This story was originally published by the Nashville Banner. Sign up for their newsletter at nashvillebanner.com/newsletters.
On the last night of her life, March 27, 1988, 29-year-old Angela Clay finished a Sunday shift as a lab worker at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Leaving the hospital around 10 p.m., she found her boyfriend, Byron Black, unexpectedly waiting to give her a ride home.
Their relationship had not been a peaceful one. On the night he came to pick up Clay from work, Black was on a weekend furlough from the Metro Workhouse, a former Nashville jail facility. He’d been serving a two-year sentence there for shooting Clay’s estranged husband — and the father of her two daughters — Bennie Clay during an altercation. According to court documents, Black had once kicked in the front door of Angela’s apartment after she refused to let him in. Family members later told police that she had been talking about reconciling with her husband and that Black had threatened to “pull a Sterling Gray” if she went through with it. Gray was the disgraced Davidson County Criminal Court judge who had killed his wife before shooting himself after she left him earlier that year.
Media reports and court documents from the time reflect slightly different versions of what might’ve happened after Clay left work that night. At some point after seeing some of her family, Black and Clay ended up together with her two daughters, 9-year-old Latoya and 6-year-old Lakeisha. The couple had been seen arguing in preceding days, and one of Clay’s neighbors reported hearing a series of loud bangs coming from her apartment between 1 and 1:30 in the morning.
The following evening, after police were called to the South Nashville apartment by concerned relatives, they found Angela shot to death in her bed. Her older daughter, Latoya, was dead in the bedroom with her, shot through the neck and chest. The other child, Lakeisha, was lying facedown in a separate bedroom with two gunshot wounds.