While on parole for 10 counts of Robbery I, Wheeler killed Nigel Malone and Nairobi Warfield. Both of the victims were stabbed multiple times. When detectives arrived at the scene they discovered the murder weapon, a pair of scissors, still in the neck of one of the victims and a blood trail leading from the victims to the streets. Blood samples collected at the scene matched Wheeler's blood.

In Jefferson County, in 1997, while on parole for 10 counts of Robbery, this killer stabbed the victim Nigel Malone nine times and left him to bleed to death.  The victim Nairobi Warfield was three months pregnant at the time, and this killer strangled her and stabbed her with scissors, which he left embedded in her neck.

Nigel Malone
Nairobi Warfield

  

Roger Lamont Wheeler was convicted by a jury of the intentional murders of Nigel Malone and Nairobi Warfield. The aggravating circumstance is that Wheeler's acts of killing were intentional and resulted in multiple deaths.

Wheeler was sentenced to death on each conviction.

On October 2, 1997, Louisville police discovered the bodies of the victims in the apartment the victims shared. The male victim was found in a hallway near the bathroom. He had suffered nine stab wounds. Two stab wounds to the chest wereconsidered the fatal wounds by the medical examiner. She described the crime sceneas having blood spatters on the floor, walls, furniture and appliances.

The medical examiner believed that the main struggle occurred in the kitchen and progressed to the hallway where the body of the male victim was found.

The female victim died as a result of manual strangulation. The medical examiner testified that she believed the struggle between the female and her assailant occurred in the bedroom where she was found.

The female victim had multiple abrasions on the left side of her neck and lacerations with a bruise on her mouth and several bruises on her lips. Her body was found in a seated position, leaning against a bedroom wall. She was covered with a blanket or quilt and a scissors was protruding from her neck.

The medical testimony determined that she had been stabbed with the scissors after she was already dead. During the autopsy, the medical examiner discovered that the female victim was pregnant.

There was blood on the floors and walls in nearly every room in the apartment. Numerous blood samples were also collected at the scene and were subject to laboratory testing. No fingerprints were found on the scissors.

Wheeler denied killing the two victims but he changed his story on several occasions. Originally, he denied ever being inside of the apartment on the night the murders occurred but then later admitted being in the apartment on that night.

He claimed that Nigel Malone was already stabbed, but that he did not see Nairobi Warfield. He also asserts that the assailant was already inside the apartment and he and that person fought which was why he was wounded.

During the trial that began in February 2001, the trial judge instructed on one aggravating circumstance, intentional killings that resulted in multiple deaths. The trial judge also instructed on mitigating circumstances that Wheeler was under the influence of extreme emotional disturbance; that his capacity to appreciate the criminality of his actions or to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law was impaired as a result of intoxication and any other circumstances that the jury could consider asmitigating.