Alan Eugene Miller Executed For A Triple Murder That Shook Alabama | Nitrogen Gas, & Final Words

On September 26th, 2024, Alan Eugene Miller was executed by nitrogen hypoxia at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama. He had been waiting for this moment for over two decades. And in those final minutes, strapped to a gurney with a mask sealed over his face, he said something that stopped the room.

In this video, we’ll find out what his last meal was, what his final words were, and we’ll walk through the full story of who Alan Eugene Miller was, what he did on one August morning in 1999, and why his case became one of the most legally controversial executions in modern American history. Stay with me. This one is heavy.

Alan Eugene Miller was born on January 20th, 1965, in Alabama. By 1999, he was 34 years old. He had no criminal record. He was not a known threat. He had not been in trouble with the law before. On paper, he was unremarkable. He worked as a delivery truck driver at Ferguson Enterprises, a heating and air conditioning distributor in Pelham, Alabama. He showed up to work. He did his job.

But something was happening inside Alan Miller that nobody fully understood, not even the people closest to him. His family had a long, documented history of serious mental illness—multiple generations. And Miller himself, it would later be revealed, had suffered extreme abuse at the hands of his father growing up.

That trauma, layered over an already fragile mind, had been quietly building for years. At some point, Alan Miller became convinced of something. He became convinced that his co-workers—men he worked beside, men he saw every single day—were spreading rumors about him, specifically that he was gay.

There was no evidence this was true. But in Miller’s mind, it was real, completely real. A forensic psychiatrist would later diagnose him with a delusional disorder, a condition where a person holds a fixed false belief that no amount of reasoning or evidence can shake. Miller wasn’t pretending. He wasn’t manipulating anyone.

He genuinely believed these men were destroying his reputation. And in his fractured state of mind, he decided to do something about it. What he did next would end three lives, shatter three families, and put him on death row for 25 years.

It was a Thursday, 7:00 in the morning. Pelham, Alabama. The kind of quiet summer morning where co-workers pull into parking lots with coffee cups, exchange small talk, and settle into another ordinary workday.

That morning, Johnny Cobb, the Vice President of Operations at Ferguson Enterprises, arrived at the company’s parking lot. He recognized several vehicles already there. One belonged to sales manager Scott Yancey, another to delivery driver Lee Holdbrooks, and one belonged to Alan Miller. Cobb walked toward the building. Then he heard it: loud noises, screaming.

He opened the front door. Alan Miller was walking directly toward him, armed with a .40 caliber Glock pistol. Miller looked at Cobb and said, “I’m tired of people starting rumors on me.” Cobb pleaded with him to put the gun down. Miller told him to get out of his way. Cobb ran. What happened inside that building next was methodical, deliberate, and brutal.

Victim one: Lee Holdbrooks, 32 years old. Miller shot Lee Holdbrooks in the chest and in the head. The wounds were severe, but not immediately fatal. Holdbrooks was alive. Incapacitated, bleeding, and terrified, but alive. He crawled. Despite the gunshot wounds, Lee Holdbrooks crawled 25 feet down a hallway, dragging himself toward the exit, leaving a long trail of blood behind him. Miller didn’t leave. He waited.

He watched as Holdbrooks slowly, agonizingly made his way down that hall, and then when he had crawled as far as he could go, Miller walked up to him, stood over him, and shot him once more, this time at close range in the head. Holdbrooks was looking up at Miller when Miller pulled the trigger. He was shot six times in total.

Victim two: Christopher Yancey, 28 years old. Yancey was in his office. Miller shot him once, and that first bullet traveled through his groin and directly into his spine. It paralyzed him instantly. Christopher Yancey was now alive, awake, and completely unable to move. He was slumped beneath his desk.

His cell phone was just inches from his hand. He couldn’t reach it. Miller walked over to the desk. He stooped down, looked into Yancey’s eyes, and shot him again. He was shot three times.

Miller then left Ferguson Enterprises, got into his truck, and drove. He didn’t go home. He didn’t flee the state. He drove 5 miles down the road to a business called Post Airgas, where he had previously worked. He had one more person on his list.

Victim three: Terry Jarvis, 39 years old. Terry Jarvis was Miller’s former supervisor, the man who had once overseen him at a previous job. Miller walked into Post Airgas with the same Glock. He shot Terry Jarvis in the chest and the abdomen. Jarvis went down behind the sales counter, severely wounded, alive, but defenseless. Miller walked behind the counter, stood over Terry Jarvis, and shot him again. Jarvis was found sprawled on the floor, riddled with five gunshot wounds.

Three men, two locations. One morning, total time elapsed: minutes.

Miller got back in his truck and drove away. Later, on the same day, a police officer spotted his vehicle on the side of an Alabama highway and pulled him over. When officers tried to take him into custody, Miller resisted. It took four officers and four separate pairs of handcuffs to subdue him.

