The courtroom in Lebanon, Ohio smelled of wood polish and dread on October 16, 2014, as a 19-year-old boy from Clayton stood silently before a jury that had just decided his fate. Austin Gregory Myers, his face arranged into something that looked like calm but might have been shock, became the youngest person on Ohio’s death row after a jury recommended death for the brutal murder of his childhood friend, Justin Back. The state’s decision, delivered by Judge Donald Oda II, imposed a sentence that would set off a decade of legal battles and moral questions about who truly deserves the ultimate punishment.
Justin Michael Back was born on February 13, 1995, in Waynesville, a small Ohio town where handshakes and front porch conversations still held currency. He was the kind of kid who noticed the people others overlooked, who scanned the cafeteria in middle school and walked toward tables where nobody wanted to sit. He befriended Austin Myers in seventh and eighth grade, pulling him into a circle of friendship when Myers was struggling.
Justin saw something worth saving in that boy, and he was catastrophically wrong about that instinct.
By 2013, Justin had graduated from Waynesville High School and his direction was set. He had wanted to join the Navy since he was three years old, his mother remembered with a clarity that only grief can produce. The summer after graduation, he worked through every requirement, every physical, every form.
By January 2014, he was ten days away from shipping out, ten days from beginning the life he had spent 18 years building toward. His friends described him in those final weeks as settled and happy, knowing exactly what he was supposed to be doing next.
On the morning of January 27, 2014, Austin Myers turned to Timothy Mosley, a 20-year-old from Dayton, and asked if he wanted to make some money. Mosley said yes. They discussed robbing a 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 dealer or going to Waynesville to take a safe from the Cates home, where Justin lived with his stepfather Mark Cates.
Myers knew the house from his middle school days. They drove out and saw Justin was home, so they left. But instead of abandoning the plan, Myers sat in the car and began thinking.
If Justin was home when they robbed the safe, Justin would know who took it. Justin would go to the police. Justin was the problem.
The solution Myers arrived at, sitting in a car on a January afternoon, was to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 his childhood friend.
They went back to Mosley’s house and pulled out a small notebook, writing down their plan like a grocery list. Wire cable and metal rope cleats to build a garrote, which Mosley would call a choke wire. Ammonia to destroy DNA evidence.
Septic enzymes to accelerate decomposition. Rubber gloves. They drove to a Lowe’s and a Dollar General and bought everything on the list.
Myers assembled the garrote with his own hands. They went to sleep. Tomorrow they would finish it.
January 28, 2014, just after 1:00 p. m. The sky over Waynesville was the flat gray of an Ohio winter, the temperature below freezing for days.
Myers and Mosley pulled up outside the house on Corwin Road. Mosley had the garrote inside his jacket. Myers knocked.
Justin Back opened the door and saw a face from years ago, a person he had not seen in six years but still associated with the middle school kid he once looked out for. Justin did not hesitate. He opened the door wide and let them in.
They sat in the living room together, watching movies, talking. Justin was comfortable, relaxed. He had no idea that the wire inside Mosley’s jacket existed.
At some point, Justin got up and moved to the kitchen, walking to the refrigerator. In that moment, Mosley moved, bringing the garrote up and over Justin’s head. But the wire caught wrong, landing across Justin’s chin instead of around his throat.
All three went to the floor. The kitchen became chaos. Justin fought hard, his hands trying to find the wire, trying to pull it away.
And then he turned his face toward Austin Myers, the boy who once protected him in the cafeteria, and said the words that would be repeated in courtrooms for years afterward: Help me, Austin.
Myers looked back at him and said, It will all be over soon. Then Myers tightened the garrote around Justin’s throat, and Mosley reached into his jacket and pulled out a pocket knife. He drove it into Justin’s back, then into his chest, over and over, 21 times.
The medical examiner would later count 21 separate stab wounds. Justin Back died on the kitchen floor of his family home, ten days before he was supposed to begin his life in the Navy, with his childhood friend’s hands around his throat and a stranger’s knife in his chest.
