Michael Phillips murdered a 75-year old man who was already dying of late-stage lung cancer. His motive was the classic one: money.
For the first dozen or so pages of the opinion, Justice Stewart recites the facts of the case in exhaustive detail, but my overall reaction was: "Seriously? That's all they've got on the defendant? This seems like an incredibly shaky case."
But then I read the next ten pages. At which point I got it. Yeah, I can totally see why Mr. Phillips was convicted beyond a reasonable doubt. No eyewitnesses or confession or anything like that; the victim was killed at his home, and his body wasn't discovered for several days. But the evidence against Mr. Phillips was nonetheless fairly damning.
Deliberately taking the life of another person for money seems a particularly heartless crime. Sadly, however, that's not a rare motive.
