Every US Prisoner EXECUTED in July 2026 | Crimes, Final Meals & Last Words

One of them bought drinks all night for an 18-year-old girl who kept trying to get away from him. Then he offered her a ride to breakfast. She got in his truck. 44 years later, the only man who knew where her body was, took that secret into the execution chamber. One of them wore a badge.

 He asked a store clerk the name and age of an 11-year-old girl, put her in the back of his patrol car, and drove off. She was pulled out of a lake the next morning. Then he filed the missing person report himself and one of them ripped the phone line off a house before he knocked on the door. So when the family woke up and reached for the phone, the line was dead.

 He had been telling people in bars for [music] weeks that this was coming, but nobody stopped him. Then Florida did something it hadn’t done since 1964. It executed two of them on the exact same day. These are the executions of July 2026. their crimes, their last meals, and their last words. But first, let us know where you are watching this from.

On July 14th, 2026, after spending nearly 37 years on death row, Dennis Sohore was executed by lethal injection in Florida for the 1981 murder of an 18-year-old girl. But the night that led to his death sentence started at a New Year’s Eve party at a bar called The Banana Boat. And what Dennis did that night, he had already done before.

 He was on probation for it, [music] and then he did it once again. It was New Year’s Eve 1981 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Dennis Sohore and his brother Gary had been together since just after Christmas when Gary drove down from Michigan to visit. That evening, the two of them took Dennis’s work truck and headed to a place called the Banana Boat.

 It was a lounge on Commercial Boulevard with a tiki bar out back. By the time they got there, the place was already packed. People drinking, music going, everyone waiting to countdown to midnight. Somewhere across Fort Lauderdale, an 18-year-old named Patty Gford was getting ready to go out, too. Patty had only been in Florida for about 3 months.

She had grown up in eastern Massachusetts with three siblings who adored her and moved to Fort Lauderdale with her high school sweetheart, a young man named Johnny Vasel. She worked as an aerobics instructor. She was healthy, she was fit, and she had her whole life ahead of her. Her boyfriend had to work that night, so she made plans with her friend Delta Harville instead.

 A mutual friend tended bar at the banana boat, so that’s where they decided to go. Patty and Delta showed up and sat down at the tiki bar behind the lounge. Just two friends out on New Year’s Eve. And then Dennis noticed her. Witnesses later told investigators that Dennis couldn’t keep his eyes off Patty. He stared at her throughout the night.

 He stood too close. He tried to buy her drinks and he lavished her with compliments. Patty tried to brush him off. She wasn’t [music] interested. and by midnight she had switched from champagne to iced tea. She wasn’t [music] drunk and she was just trying to enjoy her night. At some point, someone snapped a photograph of Dennis lurking in the background behind Patty and Delta, a random picture at a party.

 But that photograph would later become the single most important piece of evidence in the entire case. As the night wore on, Delta started feeling sick. She later told investigators she believed she had been drugged. Around 2:00 a.m., Patty helped walk her to the parking lot and put her in her car to sleep it off.

Patty went back inside to settle her tab, but when she came back out, Delta was in no shape to drive. Dennis and Gary offered to take Patty to get breakfast while Delta slept. Patty said yes. She got in the truck with two men she had met just hours before, one of whom she had been trying to get away from all night, thinking they were going to grab some food, but they never took her to get food.

 What happened next came from Dennis’s own mouth. Three separate times on three separate tape recorders, Dennis told police what he did. He said that once they were alone, he asked Patty if she wanted to have. She said no. She had been saying no all night, and that should have been the end of it. But Dennis grabbed her by the hair.

Patty fought back. She screamed. She scratched at his face. And Dennis got angry. He started choking her. He squeezed until she stopped fighting, until she stopped moving. Until she stopped breathing. And when it was over, he knew in his own words that he had probably just killed her. He left her body somewhere off a dirt road.

 And then he drove home. Patty Gford’s remains were never recovered. Her family never got to bury their daughter, and her brother Bobby spent three months walking through fields and ditches looking for his little sister. But he never found her. A Broward County detective later said the only mistake she made was going out with friends and celebrating New Year’s Eve.