Inside the truck, on the driver’s seat, sat the .40 caliber Glock—one round still in the chamber, 11 more in the magazine, an empty second magazine on the passenger seat. Ballistics would later confirm it: every shell casing found at both crime scenes matched the same gun. Alan Eugene Miller was transported to the Pelham Police Department and charged with murder.

The trial took place in 2000. The evidence against Miller was overwhelming. Eyewitnesses, ballistics. His own words, “I’m tired of people starting rumors on me,” spoken while holding a loaded gun.

Miller’s defense team did attempt one angle: mental illness. A forensic psychiatrist testified that Miller was suffering from a delusional disorder at the time of the murders. That the belief about rumors, while false, was clinically real to him; that he was a mentally ill man, not a calculating, cold-blooded criminal in the traditional sense.

It was a serious argument, but it had a ceiling. Under Alabama law, a mental illness defense only succeeds if the defendant couldn’t understand the difference between right and wrong at the time of the crime. The psychiatrist testified that while Miller was delusional, his condition didn’t rise to that legal threshold. The insanity defense was withdrawn before it could even go to the jury.

What’s more, and this is where the case gets complicated, Miller’s court-appointed attorney presented almost nothing during the penalty phase. A few sentences of testimony from one psychiatrist, no evidence of Miller’s childhood abuse, no evidence of his family’s multi-generational mental illness, no character witnesses, no letters, no records—just a few sentences.

The jury deliberated for three hours. The verdict: 10 jurors for death, two jurors for life without parole. Not unanimous. 10 to 2.

Here’s the thing about that number. In most states across America, a split verdict like that would have automatically prevented the death penalty. 10 to 2 is not a consensus. It is not certainty. It is a divided room. But Alabama was different. At the time, Alabama was the only state in the country that allowed a judge to override a jury’s non-unanimous recommendation.

The trial judge looked at that 10 to 2 split, called it “probably the most difficult sentence I’ve ever had to consider,” and sentenced Alan Eugene Miller to death anyway. On August 24th, 2000, the sentence was officially entered: death by electrocution.

Miller appealed and appealed and appealed. His legal team raised ineffective assistance of counsel, arguing that his trial lawyers’ near-total failure to present mitigating evidence at sentencing was a constitutional violation. Courts reviewed it. Courts denied it. He raised his mental illness. Courts acknowledged it. Courts moved on.

The years passed. Alan Miller sat in a cell at Holman Correctional Facility while lawyers argued, courts deliberated, and the calendar kept turning. Then in 2018, Alabama made a significant change to its execution protocol. The state authorized a new method of execution: nitrogen hypoxia—death by suffocation through pure nitrogen gas, a method that had never been used on a human being before.

Inmates on death row were allowed to select their preferred method. Miller chose nitrogen hypoxia. The state acknowledged his selection and then proceeded to schedule his execution by lethal injection anyway.

September 22nd, 2022. Alan Miller was prepared for execution by lethal injection. He was strapped down. Prison staff worked to establish intravenous line access for the lethal drugs. They couldn’t find a vein. They tried and tried again. The execution warrant had a deadline of midnight. That clock was ticking, and the state could not get the intravenous lines in place. Eventually, the execution was called off.

But that’s not the most disturbing part. Miller later alleged that during the failed attempt, prison staff left him strapped upside down on a gurney, inverted, while he bled for 20 minutes. If true, that is a profound failure, not just of process, but of basic human dignity.

The botched execution sparked immediate legal action. Miller filed a federal lawsuit. His attorneys argued the state had violated his rights, that the attempt itself constituted cruel and unusual punishment, and that the state should be barred from ever attempting a lethal injection execution again.

By November 2022, Alabama blinked. The state formally agreed in a legal settlement that it would not execute Alan Miller by lethal injection. It would use nitrogen hypoxia, the method he had originally chosen four years earlier. Attorney General Steve Marshall framed it positively, saying the resolution confirmed that Alabama’s nitrogen system was reliable and humane. Critics were less optimistic because Alabama wasn’t just going to test this method with Miller. First, they would use it on another man.

January 25th, 2024. Kenneth Eugene Smith became the first human being in recorded history to be executed by nitrogen hypoxia. Smith, like Miller, had survived a botched lethal injection attempt in 2022. Alabama had tried twice to kill him. The second time, it used nitrogen gas. Witnesses in the room described what they saw. Smith was conscious for several minutes after the gas began flowing. He then shook and writhed on the gurney. For 2 minutes, he convulsed. For several more minutes, he breathed in deep, labored gulps—large, desperate breaths—before gradually going still.

