Gerald Hand v. Marc Houk

OPINION

BOGGS, Circuit Judge.

This case presents a habeas petitioner who has been convicted of two counts of aggravated murder and sentenced to death. Over the span of nearly thirty years, petitioner Gerald Hand married four women. Three of those women would die, two of them victims of violent, unsolved home invasions. The death of Hand’s fourth and final wife, however, revealed a different story. At home at the time of her death, Hand allegedly confronted and shot the intruder, who turned out to be his friend and employee Lonnie Welch. Subsequent police investigation uncovered a decades-long…