Duane Owen was 23 and already in the Palm Beach County jail on burglary charges when detectives from Delray Beach and Boca Raton began bringing him out to talk, and he kept coming back. Over six days in June 1984, the 3rd, 6th, 7th, 8th, 18th and 21st, he sat with them on videotape, waived his rights again and again, and bargained. He would confess to what they could prove, he told them, if they could show him the proof. The passages below come from those sessions, and in them he asks what the prosecutor, Paul Moyle, might offer him and whether he will hear about his own indictment before the news does.
Karen Slattery was 14 and babysitting two children at a house in Delray Beach on the night of March 24, 1984, when he climbed through a bedroom window and stabbed her to death. Georgianna Worden, a mother, was beaten with a hammer in her bed in Boca Raton in the early hours of May 29, and her children found her as they got ready for school. He was arrested on May 30 on burglary warrants. On June 21, shown his fingerprint from the Worden house, he called it really strong evidence and confessed to both killings in the same evening.
He was convicted of Karen Slattery's murder and sentenced to death, and these excerpts are from the State's answer to that appeal. In 1990 the Supreme Court of Florida reversed that conviction, ruling that the detectives should have stopped when he said he would rather not talk about it, and he was convicted again at a retrial in 1999. The Worden conviction and death sentence stood. After decades of litigation over his mental competence, Florida executed him at Florida State Prison on June 15, 2023.
These are not the interrogations. They are 15 short passages that the Florida Attorney General's office quoted in its answer brief, No. 68,550, to argue that Owen never asked for a lawyer and knew exactly whom he was dealing with. The brief quotes more dialogue than this, but the rest is the prosecutor cross-examining a defense psychologist about another client, which is not Owen and is left out. The full transcript of the June 21 tape, as it was played to the jury, runs to 114 pages of the record on appeal, pages 2975 to 3088, and is not reproduced in the brief.
The questioners are Boca Raton and Delray Beach detectives, and the "Mark" Owen refers to is Mark Woods of the Delray Beach police. What Owen says here is bargaining, not an account of any crime, and his remark that he did "a couple more" was never tied to a charge. These are the State's chosen passages, printed to win an argument, and nothing tells us what surrounded them.
The brief is a public filing by the State of Florida, published in the Florida State University College of Law's digital collection of Florida Supreme Court briefs, and there is no private rights holder. The trial record, including all six days of videotape, is held by the Clerk of the Circuit Court in Palm Beach County and can be requested under Chapter 119 of the Florida Statutes; the record pages above can be requested from the Clerk of the Supreme Court of Florida.
The brief was scanned and its text layer was produced by a machine, which in eight of these passages spaced out every letter ("g o o v e r t h e r e") and in others ran whole phrases together ("Iadmittedto them"). In those passages we have changed only the spaces. Every letter is exactly where the text layer puts it, in the same order, and we checked this mechanically, letter by letter, for each passage we respaced. Nothing else has been corrected: "tha sums it up", "know know" and "mums the word" are as printed. Where the brief gave a record citation after a passage, it is kept.
Passage 1
A. --John Doe situations and stuff--
Q. Uh-huh.
A.--and then he would have to come back with you, like, say for instance--
Q. Well, if the attorney wants to sit down and talk with you, okay. I mean I'll go over to the attorney and I'm going to go over and tell him, you know, what you've told me so far and this and that and the other thing, and he may not want to sit and talk with you.
Passage 2
A. See, I'm saying then you could bring this up to him like when he says well he ain't telling us nothing, say maybe because he wants certain guarantees or something.
Q. Well --
A. Like Mark said, he said that like for instance, if I go in front of this Paul Moyle, I could almost call my own shots, just like you were saying.
