Abron Scott was 18 in the summer and fall of 1983, a West Tampa youth who could barely read, when three people died in the Tampa Bay area over a little more than three months. Linda Lansen, 41, died in Tampa in July. Barbara Grams, 19, died in Tampa in August. Carlos Orellana, 33, died in Oldsmar, in neighboring Pinellas County, on October 22. Scott and his older companion, Amos Robinson, were arrested within days of the last death, and a jury convicted Scott of the first-degree murder, robbery and kidnapping of Orellana. He was sentenced to death. The Supreme Court of Florida later replaced that sentence with life.
For almost forty years no one connected him with the two Tampa women. Another man, Robert DuBoise, was convicted of the Grams murder in 1985 and spent 37 years in custody before prosecutors and the Innocence Project established that he had been wrongly convicted. The same review led investigators to Scott and Robinson. In August 2022 a Hillsborough County grand jury indicted both men for the murders of Grams and Lansen. On March 20, 2024, Scott pleaded guilty to what the State Attorney's Office called "the 1983 rapes and murders" of the two women and received two further life sentences, to run consecutively with the one he was already serving. Robinson pleaded not guilty and has not been tried for those deaths.
Scott was born around 1965. He was 57 when the indictments were announced in August 2022, and nearly two years younger than Robinson. He grew up in West Tampa. When he was about 13 he reconnected with his father, a pastor in Cocoa, on Florida's Atlantic coast, and spent part of his adolescence there. He wrestled at Cocoa High School and left before graduating.
His intellectual limits were part of every later courtroom discussion of his life. His IQ was estimated in the 50s or 60s, and relatives said he could not read a job application. He drifted back to the Gulf coast and moved in with an older sister in Oldsmar, a small city at the top of Tampa Bay, where he picked up odd jobs.
In July 1981 he was arrested and held first in a juvenile facility and then in an adult jail. It was there, in both places, that he met Amos Robinson, who was serving time in a 1981 case of his own and went on to spend two years in prison for it. By 1983 both men were back in the Tampa area.
At Scott's trial for the Orellana murder, his father tried to explain the young man he knew. "Mostly he just wanted to be accepted, wanted to be wanted again," he told the court. Scott's lawyer described his client as "a child in a man's body." Psychologists who examined the two co-defendants each called the man in front of them "a follower."
Linda Lansen was 41, divorced and the mother of a seven-year-old daughter. She lived in Tampa with her niece, who was also her closest friend, and who remembered her as "warm and wonderful." She died on the night of July 10 to 11, 1983.
The case went unsolved for decades, and her daughter grew up without knowing who had taken her mother.
Barbara Grams was 19. She had moved out on her own about two years earlier. Andrew Warren, the Hillsborough County state attorney who would later reopen her case, described her as a friendly, outgoing teenager. She died in Tampa on the night of August 18 to 19, 1983, five weeks after Linda Lansen.
Her death became the more public of the two cases, because the police soon charged a young man with it. That man was not Abron Scott, and the error at the center of the Grams prosecution shaped everything that later happened in his own case.
Carlos Orellana was 33 and spoke five languages. He died in Oldsmar on October 22, 1983.
Scott and Robinson were arrested in October 1983. Both were charged with Orellana's murder, and both were convicted. In Scott's case the jury returned verdicts of first-degree murder, robbery and kidnapping.
Decades later, Scott tried to describe his part in Orellana's death. "I can't remember it all," he said. "But I know I was involved." Asked why, he answered: "Don't ask me, ma'am. I don't know."
Under Florida law at the time, a capital jury gave an advisory recommendation on sentence, and the trial judge made the final decision. In Scott's case the jury recommended death, and Circuit Judge Susan Schaeffer imposed it. Robinson, tried for the same murder, also received a death sentence.
The two cases then took different paths through the Supreme Court of Florida. On April 10, 1986, the court upheld Robinson's first-degree murder conviction but set aside his death sentence and sent the case back for a new sentencing hearing before a jury; rehearing was denied on May 29, 1986. At that new hearing a jury recommended life, and Robinson was resentenced to life.
Scott's direct appeal went the other way. In Scott v. State, decided in 1986, the court affirmed both his conviction and his death sentence. He was now under sentence of death for a crime in which his older co-defendant faced only life.
Scott's lawyers returned to the court under Florida Rule of Criminal Procedure 3.850, the rule that allows a prisoner to challenge a conviction or sentence after the direct appeal is over. The question was whether a change in a co-defendant's sentence, made after Scott's own appeal had ended, could reopen his.
On July 23, 1992, the Supreme Court of Florida answered yes. In Scott v. Dugger, the court held in an unsigned opinion that "the death sentence of one codefendant is subject to collateral review under rule 3.850" when an equally culpable codefendant later receives a life sentence. It vacated Scott's death sentence and sent the case back for the imposition of life without eligibility for parole for 25 years. It denied the other claims in his motion and his petition for habeas corpus. Rehearing was denied on September 24, 1992.