 But Dennis wasn’t alone that night. [music] His brother Gary had been in that truck, too. And what Gary saw would eventually put Dennis on death row. Gary told the jury that after they left the banana boat, [music] Dennis pulled over and stopped the truck. Gary heard screaming. Patty screaming for help. He jumped out, ran around to the other side, and found Dennis on top of her, pinning her hands to the ground.

 Gary picked up a rock and threw it at his brother. He yelled at him to stop. Dennis turned and looked at him, and Gary described that look to the court. He said his brother’s eyes had rolled back in his head and it looked like he was possessed by the devil. Dennis told him to get back in the truck, and Gary did.

 He got in and sat there while his brother attacked an 18-year-old girl on the side of the road. He said he was afraid of his own brother and that he never saw Patty again. A few days later, Gary went home to Michigan. He didn’t call the police. It was Delta who raised the alarm. She woke up alone in her car around 5:30 a.m. Patty was gone.

 And when investigators went through the photos from that night, they found one with Dennis in the background. They released it to a local television station. Dennis saw his own face on the evening news and he [music] panicked, but not because he felt guilty. In his own words, he was terrified that he had committed what other people would see as another crime. Not Patty, not remorse.

His first instinct was fear that he had been caught again. He fled that same day, drove to Tampa, abandoned the truck, took a bus to New Orleans, and eventually he ended up in Atlanta. For 4 and 1/2 years, Dennis Sohore was a free man. The police didn’t catch up with him until May 1986 when he was stopped in Dalb County, Georgia for suspicion of drunk driving.

Investigators flew him to Atlanta and Dennis confessed again. They brought him back to Florida, drove him to the banana boat, and he gave a second and third taped confession. But he couldn’t remember where he left Patty’s body. But the confessions weren’t even the worst of it.

 His roommate in Atlanta, a man named Paul Jones, testified that Dennis once casually told him about choking someone and dumping the body out in the countryside near a drainage pipe. Jones said Dennis told him that if he had to, he would do it again, that the murder didn’t bother him at all, and that women were, in Dennis’s words, more or less aual tool, nothing more.

 An inmate named Michael Hickeyi, who was held with Dennis at the Broward County Jail, testified that Dennis walked up to him one day and asked how to discredit a witness. They talked for a while and right before he walked away, Dennis [music] said, “Yeah, in case you’re wondering, I killed a fuck.” The jury heard all of it.

 And they convicted Dennis of kidnapping and first-degree murder. But the penalty phase is where this story takes a turn. And it started with two women the jury had never heard about. Dennis had confessed to raping two other women before the murder. The first happened in Michigan in 1979. He asked a woman for a ride home.

 Once they were alone, he choked her unconscious. When she came too, she had defecated on herself. Dennis her and then he took her to his house, allowed her to shower, and her two more times. When a Michigan detective asked Dennis about it, he described what it felt like. All I can relate it to was like an airplane jump.

 He said there was no feeling, no emotion. At that point, I wasn’t existing. No feeling, no emotion. That’s how he described raping an unconscious woman. The second time it happened in Fort Lauderdale in 1980, Dennis ambushed a 19-year-old woman in a parking lot. He choked her, threatened to stab her, and dragged her into a camper shell on the back of a truck.

 He assaulted her in every way possible, and bit her repeatedly. He became violent specifically because he was angry he had not climaxed. This was the crime Dennis was on probation for when he sat down next to Patty at the banana boat. Dennis’s own ex-wife testified that in a single year of marriage, he assaulted her at least 30 times.

 If he wanted, he got it because he would get violent if he didn’t. And then the state’s medical examiner told the jury something about how Patty died that no one in that courtroom forgot. He said choking is a slow and painful way to die. In mitigation, Dennis’s family described a childhood of violence. His father had been a boxer who beat him relentlessly.

His sister had to physically pull their father off of him. Their father would bang Dennis’s head against the wall until he slid to the floor and then keep kicking him. and his own parents admitted to the abuse on the stand, but the jury heard everything else and they recommended death by a vote of 10 to two.

Then came decades of appeals and at one point Dennis argued there was no proof Patty Gford was even dead because her body had never been found. The man who confessed three times on tape to choking her to death was now arguing there was no proof she was gone, but every appeal was denied.

