Donald David Dillbeck killed two people eleven years apart, and both killings came out of attempts to get away. In April 1979, at 15, he was a runaway from Indiana sitting in a stolen car at a closed county park on Fort Myers Beach when Lee County Deputy Sheriff Dwight Lynn Hall stopped to question him. He ran, Hall tackled him, and in the struggle Dillbeck took the deputy's pistol and shot him twice. He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison.
In June 1990, still serving that sentence, he walked away from a prison work crew catering a meal for senior citizens in Gadsden County. Two days later, in the parking lot of the Tallahassee Mall, he tried to force Faye Lamb Vann, a mother who was waiting in her car while her family shopped, to drive him away. She fought back, and he stabbed her to death. A Leon County jury convicted him of first-degree murder in February 1991 and recommended death by a vote of 8 to 4. After nearly 32 years of appeals, much of it centered on the brain damage his lawyers traced to his mother's drinking during pregnancy, he was executed on February 23, 2023, the first person put to death in Florida since 2019.
Dillbeck was born on May 24, 1963, according to Florida's Commission on Capital Cases. The account of his early years comes mainly from testimony at his 1991 trial, as summarized in the briefs filed in his direct appeal and in WCTV's reporting on the trial record.
His biological mother drank heavily while she was pregnant with him. His biological father testified that she drank throughout the pregnancy and that he later left the family; the defense brief records testimony that she drank 18 to 24 cans of beer a day. The trial court accepted that her drinking had caused him brain damage. The same testimony described a home of severe abuse. His older sister testified that their mother beat both children, and the defense brief summarizes testimony that the mother made them pray for hours and punished them when they stopped. The sister was hospitalized twice for injuries.
When Donald was about four and a half, the children were removed from their mother and placed in foster care. WCTV reported that she died by suicide after leaving a mental health facility. His sister was adopted, but the family that took her did not want him. He was described as a slow learner, and his foster family rejected him.
At about six he was adopted by an older Indiana couple, the Dillbecks, whose surname he took. The defense told the appeals court that they loved him deeply and that he became the center of their lives. In 1991 they would travel to Florida to visit him in jail and, in tears, ask the judge to spare his life.
By his own trial testimony, as the defense brief describes it, he began using amphetamines and marijuana heavily at about 13. He had found his sister again when he was around 11, but by 15 she wanted nothing to do with him because of his drug use. He ran away from home in ninth grade.
In March 1979, at 15, he tried to steal a CB radio from a car parked outside a house in Indiana. The owner caught him and, according to the trial testimony summarized in the defense brief, meant only to take him inside, warn him and let him go. As the man escorted him, Dillbeck pulled a knife and stabbed him in the chest. The man survived. AP and WCTV, citing court records, report that Dillbeck then fled to Florida; WCTV adds that he was charged with attempted murder in Indiana. The defense brief says that a few days after the stabbing, after police photographed him, he stole a car and drove south. He later told investigators he chose Fort Myers because he had once known someone who vacationed there.
Dwight Lynn Hall was born on June 28, 1947. He was 31 and had been with the Lee County Sheriff's Office for about two years, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, which records that he left a wife and two children. The Sheriff's Office lists him, under badge number 310, among its deputies killed in the line of duty, and he is named on the agency's annual memorial roll of fallen officers. A man who grew up as a neighbor of Hall's family wrote on the memorial page in 2023 that he had been born weeks after Hall's death and had heard about him all his life from his own parents, to whom the Halls were like family.
On April 11, 1979, two days or so after Dillbeck arrived in Florida, Hall responded to a report of a suspicious person sitting in a vehicle after closing time at a county park on Fort Myers Beach. The car had out-of-state plates. Hall did not know it was stolen, or that its driver was wanted for a stabbing in Indiana. WCTV and Amnesty International describe Dillbeck as asleep in the car when the deputy found him.
The trial record gives the sequence in some detail. Hall asked for identification. Dillbeck opened the trunk, as if to find a license he did not have, and Hall saw a marijuana pipe and told him he would have to arrest him. As Hall searched him, Dillbeck struck the deputy in the groin and ran. Hall chased and tackled him. Dillbeck later testified that Hall said, "I don't want to have to hurt you." During the struggle Dillbeck took Hall's gun and shot him twice at close range. The medical examiner, Dr. Wallace Graves, testified in 1991 that the wound to the back was the fatal one.
Dillbeck ran. WCTV reports that he was found shortly afterward hiding in the surf. The State's brief says he later told police where he had buried the gun, and that it was recovered about 13 days after the shooting.
Dillbeck was 15, but he was prosecuted and sentenced as an adult. The Florida Supreme Court's 2023 opinion records that he "entered a negotiated guilty plea of first-degree premeditated murder" and was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years. The Officer Down Memorial Page gives the sentencing date as June 6, 1979.
That conviction was never set aside. It later became one of the five aggravating factors behind his death sentence, and in 2023 his lawyers tried, without success, to reopen it.
Dillbeck entered the adult prison system as a teenager. He was held at Sumter Correctional Institution, then at Zephyrhills and Avon Park, and finally at the Quincy Vocational Center in Gadsden County, which the trial briefs also call the Gretna Vocational Center. At trial he testified, as the defense brief summarizes it, that he was raped several times at Sumter, which the brief describes as the most violent prison in the state. The trial court later accepted as a mitigating factor that he had been sent to a violent prison at an unusually early age.
