Murder of Suzanne Marie Collins

After numerous appeals, Alley was executed by lethal injection at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee, on the morning of June 28, 2006; he was pronounced dead at 2:12 a.m. The length of Alley's appeals process caused Collins' family to successfully work for limitations on groundless habeas corpus appeals. The amount of time between the murder and Alley's execution (20 years, 11 months, 14 days) was actually longer than Suzanne Collins had been alive (19 years, one month, four days old) when she was killed. On April 30, 2019, Alley's daughter petitioned the Criminal Court for Shelby County for the DNA test that was denied prior to his execution. A judge denied the request on November 18, 2019.

The Collinses have also established a scholarship named the Suzanne Marie Collins Perpetual Scholarship, first awarded in 1996.

In March 1991, Jack Collins addressed delegates at the Crime Summit in Washington, D.C., convened by then Attorney General Richard Thornburgh. Collins's statement was about the lack of finality with criminal convictions and pressing for reform. In the early 1990s, both Collinses became Eastern Regional Directors of Citizens for Law and Order, based in Oakland, California. Jack Collins continued with opportunities presented to the couple and worked with Executive Director Lee Chancellor of the Judicial Reform Foundation to create a pamphlet on habeas corpus abuses and history of the judicial process. On May 7, 1991, Jack Collins testified before Congress on habeas corpus reform and the endless appeals that Alley was requesting. Trudy Collins was in attendance in support of her husband.

In spite of his attempt to convince a jury that he had multiple personality disorder, Alley was convicted on March 18, 1987 of murder in the first degree and on May 17, 1987, was sentenced to death. He was also convicted of aggravated kidnapping and aggravated rape, for which he received consecutive forty-year sentences. He was scheduled to die by electrocution May 2, 1990, but was reprieved indefinitely by the state Court of Criminal Appeals.

Suzanne Marie Collins was a U. S. Marine Corps Lance Corporal who was tortured, raped and murdered by Sedley Alley in 1985. At the time of her murder she was stationed at Naval Air Station Memphis in Millington, Tennessee. Collins was a student undergoing training at the base, and was scheduled to graduate from avionics training on the day of her murder. She is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Sedley Alley (August 16, 1955 - June 28, 2006), a civilian married to an enlisted member of the military, abducted Collins late in the evening of July 11, 1985 while she was jogging on the base. He took her to nearby Edmund Orgill Park. Once there he beat her multiple times, fracturing her skull, before repeatedly shoving a tree limb up her vagina with enough force to penetrate her abdomen and tear one of her lungs. The autopsy would state that Collins died from blunt force trauma to the head and internal hemorrhaging from the tree limb. He then ditched the body and fled the scene.