State officials had promised the death would be near-instant, peaceful, even. What witnesses saw was neither. Alabama was now proposing to use the same unmodified method on Alan Eugene Miller. Miller’s attorneys filed a new lawsuit challenging the protocol, citing Smith’s execution as evidence that the method caused suffering. The courts reviewed; the courts denied. An execution date was set: September 26th, 2024.

The morning of September 26th, 2024, arrived like any other morning in Atmore, Alabama. Inside Holman Correctional Facility, Alan Eugene Miller, now 59 years old, ate his last meal: a hamburger steak, a baked potato, and French fries.

He had nine visitors that day—family, people who had known him, people who still loved him. He met with his spiritual adviser, John Munch, a man who was not only a pastor but also a physician. Munch had been walking alongside Miller through the final stretch of this journey, and he would be present in the execution chamber when it happened.

As evening approached, Alan Miller was taken to the execution chamber. He was strapped to the gurney. A mask was fitted over his face, covering him from his forehead to his chin. The mask would deliver the nitrogen gas directly. The witnesses took their positions. The family of his victims were there, officials, media reporters, and on the other side of the glass, the people who had come to say goodbye to Alan Miller.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall cleared the execution to commence at 6:16 p.m. The nitrogen began to flow.

What happened next was documented by the reporters and witnesses who were present. Almost immediately, Alan Miller began to shake. His body trembled on the gurney, his arms pulled against the restraints. For approximately 2 minutes, he shook and struggled, his body reacting to the rapid depletion of oxygen with involuntary, visible convulsions.

Then the shaking slowed. What followed was six minutes of intermittent gasping. Not small, subtle breaths, but gulping, desperate breaths. His body fighting for something it could not find. For 8 minutes total, the witnesses watched. Then he went still. The nitrogen gas flowed for 15 minutes in total.

Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm stepped out for a post-execution press conference. He confirmed the visible movements. He said they were expected. “That was nothing that we did not expect.” He said everything went “according to plan and according to our protocol.”

But inside the execution chamber, Miller’s spiritual adviser, physician John Munch, saw something different. “We don’t see people jerking around like that while they’re dying normally,” Munch said afterward. “His face was twisted and he looked like he was suffering.”

Two people, same room, two completely different accounts of what they witnessed. At 6:38 p.m., Alan Eugene Miller was pronounced dead. He was the 1,600th person executed in the United States since executions resumed in 1976. He was the last of five people executed across the country within a single week. The most executions in one week since July of the year 2000.

Just before the mask was placed over his face, Alan Eugene Miller spoke. His voice was calm. His words were brief. “I didn’t do anything to be in here.” He turned toward the family and friends who had come to witness his death, the people who had stood by him through 25 years of this, and he asked them to take care of someone. The name was inaudible through the mask. Then he said it again: “I didn’t do anything to be on death row.” Those were his final words.

It is important, necessary, to return here at this point in the story. Three men died on August 5th, 1999.

Lee Holdbrooks was 32 years old. He crawled 25 feet toward an exit, bleeding, trying to survive, and was shot at close range when he could crawl no further. He left behind a wife. Terra Barnes, his widow, said before the execution that it had taken far too long to get to this point. “I feel that it has taken way too long to get here,” she said.

Christopher Yancey was 28 years old, paralyzed by the first bullet, unable to reach his phone, unable to call for help, unable to run. He was 28.

Terry Jarvis was 39 years old, a former supervisor, shot five times behind the counter of his workplace.

These three men were not symbols in a legal debate. They were people. They had families. They had mornings and routines and futures. And on one Thursday in August, all of that was taken from them. Not by circumstance or accident, but by a man who walked into their workplaces with a loaded gun and chose to pull the trigger. Three families carried this loss for 25 years.

Governor Kay Ivey said after the execution: “Just as Alan Miller cowardly fled after he maliciously committed three calculated murders in 1999, he has attempted to escape justice for two decades. Tonight, justice was finally served for these three victims.”

Alan Eugene Miller was executed on September 26th, 2024. He was born in 1965. He killed three people in 1999. He was sentenced in 2000. He survived a botched execution in 2022. He died in 2024. His last meal was a hamburger steak, a baked potato, and French fries. His last words were, “I didn’t do anything to be in here.”

And somewhere in Alabama, the widow of Lee Holdbrooks exhaled, 25 years after the morning her husband crawled down a hallway and never came home.

There are no clean answers in a case like this. There are victims who deserve better. There is a man whose mind may have been broken long before he ever picked up that gun. There is a justice system that failed at multiple points: before the crime, during the trial, and arguably at the execution itself.

What we’re left with are questions. Questions about fairness, about mental illness, about what justice actually looks like, and whether after 25 years and a death on a gurney, any family truly gets closure.

So, I’ll leave you with this: When a person is executed by a method that witnesses describe as visibly painful, using a protocol that was never properly tested, does that constitute justice? Or does it complicate the very thing it was meant to deliver?