Brian Bliss Travis had been back on the streets less than eight months before the four murders last week in Mena and Hatfield he confessed to last week.
Inside Fort Smith obtained that information, despite the Arkansas Department of Corrections refusing to provide details on former sentences and paroles for Travis, citing “inmate privilege.”
A spokesman fr ADC said on Tuesday that inmate information on past convictions is available when an individual is in prison, but not they have once been released.
A written request for parole information on Travis has also been submitted to the Arkansas Parole Board but a spokesman for that entity said on Tuesday that information is only available to the courts, law enforcement and the former inmate’s attorney.
Travis was paroled in August of 2016 after having served six years and one month for his July 2010 conviction for four counts of being a person (felon) in possession of firearms, residential burglary and theft of property charges.
He was sentenced to 540 months on the firearms charges and 360 months each on the burglary and theft convictions, all imposed consecutively.
Facing 1,260 months in prison for those crimes alone, and without parole, Travis would have been a free man no sooner that August 2031.
He confessed over the weekend to taking the lives of Bethany Jo Wester, Acelynn Wester, Reilly Scarbrough and Steven J. Payne last week.
Travis, who has a long and checkered criminal past was a familiar character to law enforcement officials in the Polk Couty area.
With a record that started when he was 19, Travis has been found guilty of or pleaded guilty to multiple counts of felony breaking and entering, commercial burglary, burglary and forgery, misdemeanor theft of property charges and a myriad of “unclassified” offenses in nine different court appearances encompassing 19 separate convictions.
Some of the court records are not completely clear on how many of the sentences included consecutive terms and concurrent terms, but Travis had been given 1,828 months of imposed sentences, 698 months of sentences that had their imposition suspended and at least 84 months of probation since his first conviction in 1998.
Sentencing for all of the crimes Travis committed since 1998 was handed down in the Eighteenth West Circuit Court, Division 1 in Polk County.
According to court records all sentencing prior to 2003 would have been handled by retired judge Gayle Ford.
J.D. Looney was the judge for the court until current judge Jerry Ryan took over the bench in 2015.