 During his nearly 37 years on death row, a man from Norway became Dennis’s pen pal. He wrote a book about him called [music] Dennis, my friend on death row. In it, Dennis wrote, “I am sure many people think that we deserve to die. But I am still a sensitive person who cares about those who suffer in the world. A sensitive person who cares about those who suffer.

 The same man who called women a sexual tool. the same man who described the woman as feeling like an airplane jump. Then in the final weeks before his execution, Dennis’s attorneys argued that lethal injection could cause a sensation that feels like drowning. They said Dennis would prefer to die by firing squad instead.

 The man who strangled an 18-year-old girl to death with his bare hands was worried that his own death might be painful. But the Florida Supreme Court called the argument meritless. Dennis also sent a letter to Patty’s family through prison staff expressing what he called his remorse and sorrow for the pain he had caused.

 44 years later, his spiritual adviser said Dennis wanted people to know that if he could help locate Patty’s body, he would, that he was simply too drunk to remember where he left her. Patty’s sister, Marilyn, had an answer for that. It’s bad enough what he did to her, she said. But he’s had all this time to repent, to think about what he did, so why not give her back? Then on July 14th, 2026, Dennis’s final day came.

 He woke up at 4:48 in the morning and met with one visitor and a spiritual adviser during the day. He was offered a last meal, but he declined. Later that day, he was escorted to the execution chamber. At 6 PM, the curtain to the witness room went up. Dennis was already strapped to the gurnie with an IV in his arm.

 The warden asked if he had any last words, and he did. He apologized several times to the Gford family. He said he was deeply sorry for his actions. He thanked his own loved ones for their support. And then he commended his spirit to Jesus Christ. The drugs began flowing at 6:03 p.m. Dennis underwent about a minute of heavy breathing followed by a few seconds of sputtering, then complete stillness.

 The warden looked into his eyes, shook his shoulders, and called his name, but there was no response. Dennis Sulture was pronounced dead at 6:16 p.m. He was 74 years old. The second execution of the month came on July 28th. But this one almost didn’t happen at all because back in March, just 5 days before this man was scheduled to die, the courts stopped everything.

 He had a chance to prove his innocence with DNA and he waited 22 years to take it. In his final days, he wrote from Death Watch that he missed music. That being alone was draining. He wrote that Florida’s clemency system has become a joke and that none of it seems to matter when it comes to sparing a life on death row. Here’s what he didn’t write about, though.

 On May 11th, 1987, he asked a store clerk the name and age of an 11-year-old girl, put her in his patrol car, and drove into the night. She was found the next morning in a lake less than a mile away, strangled, and drowned. And that girl may not have been his only victim. Investigators later linked James to two other unsolved murders.

 This is what happened. Terresa McCabe was an 11-year-old fifth grader at Mascot Elementary. On the evening of May 11th, 1987, at around 1000 p.m., she told her mother she needed a pencil to finish her homework. Her mother said no. She didn’t want her to leave the house that late, but Teresa said, “Mom, I won’t take but 5 minutes.

” So her mother let her go. She walked to a convenience store near her home. Minutes later, she left the store with a 16-year-old boy who had been doing laundry next door. The two walked over to the store’s dumpster and talked for about 20 minutes. That’s when James Ducket pulled up in his patrol car. James was 29 years old and just 7 months into his career as a police officer.

 He was the only cop on duty that night, working a 7:00 p.m. to 700 a.m. shift. The entire town of Mascati was his responsibility and his alone. James went inside the store first and asked the clerk about the girl. What’s her name? How old is she? The clerk told him Teresa was between 10 and 13 years old.

 James said he was going to check on her, then walked outside toward the dumpster. According to James’s own testimony, he questioned the children and told Teresa to go home. >> I said, “Listen,” I said, “It’s getting close to 10:30.” I said, “I want you to go straight home.” >> He said he reminded Teresa about the 10:30 p.m. curfew for minors.

 But when the boy’s uncle arrived at the scene, James and Teresa were still standing near the patrol car. James sent the uncle and the boy away. And once they were gone, he placed Teresa in the passenger seat of his patrol car, shut the [music] door, walked around to the driver’s side, and drove away with her. The uncle also testified that he never saw Teresa touch the hood of the patrol car. We’ll come back to that later.

