On the afternoon of July 26, 1983, Michael Rock, a teenager riding his bicycle past a house in Vero Beach, Florida, saw a naked girl with her hands tied behind her back running up the driveway toward the road, and a naked man behind her. The man caught her, dragged her back toward the house, threw her down and shot her twice, once in the back of the head and once in the jaw. The boy went for help. The girl was Lynn Elliott, seventeen, a student at Vero Beach High School. The man was David Alan Gore, twenty-nine, and what the boy saw ended a run of rapes and killings in Indian River County that had lasted more than two years and that nobody had connected to him.
Elliott and her friend Regan Martin, fourteen, had been hitchhiking to Wabasso Beach, north of town, that day when Gore and his first cousin, Fred Waterfield, stopped a pickup and offered them a ride. According to the Florida Supreme Court's account of the trial record, the glove compartment fell open and a gun came into view; Gore took it, held it to Regan's head and gripped the girls' wrists together, and he handcuffed them while Waterfield drove. They were taken to a house belonging to Gore's parents, who were away on vacation. Waterfield soon left; Gore later said his cousin had been spooked at seeing his own sister on the drive. Gore tied the girls up and put them in separate bedrooms, warning them that if they tried anything he would come back and kill them. Regan testified that he cut off her clothes and forced her to perform oral sex on him while threatening to slice her throat, and that he kept moving back and forth between the two rooms; he raped Lynn as well. He was assaulting Regan when Lynn freed her legs and ran. In his statement to police he said he caught up with her after she tripped, started dragging her back, and shot her when she fought him.
Regan heard the shots from inside. When Gore came back he put her in a closet and then in the attic, and told her he would kill her if she tried anything. Lynn Elliott's body went into the trunk of his mother's car. He had a police scanner to listen for officers, and he made phony 911 calls to divert them from the house. The standoff lasted about ninety minutes and ended when he surrendered. Officers found Regan Martin in the attic, naked, handcuffed, her legs tied with electrical cord, and alive. Whether he had been drunk would later matter in court, and the witnesses were consistent: Regan said he did not smell of alcohol, slur his words or have bloodshot eyes, Michael Rock said he did not stagger as he ran down the driveway, and three officers said he showed no sign of impairment when he was arrested.
The case that emerged from his statements over the following months reached back to 1981, and it turned on a badge. Gore had been an auxiliary deputy with the Indian River County Sheriff's Office, and he used the authority it lent him to stop women and girls who had no reason to refuse a man who looked like police. He also worked as caretaker of a citrus grove, which gave him somewhere isolated to take them. Waterfield, a former high school football player a year older than Gore, was said to have paid him to find victims for them both.
The first were a mother and daughter. On February 19, 1981, Gore showed his badge to Ying Hua Ling, seventeen, persuaded her into his truck and drove her to her own home, where he found her mother, Hsiang Huang Ling, forty-eight, and took them both. By his own account the mother, tied to a tree, choked to death while the daughter was raped. Their bodies were dismembered, packed into oil drums and buried.
Judith Kay Daley, thirty-five, had grown up in Fort Pierce and was back from California on a visit when she went to the beach on July 15, 1981. Gore disabled her car and offered her a ride to a telephone. He drove her instead to a secluded spot where Waterfield was waiting, and both men raped her. Gore said he left her body in a swamp.
About a week later Gore tried to use the badge on a teenage girl who did not go with him, and her father complained. The sheriff's office took the badge. Days after that, police found him hiding in the back seat of a woman's car with a handgun and a police scanner; handcuffs and rope were in his own car, parked nearby. He was convicted of armed trespassing and sentenced to five years, and was paroled in March 1983 after serving less than two.
Within two months he killed again. On May 20, 1983, he and Waterfield picked up two fourteen-year-olds from Orlando, Barbara Ann Byer and Angelica LaVallee, who had run away from home and were hitchhiking south. Both girls were raped and shot, and their bodies were dismembered and scattered. Two months after that came Lynn Elliott.
What investigators knew about the five earlier deaths came almost entirely from Gore, and on December 7, 1983 he led them to remains. Accounts differ on how many victims were found. The Associated Press reported at his execution that he had led authorities to the bodies of four; other summaries say three that day, Barbara Byer and the two Lings.