Q. Well, no. No. What he said was -- is if we get down to that point, okay, you know, he may sit down with you. You want to control the ball game or your attorneys or both of ya's. If he -- if he, you know, wants to do anything, okay, or maybe if your attorney approaches him, okay, and sits down and discusses options on what to do, you know, where to do, okay. I -- I can't say that because I can't, you know, I can't offer you the promise that it's definitely going to happen. You're going to go over there and this is going to go over there and this is the way to do it. You know, I can't do that. Okay. That's -- that's later down the pike.
Passage 3
A. But see, I realize that. But say for instance if, you know, if I go over to talk to him like, for instance, he could say well, if this certain situation does happen and stuff, we could pass background and stuff and all this.
Q. Yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah, that's what you're going to find out. But I got to go over there first and I got to sit with him and, you know, we'll discuss our case, what we, you know, what we have up to this point pending results of the lab tests and all that stuff like that, and he may just go put it in front of the Grand Jury and go for an indictment. Okay. And then, once you're charged and everything like that, you know, then you do what you want to do. You know, you can ask to go see him or him, whether it's him or what ever other attorney or through your attorney, say, yeah, I want to sit down with this guy. That's up to you. Okay. I'm sure, you know, he may sit down and listen to you. But you --
Q. Maybe he won't, you know. Maybe he won't until he wants to. I mean but you're going to snap your fingers and he's going to come running over here because maybe he won't feel as though he has to. And he'll call the shots and he'll come to you and he'll say hey, here what I'm going to recommend or here's what I'm going for.
Passage 4
A. So when you go over there to present your case to this guy, I mean what actually is that going to do? I mean is he going to say all right. We can go --
Q. Well, we'll fill him in and he'll kick it around today. That's all. Because I got to wait on the lab results from the other side. Okay. You know, bedding and all that other jazz. We got to wait on the lab results from that. When I have all of that back, I'll just go ahead and, you know, file it or go in front of a Grand Jury, whatever, you know, drag all that stuff with me, show it to the Grand Jury and they make an indictment, or they don't make an indictment, okay. And then, you'll be charged. Okay. You'll be charged while you're right up there.
Passage 5
Cited as: (ST 399-402)
A. So, when I actually am charged, I mean I'm going to be notified, right? They're going to call me up and say come down and say hey --
Q. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Unhuh, yeah. Yeah, it's not going to be charged and you be sitting over here wondering. Oh, yeah. You'll know. You'll know.
A. Because, you know, I'd like to know before the news tells me or something, you know.
Q. Yeah. But, uh, that's what we'll do. Okay. That's where we're going. Anything else?
A. No. That was my main concern about this Paul dude.
Q. Okay.
A. I just wanted to know where he fell into this whole situation.
Q. Well, it's -- I guess he was called because he's head honcho over there, you know, and the head attorney, I think, right now. But, uh --
A. All right. I guess tha sums it up. You got to get over there anyway, right?
Q. Yeah. I got to go.
Passage 6
A. You know, see, I didn't B & E her house, you know, or wherever this house was.
Q. Okay.
A. So, really, I can't say I, know know, I did it when I didn't.
Q. Okay. Well, that's why I said to you a minute ago, you know, I know -- I know the house was burglarized or what ever you want to call it. I know some body got into the house, okay. Maybe a that's a better term.
Passage 7
Q. What other case?
A. Well, the other ones that I'm already here for, you know.
Q. Uh-huh. I know about that.
Passage 8
A. I admitted to them because I knew I did them.
Q. Uh-huh.
Passage 9
A. No. I did a couple more of them, but mums the word on them.
Q. Maybe for now.
A. As a matter of fact, I don't think I ever did. I think that's about it.
Passage 10
Q. No, they weren't.
A. Huh?
Passage 11
Q. The ones --
A. Huh?
Passage 12
Q. Okay. You don't want to talk about them?
A. About whic hone?
Passage 13
Q. The ones that you did that you didn't get caught for.
A. No reason to, no.
Passage 14
Q. Why?
A. Why should I?
Passage 15
Q. Because you want to, because you want to tell me about them. I don't know.
A. No. They -- ain't such importance anyway.