Tommy Reed Gets Life in Prison For Murder of Man He Met Through an iPhone Gay Social Networking App

Tommy Reed was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to first-degree murder.

​Tommy McKey Reed was in a Maricopa County Superior Court this morning where Judge Paul McMurdie sentenced him to life in prison for the 2010 murder of a man he met through a gay social networking app for his iPhone.

Reed pleaded guilty earlier this year to first-degree murder in the death of 54-year-old Mark G. Woodland, a man he met, as we mentioned, through a gay social networking iPhone app.

Woodland was found dead at his apartment in the 3800 block of East Greenway Road in Phoenix on April 24, 2010.

Police say Woodland's roommate returned home to the apartment the men shared about 11 p.m. on the night of the murder and noticed that the place had been ransacked.

The roommate called police, who, after searching the apartment, found Woodland's body beaten and stabbed in a downstairs bathroom.

The roommate told police that Woodland had sent him a text message at 5 p.m. saying he was going to pick up a male date. He sent a second text at about 6 p.m. to make sure the roommate had left the apartment. 

After finding his body, and his ransacked apartment, police tracked down a friend of Woodland's in California, who told them Woodland had met his "date" by using a social networking application used by gay men to meet each other.

The app uses a GPS positioning system to locate "dates" based on a person's proximity with other users.

Police were given Woodland's date's user name for the app by his friend in California, as well as a description of the man last seen with Woodland by one of his neighbors.

Three days after the murder, police tracked down a suspect whose iPhone arranged the date with Woodland and matched the description of the man given to police. That man was then-19-year-old Reed.