She walked into the death chamber at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama, under a black hood, her head shaved to accommodate the electrodes strapped to her body. At 12:01 a. m.
on May 10, 2002, Linda Sheryl Lyon Block became the first woman executed in Alabama in 45 years, and she did so in the electric chair with no option to choose a less brutal method of death.
The 54-year-old mother and former businesswoman had spent more than seven years on death row for the murder of Opelika Police Sergeant Roger Lamar Motley Jr., a 38-year-old veteran officer gunned down in a Walmart parking lot while responding to what he believed was a welfare check on a child. Her final word, when asked if she had anything to say, was a single, defiant “No.”
Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner Michael Haley witnessed the execution and described her demeanor as eerily calm. She displayed no emotion throughout the procedure, staring blankly ahead as the death warrant was read. Witnesses reported seeing steam rise from the wet sponge beneath the electrode on her left leg as 2,050 volts of electricity surged through her body for 20 seconds, followed by 250 volts for 100 seconds.
At 12:10 a. m. , Linda was pronounced dead, her fists clenched and her body tense from the current that killed her.
She had refused a special last meal, declined to write a final statement, and spent her final hours with three close friends and her spiritual advisor, Sally Meechum, the only person she permitted on her witness list for the execution.
The case that sent her to the electric chair began on October 4, 1993, in Opelika, Alabama, in what should have been a routine errand. Sergeant Roger Motley, a supply sergeant who had worked his way up from patrol, was heading to Walmart to pick up supplies for the department when a woman flagged him down in the parking lot, concerned about a young boy sitting alone in a parked red Ford Mustang.
Motley, the kind of officer who would lend his bulletproof vest to a rookie even if it meant going without one himself, approached the vehicle without hesitation and without protection. He had given his vest away earlier that day, a decision that would prove fatal.
Inside the Mustang sat 51-year-old George Sibley, Linda’s common-law husband, along with Linda’s 9-year-old son. When Motley asked Sibley for his driver’s license, Sibley refused, launching into an anti-government tirade about his sovereign citizen beliefs. When Motley placed his hand on his service revolver as a standard precaution, Sibley grabbed a semi-automatic pistol and opened fire.
Motley spun away, taking cover behind his patrol car and radioing in a distress call. He returned fire, striking Sibley and wounding him. But across the parking lot, Linda heard the gunfire from a payphone where she had been finishing a call, and she reacted instantly.
She grabbed a gun from her purse and ran toward the sound of gunfire, dropping into a crouched position as she approached. Witnesses later said she raised her weapon and fired without warning at Motley, who was focused on the threat in front of him. He never saw her coming from behind.
A second shot struck him in the chest, and without his bulletproof vest, the wound was fatal.
Officer Motley was rushed to East Alabama Medical Center but was pronounced dead shortly after arriving. He left behind his wife, Juanita, and their four children. He had spent years serving as a police officer, and he died trying to help a child he believed might be in danger.
The couple fled the scene but were quickly apprehended. Police tracked them down after witnesses reported their high-speed flight, and both were arrested. Linda’s son was taken into police custody.
What emerged during the investigation was a decades-long descent into radicalism that had been building long before that fatal day. Linda Sheryl Lyon was born on February 8, 1948, in Orlando, Florida. Her childhood was difficult, marked by a troubled relationship with her mother, whom she later accused of physical and mental abuse.
Despite her difficult start, Linda grew into an intelligent and independent woman. In Key West, she threw herself into community life, serving as secretary of the Humane Society, working as an investigator on animal abuse cases, and serving as president of the Friends of the Library for two years.
In 1983, when Linda was 35, she married 80-year-old Carl Block, a military veteran who had lost his only son in a car crash. The unusual marriage produced a son, but the relationship soured, and they divorced in December 1991. The split was bitter, and by then Linda had already met George Sibley.