 At around 11 p.m., Teresa’s mother walked to the convenience store looking for her daughter. The clerk told her that Officer James may have taken Teresa to the police station. Teresa’s mother and her sister spent the next hour driving around Mascotti. They didn’t see a single police car, so they drove to the Mascot police station, but nobody was there.

 An 11-year-old girl was somewhere in the dark, and the only officer on duty was nowhere to be found. So, they drove to the nearby Groveland police station and reported Teresa missing. Teresa’s mother then returned to the mascot station and waited. 15 to 20 minutes passed before James finally showed up. And when he did, he told her he had spoken with Teresa at the store, that she had been in his patrol car, and that he had told her to go home.

Teresa’s mother filed a missing person report with James himself. After taking the report, James made a missing person flyer, but then things started to feel off. He brought the flyer to the store only to tell the clerk not to post it, claiming it wasn’t a good picture. He said he should bring a better one, but he never came back.

 A recording of James’ radio traffic that night revealed something troubling. Between 10:50 p.m. and 12:10 a.m., there were no transmissions at all. Over an hour of complete silence during the exact window, Teresa disappeared. But it gets worse. A clerk at another store later testified that while police usually drove by every 45 minutes to an hour, Jame

s had come by at 9:30 p.m. and didn’t return until he brought the flyer later that evening. He was supposed to be out on patrol. Where was he? The next morning, a fisherman made a grim discovery at Night Lake, less than a mile from the convenience store. At first, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but when he alerted authorities, the police chief quickly confirmed it.

It was Theresa. The search was over. The medical examiner testified that Teresa had been sexually assaulted while she was still alive, then strangled and drowned. Terresa Mcabe was just 11 years old. She had never engaged in any sexual activity before that night. The investigation zeroed in on James immediately.

 He was the last person seen with Teresa. He was the only officer on patrol that night, and the circumstantial evidence kept piling up. Tire tracks at the murder scene matched a rare set of snow tires that existed on only two cars in the entire county, [music] and both of them were mascot police cars. Then there were the fingerprints. Both James and Teresa’s prints were found on the hood of his patrol car.

 Her print showed she had been sitting backwards on the hood and had scooted up the car. >> All identified with Teresa Mackey. She goes here, here, here, and keeps moving up. And then finally, there’s one completely turned sideways in this position here. >> But James kept denying it. >> Sir, she had not been on the hood of my car.

 Nobody was sitting down at any time on the hood of my car. Are you telling us that’s not her fingerprints? >> Like I said, she was not sitting on my vehicle. >> Meanwhile, blood was found on Teresa’s underwear and was discovered on her jeans, but none of it was found in or around James’ patrol car. And then the most controversial piece of evidence, a single pubic hair found inside Teresa’s underwear.

 FBI special agent Michael Malone concluded there was a high degree of probability that the hair belonged to James. We’ll come back to Agent Malone because years later what investigators discovered about him would call this entire piece of evidence into question. Before his arrest, James gave a statement denying he drove to the lake that night.

 He said Teresa was never on the hood of his patrol car. He claimed he stopped for coffee after the girl went home. But the prosecution wasn’t done. James was supposed to protect the people of Mascotti, Florida. That was his job. That was the oath. But three young women came forward to testify about what he actually did with that badge while he was on duty as a police officer.

 All three were petite, just like Teresa. One testified that in early 1987, James had picked her up while she was looking for her boyfriend and while in the patrol car placed his hand on her shoulder and [music] tried to kiss her. Another described something that happened on May 1st, 1987, just 10 days before Teresa was murdered.

 She was walking alone along the highway when a patrol car pulled up beside her. James offered her a ride and she got in. She probably thought, “Well, he’s a police officer. He’ll take me home.” But instead of taking her where she needed to go, he drove her to an orange grove miles from anyone who could hear her. Out there, alone in the dark with a uniformed officer.

 He placed his hand on her breast and tried to kiss her. A third woman testified that she had met James at remote locations on multiple occasions while he was on patrol. Each time she performed oral on him. Each time he was on duty in uniform in the patrol car that was supposed to be protecting the streets of Mascotti. The prosecution revealed that this wasn’t a one-time lapse.

