Red Onion State Prison inmate pleads guilty

Red Onion State Prison inmate Bobby Gleason pleaded guilty to a second prison murder Friday and took another step toward his endgame – to be killed by the commonwealth of Virginia.

After he hogtied, bludgeoned and then strangled his cellmate in 2009, Gleason pledged to kill again if he wasn’t given the death penalty. He made good on his promise in July 2010, when he strangled another inmate with a makeshift noose from an adjacent cage in the maximum security prison’s recreation yard. He was then – and still is – awaiting sentencing on the first capital murder conviction.

Robert Gleason Jr., 40, who legally changed his name to Charles Robert Flynn during his last murder trial, confessed Friday to the recreation-yard slaying of his prison buddy, 26-year-old Aaron Cooper.

“He was my ace in the hole,” Gleason later told investigators, according to the prosecution.

At a December hearing, he told the court that the prison attorney told him he wasn’t going to get the death penalty for the first murder, like he wanted. That’s when Gleason decided to kill Cooper.

“I already had a few inmates lined up, just in case I didn’t get the death penalty, that I was going to take out,” he said.

 Gleason was mad that people weren’t taking him seriously.

His prison friend Cooper was serving a 34-year sentence for carjacking and robbery.

“I planned it so much,” Gleason said in December.

He smuggled the noose out in the long sleeve of his prison jumpsuit then, once in the prison yard, told Cooper he had a religious necklace that he needed to measure “like a tailor would do.” After he lured Cooper to the fence, he put the noose around his neck and told him to sit down.

Cooper’s last words were “don’t kill me,” Gleason said at the December hearing. He jerked the rope “and choked him ‘til he turned purple.”

Wise County Circuit Court Judge John Kilgore asked Gleason Friday if he understood that by pleading guilty he could be sentenced to death. Gleason said he did.

The judge accepted his guilty plea, but would not convict him until he is evaluated for sanity and competency to stand trial. Mental evaluations are required by Virginia law in capital murder cases.

Gleason was born in Massachusetts, according to court records. He dropped out of school after the seventh grade and finished his GED in prison in 2004. He was a self-taught tattoo artist.

His criminal record began in 1999 with a North Carolina conviction for violating an order of protection, according to court records. Five years later, he added a felony firearms conviction, followed by a handful of contempt of court misdemeanors two years after that. He began 2007 with an assault conviction and finished the year with failure to appear, larceny and unlawful wounding. The next year, in 2008, he was convicted of murdering a man in Amherst County, Va. Violent and belligerent, he was tasered at his own murder trial, eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to serve life at Wallens Ridge State Prison in Big Stone Gap, also in Wise County.

There, he killed his cellmate, 63-year-old Harvey Watson Jr., in May 2009. Watson was mentally ill – he sang, masturbated and drank his own urine, Gleason said during his trial. For a week, he’d asked the prison to move him but they wouldn’t. He tied Watson up, gagged him with a sock, beat him and finally strangled him. He left him covered up in his bunk, where Watson’s body remained for 15 hours before guards noticed. In the meantime, Gleason ate a meal just a few feet from his dead cellmate.

“I murdered that man cold-bloodedly. I planned it, and I’m gonna do it again,” he told the Associate Press. “Someone needs to stop it. The only way to stop me is to put me on death row.”

For Watson’s killing, he was charged with capital murder, pleaded guilty, rescinded his plea then pleaded guilty again. He is set to be sentenced at 9 a.m. Feb. 22.

He will be back in court at 9 a.m. April 22 for the Cooper murder. The judge is expected to announce that day whether he will accept Gleason’s guilty plea.

cgalofaro@bristolnews.com
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