In August 1992, the couple’s radical beliefs turned violent. They broke into Carl Block’s apartment in Orlando, tied him to a chair, gagged him, and demanded he stop trying to claim their house in a custody dispute. Linda stabbed him once in the chest and walked out, leaving him bound and bleeding.
Neighbors found him before it was too late, and he survived.
Both Linda and George were arrested and charged with aggravated battery, but when their sentencing hearing arrived, they never showed up. Instead, they barricaded themselves inside George’s home in Pine Hills, surrounded by weapons and ammunition, faxing dramatic statements to newspapers declaring they would rather die than live as slaves.
Police chose not to storm the house, instead keeping it under quiet surveillance until the couple slipped away in the night. They loaded their arsenal into the red Mustang, three handguns, two semi-automatic rifles, and an M-14 rifle. On the back bumper was a sticker that read, “A woman is a woman without a gun.”
They were fugitives, living in their car and constantly on the run, until the fatal stop in Opelika. After their arrest, Linda and George refused to cooperate with their court-appointed attorneys, rejected the court’s authority, and insisted they had acted in self-defense. They even argued Alabama had no legal right to try them because the state had never been properly readmitted to the Union after the Civil War.
The evidence was overwhelming. Multiple witnesses testified that George fired first and that Linda moved into position and shot Motley while he was taking cover behind his patrol car. Both were convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death.
Linda entered Alabama’s death row on December 21, 1994, at the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka. During her seven years there, she never backed down from her beliefs, refusing to file appeals and insisting the courts were corrupt and had no jurisdiction over her.
In 2002, Alabama passed a law allowing death row inmates to choose between lethal injection and the electric chair, but the law did not take effect until July 1st. Linda’s execution was scheduled for May 10th, weeks too early for her to have that choice. Those who knew her doubted she would have chosen an alternative anyway.
Three years later, on August 4, 2005, George Sibley was executed by lethal injection. In his final days, he filed a handwritten petition claiming Linda, not him, had fired the fatal shot that killed Officer Motley, but legally it no longer mattered. Both had been convicted of capital murder.
Sibley, like Linda, refused a special last meal and had not eaten since Tuesday, two days before his execution. He did choose to speak before he died. “Everyone who is doing this to me is guilty of a murder,” he said.
Strapped to the gurney, he added, “My sister and my niece, I want to express my love and gratitude to my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”
Watching through the glass were members of Roger Motley’s family. His widow Juanita, his son, two stepsons, his mother Ann, and his sister Betty Ann Foshee all witnessed the execution. For Juanita, the execution marked the end of a 12-year ordeal.
“I am ready to just close this chapter of my life and go on,” she said afterward. “I believe justice was served.” Roger’s mother, Ann, put it more bluntly: “Thank the good Lord I had a son like mine and not like George Sibley.”
Linda Sheryl Lyon Block was 54 years old when she died. George Sibley Jr. was 62 when he was executed.
Their deaths closed a dark chapter in Alabama’s criminal justice history, but questions linger about a system that sent a woman to the electric chair without giving her the choice afforded to others, and about the radical beliefs that led a mother and businesswoman down a path of violence and death.
Officer Motley’s family has spent more than two decades trying to move forward. His widow has spoken publicly about the closure that came with the executions, but the pain of losing a husband and father in a Walmart parking lot over a routine welfare check never fully fades. The boy in the Mustang, now grown, carries the weight of that day with him, a child caught in the crossfire of his mother’s fanatical beliefs.
The case remains one of the most unusual in Alabama’s criminal justice history, involving sovereign citizen ideology, a fugitive couple, and a police officer who died protecting a child. Linda’s execution also marked a turning point in the national debate over the electric chair, which has since been abandoned by nearly every state as too brutal and outdated.
In the years since, no other person in the United States has been executed by electrocution without being offered a choice of lethal injection. Linda Lyon Block holds that grim distinction as the last, and her final word, that single defiant “No,” stands as a chilling epitaph for a life defined by defiance, radicalism, and ultimately, violence.