 This was how James operated. He used the badge. He used the uniform and he used the patrol car, the same car Teresa was last seen getting into. He found women and girls who were alone, drove them somewhere isolated, and did whatever he wanted. The only difference with Teresa is that she didn’t come back. James was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.

 He was suspended from the police force on June 16th, 1987 and fired 3 days later. His career as a police officer had lasted exactly 7 months. On May 10th, 1988, it took the jury less than 90 minutes to find James guilty of battery and firstdegree murder. And by a vote of 8 to4, they recommended the death penalty. Circuit Judge Jerry Lockett sentenced [music] James to death by electric chair for the murder and to life in prison with no parole for 25 years for theual battery.

Now remember FBI agent Michael Malone. Years after the trial, the Department of Justice investigated Malone for providing false testimonies in multiple cases. Government reports described him as one of the most problematic analysts in the FBI laboratory. And that was not it.

 A retired detective, a former police chief, and the mayor of Mascot all publicly said they believed James was innocent. But then that retired detective kept digging. And what Marshall Frank found changed his mind entirely. On May 7th, 1986, an unidentified woman was found dead in a water- fil pit near Lakeland, Florida. She was last seen getting into a dark blue car.

 At the time, James owned a royal blue Buick Regal. Then, on September 19th, 1987, 4 months after Teresa’s murder, 14-year-old Jennifer Weldon disappeared after leaving a carnival near Lakeland 3 days before her 15th birthday. Her body was found two weeks later in a rural part of Pulk County. By then, James had been fired from the police force and was working night shifts at a phosphate mine.

 He drove the same route to work around the area where Jennifer’s body was found. Gasoline receipts placed James near the scene, and he had arrived for work 2 hours late, disheveled. And then there was this. Jennifer had been carrying a green shopping bag and a stuffed toy when she disappeared. Later, James’ wife told investigators that her husband brought home a lime green shopping bag with a stuffed toy inside for their children.

In 2003, Pulk County authorities announced they intended to charge James with Jennifer Weldon’s murder if his death sentence was ever overturned. But those charges were never filed. Marshall Frank, the detective who had once fought to free James, reversed course completely. He concluded James was guilty of killing Terresa McCabe and Jennifer Weldon.

One thing was clear, children disappeared around the ducket name, Terresa Mabe, possibly Jennifer Weldon. And then years later, another child vanished, this time from inside the family itself. James had a son named Joshua who was just three years old when his father was sent to death row. Joshua grew up, married, and had a little boy named Trenton.

 On August 27th, 2006, 2-year-old Trenton vanished from his bedroom in Leburg, Florida. His mother, Melinda, claimed someone cut through the window screen, but investigators found Trenton’s toys and sonogram photos in a dumpster at the apartment complex. Melinda refused a polygraph and she failed a voice stress test. And nobody besides Melinda had seen Trenton alive since the day before she reported him missing.

Two weeks later, CNN’s Nancy Grace grilled Melinda on live television. The next day, before the interview even aired, 21-year-old Melinda her own life. Trenton Ducket has never been found. He would be 21 years old today. From his cell on death row, James kept photos of his grandson pinned to the wall.

 Investigators questioned him about the disappearance, but they found no connection. During his 38 years on death row, James filed appeal after appeal, but every single one was denied. The courts consistently ruled that even if the hair evidence was questionable, the tire tracks, the fingerprints, the radio silence, and the eyewitness testimony all pointed to one person.

On February 27th, 2026, Florida Governor Ronda Santis [music] signed James’s death warrant, the fifth death warrant he signed that year. In a piece he wrote from Death Watch, James described the moment the warrant arrived. He told friends on his wing that if a transport van came through the back gate, it would be for him.

 And at approximately 5:10 p.m., he watched two vans pull through the gate from his cell. Footsteps came down the hallway. The warden with several officers stopped at his cell. It’s time. The governor has signed your warrant. He was moved to a cell on death watch where an officer logged everything he did 24 hours a day. And there he started writing about what he was going through.