When it was over, the two men stood in a kitchen that looked like a nightmare. They poured ammonia across the floor and counters. They tore up the kitchen rugs soaked with Justin’s blood.
They found plastic and wrapped Justin’s body in a blanket, dragging him to the trunk of Mosley’s car. They moved through the house methodically, taking the safe from the closet, jewelry, credit cards, electronics, bags of Justin’s clothing. The idea was to make it look like Justin had packed up and run away.
They loaded everything into the car and left around 2:00 p. m.
Mosley got paranoid on the drive, convinced they were being followed. He took back roads, pulling over to check the car for blood. They stopped at Mosley’s house, dragged the safe up the stairs, changed clothes, then drove south into Preble County to a remote field near a creek crossing locals called Crybaby Bridge.
They carried Justin’s body out to a fallen log and laid him on the ground. Myers took a pistol he had stolen from the Cates home and fired two shots into Justin’s body. The gun jammed on the third.
He cleared the jam mechanically, ejecting the casing into the dirt, where police would find it later. Then he opened containers of septic enzymes and poured them over Justin. They walked back to the car.
On the drive away, Myers suggested they should also 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 Justin’s stepfather, Mark Cates, to eliminate the witness who would notice the safe was gone. Mosley said no. That was the only no either of them said across two full days of planning and execution.
The safe, when they finally got it open, contained $70 and a document. That is what Justin Back’s life was worth in the mathematics of Austin Myers’ plan.
Justin’s stepfather came home from work that afternoon and felt immediately that something was wrong. Things had been moved. The kitchen rugs were gone.
Justin’s phone was lying on the floor. Justin was nowhere. By the time Mark and Sandy Cates had searched the house and called for help, it was clear to anyone who walked through the door that something catastrophic had happened.
Neighbors confirmed they had seen a car outside the house with two young men inside. Police began pulling threads, checking Justin’s call records, his social media, his contacts. Investigators worked through the night and into the next day, interviewing everyone connected to Justin, building a picture of who had been in that house.
Myers and Mosley had been staying together at a house in Clayton, and it did not take long for investigators to arrive at their door. Both men were brought in. Both gave statements.
Both admitted to being present. Then their stories diverged. Mosley saw what was coming and made a calculation.
He went to prosecutors early, before any formal plea arrangement, and began providing information. He told investigators where the body was, leading them to Crybaby Bridge in Preble County, where Justin’s body was recovered, still clothed, still partially wrapped in the blanket, the septic enzyme residue on the ground beside him. He gave prosecutors a detailed account of what happened in that kitchen.
In exchange, prosecutors offered to remove the death penalty from Mosley’s sentencing. He would plead guilty to aggravated murder, testify against Myers at trial, and go to prison for life without parole. Myers would face a jury alone.
The trial in Warren County in the fall of 2014 turned on one of the most uncomfortable questions in American criminal law: What does it mean to be the most culpable person in a murder when you are not the one who inflicted the fatal wound? Mosley took the stand for the prosecution and testified in precise, damning detail. He described the conversations, the shopping trips, the notebook, the garrote being assembled.
He described Myers proposing the killing, holding Justin from the front while Mosley attacked from behind, tightening the wire around Justin’s throat and saying, It will all be over soon.
Prosecutor David Fornshell argued with obvious conviction that without Austin Myers, Justin Back is alive. Every element of this crime traced back to one person. Fornshell told the jury that Austin Myers is a serial killer who got caught after his first attempt.
He pointed to evidence that Myers had reportedly suggested poisoning Justin before they settled on the garrote, that after the murder he suggested killing Mark Cates, that he shot Justin’s body twice after death and doused it with decomposition chemicals. This was not a person who lost control in a moment of passion. This was a person who had decided with considerable deliberation that killing people was an acceptable solution to a logistical problem.
The defense countered with everything available. Myers was 19 years old, barely past the age at which the Supreme Court had already ruled juvenile offenders could not be executed. He had no prior criminal record.