The majority quoted the trial judge herself. "I would have sentenced Mr. Scott to life despite the jury's recommendation," Judge Schaeffer said.
Chief Justice Barkett and Justices McDonald, Shaw, Kogan and Harding joined the opinion. Justice Overton agreed that Scott deserved relief but not with the remedy. "I would find that Scott is entitled to a new sentencing hearing," he wrote. Justice Grimes dissented in full. "The majority opinion is contrary to existing case law and any reasonable definition of finality," he wrote, and he rejected the premise that the two men stood on equal footing: "they were not equally culpable in the commission of the murder."
Scott's death sentence was replaced with life. In the decades that followed he remained in Florida's prison system, and the two Tampa deaths of 1983 were not connected to him.
Tampa police charged Robert DuBoise, then 18, with the Grams murder. On March 7, 1985, a Hillsborough County jury convicted him of capital murder and attempted sexual battery. The case against him rested on expert testimony and on the word of a jail informant. The jury recommended life. Circuit Judge Harry Lee Coe III overrode the recommendation and sentenced DuBoise to death. The sentence was later reduced to life.
In 2018, under Warren, the Hillsborough County State Attorney's Office became one of the first in Florida to set up a Conviction Review Unit, a team that reexamines old convictions in partnership with outside investigators. The unit, led by attorney Teresa Hall, took up DuBoise's case with the Innocence Project.
Reviewing the Grams file, the unit returned to evidence preserved since 1983. That evidence excluded DuBoise, and experts concluded that the testimony on which his trial had turned was wrong. In August 2020 his sentence was reduced to time served, and he was freed from a Florida state prison in the last week of that month.
On September 14, 2020, Hillsborough County Circuit Judge Christopher Nash granted the motion to vacate. He ordered DuBoise's convictions voided and his civil rights restored, and the charges were dismissed. The judge also removed DuBoise, by then 55, from the state's sex offender registry. "This court has failed you for 37 years," Nash told him. Warren said: "There's nothing we can do to give back the 37 years that were wrongly taken away from him."
DuBoise later received $1.85 million in compensation from the Florida Legislature. In January 2024 the Tampa City Council approved a $14 million settlement of his civil claims, without any admission of wrongdoing.
Clearing DuBoise left the Grams murder unsolved, and the review did not stop there. The evidence that excluded DuBoise pointed elsewhere, and in 2021 investigators reopened the Lansen case as well. For more than two years the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the Tampa Police Department and the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office worked the two files together.
The evidence tied the same two men to both deaths: Amos Robinson and Abron Scott. Both were already serving life sentences for the Orellana murder. A piece of evidence from the Lansen file had been linked to Scott as early as 2007, though no charge followed at the time.
On August 4, 2022, a Hillsborough County grand jury indicted Robinson, 58, and Scott, 57, for the murders of Barbara Grams and Linda Lansen. Warren announced the charges at a news conference held a few hours after Governor Ron DeSantis suspended him from office. The governor cited neglect of duty; Warren called the suspension an attempt to overturn the result of an election. He went ahead with the announcement. "We can now prosecute these men, and we will," he said.
He read statements from the Lansen family. Her daughter, who had been seven in 1983, wrote that the loss of her mother would stay with her as a waking torment. Her niece described the years in between: "The void stays, and the pain stays, and the crying stays." She called the news "the beginning of closure."
On August 15, 2022, both men pleaded not guilty at arraignment. The Public Defender's Office moved to withdraw from Scott's defense because of a conflict with Robinson's. On September 27, 2022, the State Attorney's Office, now led by Susan Lopez, filed notice that it would seek the death penalty against both men in both cases.
In 2023, at the age of 58, Scott confessed. Under the agreement that followed, prosecutors set aside the death penalty in his case, and Scott agreed to testify against Robinson.
On March 20, 2024, in a Tampa courtroom, Scott pleaded guilty to the 1983 rapes and murders of Barbara Grams and Linda Lansen. The court imposed two life sentences, to be served consecutively with each other and with the life sentence he was already serving for the Orellana murder: three consecutive life terms in all. The prosecutor, Assistant State Attorney Ron Gale, set out for the court the evidence that tied Scott to the Lansen case.
Linda Lansen's daughter, now an adult, gave a victim impact statement. She spoke directly to the man in front of her. "You ruined my life," she said. "I never thought the day would come when I would find out who killed my mother." She had grown up, she said, only to find herself "sitting here talking to her murderer 40-plus years later." The State Attorney's Office said Scott's crimes had "forever changed the trajectory of her life."
Scott spoke to the families. "I want you to know sincerely, willingly and humbly I apologize for my participation in the crimes committed against your loved ones," he said. "I ask you to please forgive me."
The State Attorney's Office credited its Conviction Review Unit and the Tampa Police Department with the result. Robinson, the office said, would return to court for a disposition hearing on September 20.