Gore was indicted on August 10, 1983. Pretrial publicity in Vero Beach was so heavy that the trial was moved to St. Petersburg, in Pinellas County, and on March 16, 1984 a jury convicted him of first-degree murder, two counts of kidnapping and three counts of sexual battery, and recommended death by a vote of eleven to one. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and the death sentence in 1985. He was sentenced to five consecutive life terms for the other five murders.
Governor Bob Martinez signed a death warrant in 1988, but it was not carried out. In 1989 a federal judge in the Middle District of Florida threw out the death sentence, holding that the 1984 sentencing had violated two United States Supreme Court decisions on the consideration of mitigating evidence, Hitchcock v. Dugger and Lockett v. Ohio, and the Eleventh Circuit affirmed in 1991. The penalty phase was heard again in 1992, with Dan L. Vaughn, a county court judge, presiding. The defense called Robert Stone, the prosecutor who had tried both Gore and Waterfield, so the jury would hear that Waterfield, whom the state had argued was equally to blame, had not been sentenced to death; on cross-examination Stone said none of Gore's life sentences carried a mandatory minimum term. The state's psychiatrist, Dr. Cheshire, testified that Gore was not an alcoholic and had no mental illness, only adult antisocial behavior, and that no one could have drunk as much as Gore claimed without showing it. The defense called about ten witnesses, among them the mental health experts Michael Maher and Peter Maculuso and Gore's mother, who told the jury that ant bites had given him convulsions when he was seventeen months old. They portrayed the son of hard-working parents, shy and introverted beside his cousin, hurt by a divorce that separated him from his children, and drinking around the time of the murder.
This jury was unanimous for death. Judge Vaughn found six aggravating circumstances: Gore was on parole when he killed; he had a prior violent felony; the murder was committed during a kidnapping and sexual battery; Lynn Elliott was killed to stop her identifying him; the killing was heinous, atrocious or cruel, in part because he had tied her so tightly that a welt formed; and it was cold, calculated and premeditated, shown among other things by his telling Regan Martin, after threatening to slice her throat, that he was going to do it anyway. He found no statutory mitigation and five nonstatutory factors, including Gore's conduct in prison, his impoverished childhood, his depression at the time of the murder and his affection for his children, and sentenced him to death again. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed in 1997.
Waterfield went to trial and was convicted in 1985 of murdering Barbara Byer and Angelica LaVallee, the only two killings for which a jury held him responsible, and received two consecutive life terms. For his part in the Elliott case he was sentenced to fifteen years for manslaughter. He has always denied the murders and says he was another of Gore's victims, manipulated and then blamed; his family, including his twin daughters, has campaigned for his release. He was later moved from Okeechobee Correctional Institution to Hardee Correctional Institution.
Court files reported at the time of Gore's execution showed he had targeted more than a dozen women and girls for abduction and rape, and that at least four had escaped with their lives. One of the earliest was in 1976, seven years before Lynn Elliott, when Angela Hommell Austin, twenty, told police that Gore and Waterfield had raped her at gunpoint. Both men were jailed and questioned. They said the sex was consensual, and neither was charged.
Gore spent twenty-eight years on death row. His later appeals argued that his resentencing lawyers had failed him. The lead attorney, it emerged, had been practicing law for about three years and had a bar grievance pending at the time; Gore also claimed that pesticides in the citrus groves where he had worked and lived had damaged his nervous system, a theory two entomologists at the hearing did little to support. On July 5, 2007, the Florida Supreme Court rejected every claim without a dissent. Lynn Elliott's parents waited. Carl Elliott, eighty-one by then, said he had begun to think he would die before Gore did; Jeanne Elliott had come out of a coma two years earlier and said she believed she had recovered because she wanted to see it. The United States Supreme Court turned down a final appeal less than two hours before the execution.
On April 12, 2012, at Florida State Prison, strapped to the gurney with Carl Elliott in the front row of the observation room, Gore apologized to the Elliott family for the death of their daughter, said he was not the man he had been twenty-eight years earlier, that he was a Christian and that he did not fear death. He did not look at them. He was pronounced dead at 6:19 p.m. He was fifty-eight.