He had a documented history of mental illness and self-harm. The divorce, the depression, the self-mutilation were all laid before the jury as context, as mitigation, as reasons to pull back from the ultimate punishment. Most critically, the defense hammered the sentencing disparity.
The man who stabbed Justin Back 21 times, who drove a pocket knife into a human being’s body over and over until he stopped breathing, was going to spend his life in a prison cell. Their client, who never once touched the knife, who by his own account did not know the knife existed until it appeared, was the one being asked to die.
The jury deliberated and returned a guilty verdict on all counts. Then came the penalty phase. Austin Myers stood up and spoke directly to the people who would decide his fate.
He said if they chose death for him, the pain would not fall on him. It would fall on his family. His mother cried.
His brother begged. His father sat in silence and watched his son try to stay alive. The jury went back and deliberated again.
They came back with death. Judge Donald Oda II accepted their recommendation and imposed the sentence. October 16, 2014.
Austin Myers, age 19 years, 9 months and 12 days, became Ohio’s youngest death row inmate.
The Ohio Supreme Court reviewed Myers’ conviction and death sentence, issuing a unanimous 7-0 ruling on May 17, 2018. Justice Patrick DeWine wrote the majority opinion, going through each of Myers’ 18 arguments with methodical thoroughness and rejecting all of them. On the question of proportionality, whether Myers deserved death when Mosley received life, DeWine was direct.
He cited the extensive evidence of Myers’ planning and active role in the killing. He noted that Myers conceived the plot, selected the victim, constructed the murder weapon, and participated in holding Justin down while the attack occurred. He observed that Mosley had cooperated with investigators from an early stage, had taken responsibility, and had provided testimony that helped bring the case to resolution.
Myers, by contrast, had maintained a posture of deflection and blame throughout. The decision concluded, We affirm the judgments of conviction and the sentence of death.
The U. S. Supreme Court declined to take Myers’ case in January 2019.
In 2021, an appeals court ruled that the trial court had not adequately considered psychological evidence related to adolescent brain development and sent the case back for a hearing on that specific question, giving Myers’ attorneys a new avenue to pursue. A 2022 execution date of July 20 was issued by the Ohio Supreme Court but pushed back by ongoing appeal proceedings. Then the broader Ohio death row situation made everything even more uncertain.
Ohio has not executed a single person since July 2018. Governor Mike DeWine, who took office in 2019, declared that the state would not carry out any executions until it had developed a new execution protocol that could withstand legal challenge. The lethal injection drugs Ohio had relied upon had become impossible to obtain.
Pharmaceutical companies had stopped supplying them for executions, and the methods available were being challenged in court as potentially constituting cruel and unusual punishment. The governor stopped short of formally halting all executions, and Ohio has continued to issue execution warrants. There are warrants scheduled through 2029, but not one has been carried out.
Myers sits today at Ross Correctional Institution in Chillicothe, still pursuing appeals, still fighting the sentence handed down when he was 19. He is now 30 years old, having spent more than a decade on death row. The two prisons housing Myers and Mosley, Ross Correctional and London Correctional, sit across the street from one another in the same town.
The man who planned the murder and the man who carried it out can look out at essentially the same sky every morning.
Justin Back’s mother, Sandy Cates, has never stopped. She lobbied the Ohio State Legislature and saw a law passed in her son’s name, Justin’s Law, which increased penalties for murder. She created a nonprofit foundation called Justin Back’s Be a Hero, organizing a 5K run every year at Waynesville Middle School, the school where her son once sat beside lonely kids and made them feel like they were worth knowing.
She told reporters that every time a new court filing comes through, every time Myers’ legal team makes another move, she is pulled instantly back to the worst day of her life. When these things come up, she said, it puts you right back to where you were on that day. And that day never fully ends for her.
It has been going on for 11 years. Justin Back asked his killer for help, and his killer told him it would all be over soon. Sandy Cates has been waiting for it to be ever since, and it is not over.