Robinson's own record extends well beyond the Orellana case. He is serving three life sentences, for first- and second-degree murder, kidnapping and robbery, and he was convicted of two further killings committed while in custody, in Washington County in 1998 and in Escambia County in 2004.
For the Grams and Lansen deaths he is accused, not convicted. He pleaded not guilty in August 2022, and in the State Attorney's words he faces the death penalty if convicted. On April 1, 2024, two weeks after Scott's plea, his lawyers asked the court to close certain hearings to the public, citing "unprecedented and highly prejudicial publicity and media attention." In January 2026, with his trial approaching, his defense pointed to the wrongful conviction of Robert DuBoise. No verdict in his case has been reported.
After his March 2024 plea, Abron Scott was serving three consecutive life sentences in the Florida state prison system. The Orellana sentence, as set by the Supreme Court of Florida in 1992, carried no eligibility for parole for 25 years; the two sentences of 2024 were added to it. Under his plea agreement he is to testify for the state when Robinson is tried.
Both the Scott and the DuBoise cases turned on the way Florida sentenced capital defendants in the 1980s. The jury heard the penalty evidence and gave a recommendation, but the judge decided. In DuBoise's case the judge overrode a life recommendation and imposed death. In Scott's case the judge followed a death recommendation and later said she would have sentenced him to life.
Florida's present statute, section 921.141 of the Florida Statutes, still provides for a separate sentencing proceeding after a conviction for a capital felony. The jury must find at least one aggravating factor unanimously, and a recommendation of death requires the votes of at least eight of the twelve jurors. If the jury does not recommend death, the sentence is life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Every death sentence is reviewed automatically by the Supreme Court of Florida.
Rule 3.850 is the main route by which a Florida prisoner may challenge a judgment after the direct appeal. Scott v. Dugger extended it to a defendant whose equally culpable co-defendant later received life, and the sentence the court ordered in his place was life without eligibility for parole for 25 years.
The Hillsborough County Conviction Review Unit, created in 2018, announced in September 2020 that it would begin a circuit-wide review of convictions that had relied on testimony of the kind used against DuBoise. Prosecutors stressed that no conviction would be overturned merely because such evidence had played a part in it. The Innocence Project counted 33 wrongful convictions across the United States that had rested on the same kind of evidence. By March 2024 the State Attorney's Office counted more than 100 cases processed by the unit and three people freed.
Scott was never charged in the death of Hermenia Castro, a woman in her fifties who died in Tampa on September 5, 1983, between the deaths of Barbara Grams and Carlos Orellana. He denied any part in it. Robinson and another man were charged in Castro's death in the early 1990s, and the charges were dropped before trial for lack of evidence. No conviction exists for her death.
The 2024 plea covered two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of sexual battery, which the State Attorney's Office described as "the 1983 rapes and murders" of the two women.
Robinson has not been tried for the Grams and Lansen deaths. The indictment is an accusation, and he is presumed innocent of those charges. Scott's own account of who did what in 1983, which places the larger share on Robinson, has not been tested in court.
July 1981: Scott is arrested and held in a juvenile facility and then an adult jail, where he meets Amos Robinson.
July 10 to 11, 1983: Linda Lansen, 41, dies in Tampa.
August 18 to 19, 1983: Barbara Grams, 19, dies in Tampa.
October 22, 1983: Carlos Orellana, 33, dies in Oldsmar.
October 1983: Scott and Robinson are arrested and charged in the Orellana case.
March 7, 1985: Robert DuBoise is convicted of the Grams murder; the judge overrides a life recommendation and imposes death, later reduced to life.
Mid-1980s: Scott is convicted of first-degree murder, robbery and kidnapping in the Orellana case and sentenced to death.
April 10, 1986: The Supreme Court of Florida upholds Robinson's conviction and orders a new sentencing hearing; he is later resentenced to life.
1986: In Scott v. State, the court affirms Scott's conviction and death sentence.
July 23, 1992: In Scott v. Dugger, the court vacates Scott's death sentence and orders life without parole eligibility for 25 years.
2018: The Hillsborough County State Attorney's Office creates its Conviction Review Unit.
Late August 2020: DuBoise is freed after his sentence is reduced to time served.
September 14, 2020: Judge Christopher Nash grants the motion to vacate; DuBoise's convictions are voided and the charges dismissed.
2021: Investigators reopen the Lansen case.
August 4, 2022: A Hillsborough County grand jury indicts Robinson and Scott for the Grams and Lansen murders.
August 15, 2022: Both men plead not guilty.
September 27, 2022: The State Attorney's Office files notice of intent to seek the death penalty.
2023: Scott confesses and agrees to testify against Robinson.
January 2024: The Tampa City Council approves a $14 million settlement with DuBoise.
March 20, 2024: Scott pleads guilty to the Grams and Lansen murders and receives two consecutive life sentences.
April 1, 2024: Robinson's lawyers ask for closed hearings.
January 2026: Robinson's trial approaches; he remains untried for the 1983 Tampa deaths.