Bio

Robert Karl Hicks was born on March 23, 1957. Georgia Department of Corrections information reported in execution records listed him as a white male from Spalding County, Georgia, with brown hair and brown eyes. He was 28 years old when he murdered Toni Strickland Rivers in 1985 and 47 years old when he was executed in 2004.

Before the murder, Hicks had a serious criminal history. The most important prior offense was a rape conviction. Amnesty International reported that one of the aggravating factors at his capital trial was that the murder was committed by a person with a prior rape conviction.

Reports also state that Hicks had been released from prison only months before the murder of Toni Rivers. He had served less than half of a 15-year sentence for raping a 16-year-old girl before being paroled. This prior conviction became central to the prosecution’s argument during the penalty phase of his capital trial.

At trial, Hicks raised an insanity defense. Court records show that he filed notice of intent to raise insanity, received funds for a private psychiatrist, and presented psychiatric testimony in his defense. The jury rejected that defense and convicted him of malice murder.

Murder Story

On July 13, 1985, Toni Strickland Rivers drove to an area on Rawls Road in Spalding County, Georgia, to meet a friend before a planned trip to Callaway Gardens. When the friend arrived, Rivers’s car was there, but Rivers was missing.

At about 8:00 p.m., a resident of Blanton Mill Road heard a loud scream from a nearby pasture area. The resident also heard a woman say, “Don’t do that.” He saw a car parked near the end of his driveway and then looked toward the pasture, where he saw someone lying on the ground and another person moving near that person.

The resident flagged down two men, Robbie McCune and Charles Garner, who were passing in a pickup truck. They also heard screams. Looking toward the pasture, they saw a shirtless man with blond hair and a black beard bending over and making stabbing motions. Garner testified that when the man straightened up, he wiped something off and put it into his pocket.

McCune and Garner recorded the license number of the car parked beside the road and went to call law enforcement. As they left, they saw the man come out of the woods, get into his car, drive a short distance, and stop because the car had run out of gas.

After calling the sheriff, McCune and Garner returned and saw the same man getting into the back of a black pickup truck that had stopped to give him a ride. Deputy Chuck Hudson soon arrived, and McCune identified the man in the pickup as the person seen near the pasture where the screams had come from.

Deputy Hudson stopped the pickup and spoke with the man, later identified as Robert Karl Hicks. Hicks denied knowing anything about a girl or hearing anything in the area. Hudson then searched him and found a folding pocket knife in Hicks’s right front pocket. The knife was covered in a fresh dark red substance that appeared to be blood.

Meanwhile, Garner found Toni Rivers in the pasture. She was nude from the waist down and covered with blood. She told him she was dying. When deputies arrived, she begged for help and said she could not breathe. She clawed at the ground and made choking sounds before she stopped moving. She died shortly afterward.

The medical evidence showed that Rivers suffered five large throat lacerations, an open abdominal wound, and eight stab wounds. She died from near-total blood loss. The injuries were severe enough that later summaries described the attack as nearly decapitating her.

Investigators searched Hicks’s car and found women’s shorts, bloody men’s socks, sandals, and a key ring with the initials “T.R.” Blood found on Hicks’s car seat, pants, socks, and knife was identified as consistent with Toni Rivers’s blood.

Hicks was indicted in Spalding County during the October 1985 term. He was tried from January 13 to January 16, 1986. On January 16, 1986, a jury found him guilty of murder. On January 17, 1986, he was sentenced to death.

The Georgia Supreme Court affirmed Hicks’s conviction and sentence on February 13, 1987. His motion for reconsideration was denied on March 3, 1987, and the United States Supreme Court denied certiorari on June 15, 1987.

Hicks later pursued state and federal habeas appeals. One of his major federal issues involved psychiatric assistance under Ake v. Oklahoma. The Eleventh Circuit ruled in 2003 that any Ake error was subject to harmless-error review and affirmed the denial of federal habeas relief.

In his final litigation, Hicks also raised a mental-retardation claim. On July 1, 2004, the Eleventh Circuit denied his application for a stay of execution and habeas motion, finding that he had not shown a reasonable likelihood that he was mentally retarded.

Robert Karl Hicks was executed by lethal injection in Georgia on July 1, 2004. Georgia execution records list him as a 47-year-old white male executed for murder in Spalding County.