A child of New York City, born in 1955, Rutrell was 15 years old when he joined accomplice L.L. Thompson, 20, in a five-week murder tour of Dixie. Driven by racism and a thirst for "adventure," the black gunmen shot and wounded three white college students in Durham, North Carolina, on April 15, 1970, rolling on from there to murder another Caucasian, J.J. Bowles, at Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on May 3. On May 14, in Boca Raton, they commandeered a car with two white co-eds on the campus of Florida Atlantic University, shooting both victims to death and dumping their corpses in some nearby woods. Six days later, in Hardeeville, South Carolina, they murdered the white owner of a roadside vegetable stand, wounding his clerk before the young man returned fire, killing Thompson on the spot. A police roadblock stopped the fugitive vehicle forty miles north of the crime scene , and Martin was arrested, along with another black New Yorker, 17-year-old Ben Chaney, Jr. Both were charged with various slayings in the crime spree, and Chaney was convicted of the Nardeeville murder on November 24, despite claims he was "mentally disturbed" by his brother's death, six years earlier, at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. Rutrell was convicted of murder in South Carolina and sentenced to prison, with trials pending on other felony charges in North Carolina and Florida.