 James wrote that he missed emailing. Messages from family and friends came through the prison system, printed out and brought to his cell. James wrote that he missed music, that the silence was constant, that being alone like this was draining. He wrote that Florida’s clemency system has become a joke. He said that no matter how a person changes through education, faith, or simply growing older, none of it seems to matter.

 He wrote, “I am not now who I was then, and that he waited, never knowing if or when my time would come until it did.” Terresa McCabe’s mother didn’t get letters from her daughter. She got a body pulled from a lake, but James missed his music. James’ execution was scheduled for March 31st, 2026 at 6:00 p.m. at Florida State Prison.

 And suddenly, after 22 years of silence, James wanted that DNA test. He had refused it in 2004. But now, with a death warrant signed, he wanted it. 5 days before his execution, the Florida Supreme Court stopped everything. But the DNA results came back inconclusive. They did not prove he was innocent. So the state asked the court to lift the stay.

 But six of the seven justices said no. His defense team argued that the state had destroyed the best evidence by insisting on a lab that couldn’t perform the most advanced testing. But then again, James had 22 years to pick any lab he wanted, and he chose to do nothing. The death warrant expired, and on April 2nd, the court ordered a deeper analysis of the DNA data.

 The defense wanted access to the raw statistics, but the state wanted to move forward. For 3 months, the case sat in legal limbo. Then on July 8th, 2026, the Florida Supreme Court lifted the stay. The DNA testing had resolved nothing. And 6 days later, Governor DeSantis signed a new death warrant. James Duckett was scheduled to be executed on July 28th, 2026 at noon.

 On the night before his execution, James met with four members of his family for a final visit. He woke the next morning at 4:45 a.m. For his last meal, he had eggs, grits, bacon, biscuits, and chocolate milk. Then he met with a spiritual adviser. Just before noon, he was taken to the execution chamber. When asked if he had any final words, James said, “No, sir.

No, sorry, no explanation.” At 100 p.m. the drugs began to flow. About 4 minutes later, the warden shook him and called his name. There was no response. James Aaron Duckett was pronounced dead at 119 p.m. He was 68 years old. He had spent 38 years on death row. Later that day, Florida executed another man.

 This was the first time Florida had carried out two executions on the same day since 1964. That evening, 80-year-old Dominic Oiconei was executed at Florida State Prison. He had spent nearly 40 years on death row, costing Florida taxpayers an estimated $850,000 before the state finally carried out his sentence.

 And that doesn’t even include the cost of his appeals. But the reason he ended up there, a broken engagement, a secret abortion, and a man who told bartenders, friends, and anyone who would listen exactly who he was going to kill and how he was going to do it for weeks, and nobody called the police, not once. It was just after 3:00 in the morning on June 10th, 1986 in a quiet subdivision in Holiday, Florida.

 Anita Gered was asleep in her bedroom at her parents house. She lived there with her two children and her parents, Raymond and Martha Artsner. A knock on the sliding glass door woke her up. It was Dominic, her ex- fiance. He wanted to talk, wanted to work things out, but she told him there was nothing left to discuss, and warned him she would call the sheriff if he didn’t leave. He left.

 He got in his car and drove home. But that night didn’t come out of nowhere. In September of 1985, Anita Gered broke off her engagement to Dominic Okicon. She later testified that the reason was his temper. She described an incident where she locked herself in a bedroom and Dominic kicked the door down holding a knife.

 “There had been other moments, too,” she said, both verbal and physical, directed at her and at her children. They had been together since 1982. They had lived together for about 6 months, blending her two kids with his 5-year-old son. They had even set a wedding date for November 30th. But Anita had seen enough. Then, a month after the breakup, something happened that should have changed everything.

Anita was at Dominic’s house when she tried to leave. He pulled a pistol, pointed it at her, and fired a round into the door jam right next to her head. Then he tried to hand her the gun and begged her to shoot him. She refused. After that, Dominic didn’t go away. He sent flowers to her workplace every single day. He called constantly.

 He showed up at her parents’ house in the middle of the night and knocked on her bedroom window roughly 20 separate times over the following months. And in a twist that makes this whole story harder to untangle, Anita sometimes let him in. She visited his house, too, more than once.

