Suspicion quickly fell upon Coleman for McCoy's murder, given his criminal record, and after it was discovered that he had reported for work that day but had left after his shift was dismissed for the evening.

Coleman was unable to provide a clear alibi for his whereabouts during the time frame of the crime and as the investigation continued, he was subsequently arrested and brought to trial.

After his conviction, Coleman would become known nationally and internationally to death penalty opponents, who seized upon his claims of injustice by the legal system and brought considerable media attention to the case.

Despite multiple appeals and attempts to win a new trial, his sentence was carried out in 1992 amid a storm of national and international media attention and protests.

[2] In January 2006, Virginia Governor Mark Warner announced that testing of DNA evidence had conclusively proven that Coleman was actually guilty of the crime.

On April 7, 1977, Coleman knocked on the door to Brenda Rife's home in Grundy and asked for a glass of water, after falsely claiming to be helping the cleanup crews aiding the recovery from catastrophic flooding three days prior.

[3] In January 1981, Coleman allegedly exposed himself and masturbated in front of two librarians, Patricia Hatfield and Jean Gilbert, at a public library.

After showing a police officer the sketch, he suggested that the perpetrator might've been Coleman and encouraged her to check a high school yearbook to see if the faces match.

Her sister's husband, Roger Coleman, had access to the house and was quickly considered a suspect due to his prior conviction.

[6] Coleman filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the Circuit Court for Buchanan County, Virginia, raising several federal constitutional claims for the first time.

[10] Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder received 13,000 calls and letters about Coleman from around the world, nearly all in favor of clemency.

He shared his final meal with James McCloskey, executive director of Centurion Ministries, a group that had been working to prove Coleman's innocence.

)[11]In 1998, Chicago lawyer John C. Tucker published May God Have Mercy (ISBN 0-385-33294-7), detailing his efforts to save Coleman from execution.

Centurion Ministries and four newspapers, including the Washington Post, sought to have DNA evidence from the case re-examined in 2000.

That year was the first instance of a court ordering DNA testing of a man who had been executed for rape and murder: Ellis Wayne Felker in Georgia.

[2] On January 5, 2006, Warner ordered the retesting of Coleman's DNA evidence, which was sent to the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto, Canada.

Death penalty supporters were able to argue that Coleman's case showed that the criminal justice system was functioning in having guilty people convicted and executed, which severely dampened moves to abolish capital punishment.