s bright-line age of 18.¹⁴

Foster then sought federal habeas relief in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida (Case No. 2:14-cv-00597-JES-KCD). The court denied the petition on October 30, 2023, declined to issue a certificate of appealability, and denied a motion to alter the judgment in August 2024.¹⁵

Foster filed a petition for certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court on September 4, 2025, naming Ricky D. Dixon, Secretary of the Florida Department of Corrections, as respondent. The Court denied it on November 24, 2025.¹

Where the Case Stands

Kevin Foster remains on death row at Union Correctional Institution in Starke, Florida. With the Supreme Court’s denial in late 2025, he has effectively exhausted his avenues for judicial review of his conviction and sentence.

1
U.S. Supreme Court. Kevin Don Foster v. Ricky D. Dixon, Docket No. 25-5575
2
Florida Supreme Court. Foster v. State, Case No. SC93372 – Direct Appeal
3
NBC News. Lords of Chaos
4
Florida Supreme Court. Foster v. State – Initial Brief, Case No. SC11-1761
5
Tampa Bay Times. Condemned Killer Back in Court
6
NBC News. Someone Has To Die Tonight
7
State Attorney’s Office, Twentieth Judicial Circuit. Appeal Denied for Lords of Chaos Killer
8
Florida Legislature, Capital Cases. Kevin Foster Case Update
9
FindLaw. Foster v. State, 778 So. 2d 906
10
The Ledger. Lords of Chaos Gang Leader Pleads No Contest to Charges
11
UPI. Killer’s Mom Held Without Bond
12
The StoryGraph. Someone Has to Die Tonight
13
U.S. Supreme Court. Foster v. Dixon, No. 25-5575 – Brief in Opposition
14
FindLaw. Foster v. State, No. SC18-860
15
U.S. Supreme Court. Foster v. Dixon, No. 25-5575 – Appendix Volume II