Bio

Brian Joseph Kinder was born on September 27, 1959. He was a Missouri prison inmate who spent over 15 years on death row following his conviction for the December 1990 rape and murder of his cousin, Cynthia Williams, in Crystal City, Missouri. Maintaining his innocence throughout his incarceration, Kinder filed numerous legal appeals, which eventually led the Missouri Supreme Court to grant new independent DNA testing of the trial evidence in 2006.

However, before those definitive findings could be fully resolved to potentially overturn his conviction, Kinder was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. After the Missouri Probation and Parole Board denied a request for medical parole to let him spend his final days with family, he died naturally from the disease at the Potosi Correctional Center hospital ward on August 8, 2007, at the age of 47.

Murder Story

On Friday, December 21, 1990, Brian Kinder went with Don Williams to the home of Williams’s estranged wife, Cynthia Williams, to pick up two of the couple’s children for the weekend. Cynthia’s third child, Donald Culton, stayed at the home. Cynthia returned from work and later went out with relatives that evening. Later that night, Kinder returned to his own home. A witness named Earl Smith saw Kinder with a pipe that had black tape on one end. Kinder left his home again at about 11:00 or 11:30 p.m.

Around midnight or shortly afterward, Kinder was seen outside Gibb’s Esquire Bar, about 40 yards from Cynthia Williams’s home. He had the pipe with him and became involved in an argument with Dwayne Wingo. Wingo later drove past Cynthia’s home and saw Kinder coming out of the house. When Wingo returned to the bar area, he saw Kinder back outside the bar.

Sometime after midnight, after Cynthia had returned home, her son Donald Culton was awakened by noises inside the house. He later described hearing a sound like something dragging on the floor and also heard what sounded like someone trying to breathe. The next morning, he found his mother’s unclothed body lying on her bed in a pool of blood. He went to a neighbor’s home, and police were called.

Investigators found that Cynthia Williams had suffered massive head injuries. A pathologist determined that she died from multiple blows with a heavy blunt object and that the injuries were consistent with being beaten with a pipe. DNA testing also showed that semen recovered from her body matched Kinder’s genetic profile.

Kinder was charged with first-degree murder, rape, and armed criminal action. A jury later found him guilty on all counts. During the penalty phase, the jury found two statutory aggravating circumstances: Kinder’s prior conviction for second-degree assault and the fact that the murder was committed during the rape of Cynthia Williams. The court sentenced him to death for murder and imposed two consecutive life terms for rape and armed criminal action.

Kinder appealed his conviction and sentence. The Missouri Supreme Court affirmed the conviction, death sentence, and denial of postconviction relief in 1996. He later pursued federal habeas relief, but the Eighth Circuit affirmed the denial of relief in 2001. Brian Kinder was not executed. He died of natural causes at Potosi Correctional Center on August 8, 2007.