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One of two men serving life sentences for the 1983 murders of five people abducted from a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Kilgore has died.

A report from the Texas Attorney General’s Office shows Darnell Hartsfield, 61, died in May from a “massive hemorrhagic stroke.”

Hartsfield was serving his sentence in the Mark W. Michael Unit in Tennessee Colony. He was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison in September 2008.

Hartsfield was scheduled for a parole hearing this month.

His cousin, Romeo Pinkerton, 64, pleaded guilty and was convicted in 2007. He is in the James V. Allred Unit in Wichita Falls.

Both were convicted of abducting Mary Tyler, 37; Opie Ann Hughes, 39; Joey Johnson, 20; David Maxwell, 20; and Monte Landers, 19; from the Kentucky Fried Chicken, driving them to a remote oil field road and shooting them to death.

The Sept. 23, 1983, murders went unsolved for decades. However, DNA testing in 2001 from blood evidence on a napkin and box lid pointed at Hartsfield and Pinkerton.

Authorities have said they believe a third suspect was involved, but that person has never been identified.

“There’s a whole lot of people who still think other people are responsible, but this is the only place the evidence leads, is to Pinkerton and Hartsfield,” Rusk County District Attorney Micheal Jimerson said in 2019.