Tony Fry was executed by the State of Virginia for the murder of Leland Jacobs
According to court documents Tony Fry would go out on a test drive with car salesman Leland Jacobs. Sometime during the ride Leland Jacobs was robbed, shot multiple times, dragged by the bumper for over seven hundred feet while still alive
Tony Fry would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Tony Fry Photos
Tony Fry Case
Tony Leslie Fry, who shot a car salesman who had accompanied him on a test drive, then tied the man to the vehicle’s bumper and dragged him down a dirt road, was executed by injection tonight. Fry, who lost his final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday and declined to ask Gov. James S. Gilmore III (R) for clemency, was put to death at the Greensville Correctional Center here. In a final statement, Fry said he was “sorry for what I’ve done, and I have made peace with myself.”
Fry, 23, pleaded guilty in Chesterfield County Circuit Court in October 1994 to capital murder and robbery in the Feb. 21, 1994, slaying of Leland A. Jacobs, who worked for a Richmond-area Ford dealership. Fry was 19 when he and a friend, Bradford A. Hinson, 17 at the time, told Jacobs that Fry’s grandmother wanted to buy a new Ford Explorer and decided to take one of the vehicles on a test drive. Jacobs, 42, was shot 11 times with a .22-caliber handgun. His necktie was tied to the rear bumper of the Explorer, and he was dragged down a dirt road into the woods. A medical examiner testified that Jacobs probably was still alive when he was dragged.
A police officer who had a warrant for Fry’s arrest in an unrelated case spotted Fry and Hinson leaving the murder scene and stopped them. Fry confessed to the killing when he was arrested. Hinson was later convicted of first-degree murder and robbery in the case and is serving an 88-year sentence. Police testified at Fry’s trial that he also confessed to robbing three churches, including one where he was a member, to setting two vacant houses on fire and to robbing a grave. Police found a jawbone that Fry had left at a friend’s apartment. Fry said he saw no need to ask Gilmore for clemency. “I honestly feel that he wouldn’t grant the clemency petition, and that’s why I didn’t file one,” Fry said in a newspaper interview this week. Gilmore had not intervened in any of the 14 executions since he took office slightly more than a year ago. The Supreme Court voted 7 to 2 to reject Fry’s emergency appeal