 The relationship that was supposed to be over kept pulling them both back. Dominic had been a heavy drinker for more than a decade. Bartenders said he would walk in when the bar opened at 7:00 in the morning and drink 10 to 15 vodka cocktails before lunch, 7 days a week. And after the breakup, it got even worse. Then in the middle of May 1986, 3 weeks before the murders, Anita came to see him.

 She told him she had had an abortion, and she would not tell him whether it was his child. Around the same time, she mentioned she had met someone new. Whatever was keeping Dominic together stopped keeping him together. He told a bartender he was going to hire a lawyer and sue Anita for having the abortion.

 He told another bartender he couldn’t stand to look at children anymore because it reminded him of the one that never existed. A friend named Joanne Caro stopped by his house one day and found him on the floor crying, shaking, and vomiting. He told her he had nothing left to live for. Over the phone in the days before the murders, he kept telling Joanne he was going to himself.

 She described him as out of his mind and totally upset. But Dominic wasn’t just talking about hurting himself. A bartender named Deborah Newell testified that during this same stretch, Dominic told her he felt like shooting Anita and her kids and then shooting himself. But then he said he wouldn’t do it because of his young son. He could think clearly enough to protect his own child from losing a father, just not clearly enough to stop what came next.

 Because after that, the threats got worse and they got specific. He told people at the bar he wanted to shoot Anita’s father, her mother, and her kids and force Anita to watch all of it. He said he would save her for last. Anita herself later testified that Dominic had told her on more than one occasion that he planned to shoot her family, starting at the kneecaps and working his way up with her forced to witness every single shot.

 He said it to her face in bars to friends over and over for weeks. The Sunday before the murders, the owner of shooters, a man named William Anderson, spotted a gun tucked into Dominic’s waistband and told him to take it outside. Dominic had already told William, referring to Anita’s parents, “Maybe I should just blow them away.

” William told him to knock off the crazy talk, and that was it. The bar owner told him to knock it off. Nobody picked up a phone. Nobody drove to the Artsner house and warned a 63-year-old man and his 60-year-old wife that someone had been describing their murders in public for weeks. The threats just floated in the air of those Pasco County bars while the man making them kept drinking and kept carrying a gun.

On the night of June 10th, 1986, Dominic was at shooters until 2:30 in the morning. He asked the bartender whether he should go over to Anita’s place. And when he left, it seemed like he had decided against it. He hadn’t. He drove to the Artser house and knocked on Anita’s sliding glass door at 3:00 a.m. She sent him away.

 [music] He drove home, but a few minutes later, the phone rang. It was Anita. According to what Dominic later told psychiatrists, she said, “You [ __ ] What do you come over here for?” And she hung up. Dominic sat in that house for nearly an hour. He had been drinking all night and all day before that and every day for the past decade.

 But during that hour, he didn’t pass out and he didn’t go to sleep. He picked up a loaded gun, got back in his 1975 Corvette, and drove back to the Artsner house. When he got there, he went to the side of the building where the telephone junction box was mounted to the wall. He ripped it off and pulled the wires out. Then he started pounding on Anita’s glass door again.

 When she didn’t respond, he moved to her daughter’s window. Meanwhile, Anita woke her father. 63-year-old Raymond Artsner went to the kitchen phone and picked it up to call the sheriff. But the line was dead. So Raymond did what fathers do. He walked into the garage, raised the overhead door, and went out to handle it himself. Anita followed him onto the driveway.

She could see Dominic coming toward them in the dark. He was staggering. She could smell the alcohol from where she stood. Raymond was furious. He grabbed a broomstick, stood his ground, and screamed at Dominic to get off his property. Dominic didn’t argue back. He just kept repeating, “Can we talk about this?” to Anita as if the gun in his hand wasn’t there.

 A neighbor woken up by the noise heard a man yelling, “Get the out of here and don’t ever come back here.” And then he heard a gunshot. Anita watched Dominic raise his right hand toward her father’s face. She didn’t even realize he was holding a gun until she saw the muzzle flash. Raymond collapsed onto the driveway. Anita turned and ran back through the garage.

 She locked the door that led into the house, but Dominic was right behind her. He smashed the glass with his fist, and reached through to turn the lock. Anita could hear him coming through as she scrambled down the hallway. She grabbed her daughter, made it through the front door, and ran across the lawn to a neighbor’s house.

