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03rd Jul 2023

Man waited until 15 year jail sentence finished before confessing to cold case murder from 2002

Charlie Herbert

He had been initially investigated for the murder

A man waited until his 15 year prison sentence was over before he admitted to an unrelated cold case murder of a pregnant woman and her son more than two decades previously.

Lewis Ladon Spivey, 39, was in jail for robbery and aggravated assault charges.

But after finishing his sentence, he admitted to a double murder 21 years previously that had been unsolved.

Spivey was immediately taken back into custody in Florida after he confessed to the killing of Monica Rollins, 23, and her six-year-old son Dalton Rollins from Alabama.

Rollins was eight months pregnant when she was murdered in September 2002, with the bodies being discovered in the city of Heflin several days later.

Rollin’s other son, who was three-years-old at the time of her death, was found hiding upstairs in the family home.

For more than two decades, investigators had been unable to work out who was responsible for the homicide.

Heflin Police Capt. Scott Bonner said: “Spivey has since cooperated with the investigation and has given a complete confession wherein he outlined the timeline of the events that day and taken sole responsibility for both murders.”

Capt. Bonner revealed that Spivey and Rollins had a “relationship” but did not divulge any information about a potential motive for the killing.

Spivey had actually been investigated by police around the time of the initial investigation into the murders, but detectives ran into a “dead end.”

Capt. Bonner said: “We didn’t have surveillance, pictures or cameras. We didn’t have the things that you would have nowadays.”

Spivey is now being held at Cleburne County Jail in Alabama after being transported from Florida.

He has been denied bail under a law which denies bail to violent offenders.

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