Joseph Ernest Atkins

Joseph Ernest Atkins (1947 – January 23, 1999) was an American serial killer and Vietnam War veteran who murdered three people in South Carolina. He murdered his half-brother in 1969 and received a life sentence. After Atkins's adoptive father pleaded for his release, he was released on parole in 1980. In 1985, Atkins murdered a 13-year-old neighbor girl and his adoptive father. Atkins was convicted of these two murders, sentenced to death, and executed in 1999.

Atkins's lawyers unsuccessfully argued for leniency, saying he was suffering a flashback from Vietnam at the time of the murders. Atkins had armed himself with a machete and was dressed in military fatigues when he committed the murders.

Military service Joseph was sent to fight in Vietnam in the late 1960s, fighting on the border of Cambodia and Laos. He saw people killed and mutilated, and heard fellow captured soldiers being tortured to death. He returned to the U.S. in October 1969 and was awarded a Vietnam Campaign Medal, a Vietnam Service Medal, and a National Defense Service Medal.

Joseph was indicted for murder in March 1970. Attorneys for both sides agreed to a guilty plea of manslaughter. On May 28, 1970, Joseph appeared before a judge, and said that "he [Charles] reached back like this in his back pocket where he had his gun, and I was scared he was going to shoot." The judge said he could not accept Joseph's guilty plea if he was claiming to have acted in self-defense. The plea deal fell through and the case went to trial. The jury rejected Joseph's claim of self-defense and he was found guilty of murder. They recommended mercy and he was sentenced to life in prison. He returned to North Charleston to live with his girlfriend, Linda Walters, in half of a duplex owned by his father. He worked several jobs and had alcoholism problems. In the spring of 1985, Aaron Polite, his wife, Fatha Patterson, and their 13-year-old daughter, Karen Patterson, moved into the duplex. Joseph barely interacted with them.

Arthur Henderson, the neighbor with whom Joseph had been drinking, testified that Joseph told him "when I go home anything I see in sight I'm going to kill."

After a failed appeal for clemency, Joseph was executed by lethal injection at Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina, on January 23, 1999. He made no final statement.