 Her mother, Martha, did not make it out. As Anita ran, she heard more gunshots coming from inside the house. When Pasco County deputies arrived around 4:00 a.m., Raymond was lying on the driveway with a single gunshot wound to the chest. He was still alive. He looked up at the deputy and said, “Dom shot me.” Those were among his last words.

 He died at the hospital shortly after. Inside the house, deputies found Martha’s body just past the door that led from the garage into the kitchen hallway. She had not made it more than a few steps. She had been shot four times. Three of those bullets went into her chest and one of them hit her heart. The medical examiner would later describe that wound as rapidly fatal.

Dominic’s Corvette was found five houses away with smoke rising from under the hood. A tracking dog picked up his scent and followed it 3/4 of a mile along a set of railroad tracks where deputies found him in the dark with his hair a mess and his clothes disheveled, looking half asleep. At trial in September 1987, Dominic’s lawyers did not argue that he hadn’t done it.

 They argued that he hadn’t planned it. They brought in psychiatrists who described his actions as hot-blooded, deranged, and psychotic rather than calculated. and diagnosed a major depression so severe it qualified as an extreme mental disturbance, but the state’s psychiatrist saw it differently. He testified that Dominic was not psychotic that night and that his judgment had not been substantially impaired.

As for Dominic himself, he told the doctors that shooting Raymon was an impulsive reaction to being struck with the broomstick. and Martha. He said shooting her was a reaction to her screaming when he came through the door. So, here is what the jury had to weigh. A man who named a specific family, who described the exact way he would kill them, who carried a loaded gun for days, who drove to their house in the middle of the night, who ripped the phone line off the wall so nobody could call for help, and who then [music]

walked up the driveway with that gun in his hand. The defense called that a spontaneous breakdown, but the jury did not agree. They convicted him on both counts of firstdegree murder. When it came time for sentencing, they recommended death by a vote of 7 to five. Five jurors voted to spare his life, but the judge followed the majority.

 For Martha’s murder, the sentence was death. and for Raymond’s life in prison. And Dominic spent the next four decades on death row fighting that sentence. He filed direct appeals, habious petitions, and a claim that his own lawyers had failed him. Every single one of those claims worked its way through the courts, and every single one was rejected.

 His lawyer’s final argument was that executing an 80-year-old man constituted cruel and unusual punishment, that the state of Florida should not put a man that old on a gurnie and inject him with lethal chemicals. But the Florida Supreme Court rejected that, too. Pasco County Sheriff Chris Noco put it more directly. He wasn’t too old or too frail when he murdered two people, and he killed them in cold blood.

 The sheriff said, “If the issue is he’s too old, then maybe the issue is it took too long to execute him.” On July 28th, 2026, Governor Dantis’ 12th death warrant of the year was carried out. On his final day, Dominic woke up at 4:45 in the morning. He had no visitors and spent his remaining hours with a spiritual adviser.

 For his last meal, he requested eggplant, parmesan, salad, cornbread, and a soda. In the afternoon, he was escorted to the execution chamber at Florida State Prison. At 6:00 p.m., the window shade inside the execution chamber rose. Dominic was strapped to a gurnie. 27 witnesses watched from behind the glass. A spiritual adviser stood at his side, clutching a rosary, praying quietly.

Dominic apologized to the victims for the hurt he had caused them. He thanked his attorneys. “I love their friendship,” he said. and then his final words. I know it don’t mean much, but I’m sorry, he said. I never meant to do what I did. He closed his eyes within a minute. The warden stepped forward, shook him, and shouted his name, but there was no response.

 It took 10 minutes. He was pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m. Afterward, as rain began to pour and thunder rolled outside the prison, officials read a statement from the Artsner family. They spoke of 40 years of sleepless nights, missed birthdays, and conversations they never got to have. The execution they wrote doesn’t erase the pain, but it closes a chapter.

Dominic Okakone was 80 years old. He became the oldest person executed in the state of Florida in modern history. This concludes all executions carried out in July 2026. Which of these cases is still sitting in your head right now? Let us know in the comments and subscribe because next month we’ll be right back here with every execution carried out in August.