Cesar Barone

Victims
4 convictions - earlier Florida killings suspected and never charged
Years active
1991 - 1993
Location
Florida/Oregon, USA
Method
Strangulation / Shooting
Status
Sentenced to death in Oregon on January 30, 1995, and also convicted in a separate Oregon trial. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole on December 14, 2022, when the Governor of Oregon commuted all seventeen death sentences in the state and ordered the execution chamber dismantled. Oregon had already closed its segregated death row housing in 2020 and carried out no execution after 1997.

Cesar Francesco Barone, born in 1960 and raised in Florida, raped and killed four women in Washington County, Oregon, between 1991 and 1993: Margaret H. Schmidt, 61, Martha B. Bryant, 41, a nurse-midwife shot on her way home from a delivery, Chantee E. Woodman, 23, and Betty Lou Williams, 51. He was working as a nursing assistant during part of that period.

He had a long earlier record in Florida, including a burglary conviction as a teenager, and had been a prison neighbour of Ted Bundy on Florida's death row, a connection widely repeated in accounts of the case. He was arrested in February 1993 and sentenced to death in Oregon on January 30, 1995.

He is also suspected in earlier Florida killings that were never charged, which is the source of the plus sign on the recorded toll. Oregon has not carried out an execution since 1997 and a moratorium has been in place since 2011, so the sentence stands unexecuted.