His prison record was mixed. In 1982, at Zephyrhills, he tried to climb a wall in front of guards; WCTV reports that he was charged and a year was added to his sentence. He was later accused of planning an escape from Avon Park. The Commission on Capital Cases lists a disciplinary finding for assault or attempted assault at Sumter in August 1984, which cost him 90 days of gain time, and one for drinking intoxicants there in March 1985. Prison officials who testified at his 1991 trial nonetheless rated him among the best-adjusted inmates they had, according to the defense brief.
In 1990 he was transferred to the vocational center at Quincy for good behavior. There he trained as a cook and was assigned to a unit that catered public events outside the prison. By June 1990 he had worked several of them.
On June 22, 1990, Dillbeck was working a catering event for Senior Citizens of Gadsden County at Gretna Elementary School. At some point a guard was not watching him, and he slipped away. He was reported missing at about 8:15 that evening.
He walked toward Tallahassee, about two days on foot. The State's brief says he took clothes from a clothesline and slept in the woods. He testified that he slept about three hours in total and ate only a couple of doughnuts, and that he arrived exhausted, hungry and with blistered feet. In Tallahassee he bought sunglasses and a Florida road map. He tried again and again to telephone a friend in Orlando who, he said, had promised to help him if he escaped, but no one answered.
According to his own testimony, he then decided to take a car with its driver, have the driver take him to a deserted road, and teach himself to drive again; he said he had not driven in 11 years. At about 8:30 on the morning of Sunday, June 24, he bought a small paring knife at a Publix grocery store. An investigator later bought an identical knife at the same price, $1.89, to match the one found in Mrs. Vann's car. Dillbeck told the State's psychologist that he had spent his money on the knife instead of on alcohol.
Faye Lamb Vann lived in Tallahassee. She was 44, according to AP, or 45, according to WCTV. She was a mother and a grandmother. Her daughter, Laura, was 11 when she was killed. Speaking on the day of the execution in 2023, Laura Vann described her as "a very sweet loving lady" who "would do anything for anyone," and said her mother loved children and "loved her grandbabies." "When she died," she said, "it felt like my whole family died."
On June 24, 1990, the family had planned a picnic at a lake, WCTV reported. Faye Vann was already dressed for it, in her bathing suit, and did not want to go into the store. She waited in her car, a blue Chevrolet Nova, outside Gayfer's department store at the Tallahassee Mall, while her son Tony and other family members went in to make a return.
It was about 3 p.m., the store was busy and the lot about half full. Dillbeck had watched the car park and the others go inside. Tony Vann noticed a man with sandy hair, sunglasses and an orange-yellow shirt standing near the store entrance as he went in.
Dillbeck went to the car and told her, by his own account, "Lady, you are going to give me a ride." AP, citing court documents, reported that he told her to drive because he had forgotten how. She refused. She sounded the horn and tried to drive away, and she fought him; he testified that she grabbed his hair as he forced his way in and that she bit him, and that he then "went off." He stabbed her repeatedly. The medical examiner, Dr. Thomas Wood, counted 20 to 25 knife wounds, mostly to her neck and abdomen, and testified that she had been conscious during the attack and that a wound to her neck caused her death.
A store employee saw a man and a woman struggling in the car. A Gayfer's security officer approached, saw what was happening, wrote down the license number and ran back to call 911. Dillbeck then tried to drive the car away. It backed up, stalled, struck at least one other vehicle and crashed.
Dillbeck ran from the car in a bloodstained yellow shirt. Samuel Bradley, another Gayfer's security officer, went after him. Dillbeck pulled off the shirt, told Bradley to get away or he would kill him, and struck him in the chest, but with the blunt side of the knife, then ran on across Monroe Street. Bradley later received an award from the City of Tallahassee for his bravery, WCTV reported. Bradley testified that Dillbeck spoke plainly and did not look lost or scared.
A guard followed in a car, and Tallahassee police closed in. Dillbeck ended up in a drainage ditch, running back and forth. An officer testified at the penalty phase that Dillbeck shouted, "I already killed one of ya'll, a cop. Kill me," and the defense brief adds the words "I'm going to the chair anyway." Surrounded, he gave up. Officers found on him a Publix receipt, an address book, the Florida map, a money clip and about three dollars in change.
At the police station he gave his name as Robert Larry Greenwood. Asked whether he was Donald Dillbeck, he answered, "Merry Christmas." According to the defense brief, he was so exhausted that he had to be wheeled into the county jail, where he drank ten glasses of water. A fingerprint examiner later found his thumbprint in blood inside the driver's door and his prints on the knife.
When Mrs. Vann's family came out of the store about 25 minutes after going in, police were at the car. They found a knife and a pair of sunglasses inside it that had not been there before.
The killing caused an uproar over how a man serving life for killing a deputy, with an escape attempt and an assault on another prisoner on his record, had come to be in a minimum security program working outside the prison. Governor Bob Martinez fired three corrections officials and sought rules to keep prisoners serving life sentences in more secure settings, AP reported.
A Leon County grand jury indicted Dillbeck on July 18, 1990, on charges of first-degree murder, armed robbery and armed burglary. His trial lawyer was Assistant Public Defender Randy P. Morrell, and the trial judge was F.E. Steinmeyer III of the Second Judicial Circuit.
There was no dispute about who had killed Faye Vann. From jury selection onward, his lawyer told jurors that Dillbeck had done it, and Dillbeck himself testified that he was guilty of felony murder, a killing during a robbery, but not of premeditated murder. The defense case was that brain damage, which his experts attributed to prenatal alcohol exposure, had left him unable to form the specific intent that premeditation requires, which would have made the crime second-degree murder.
The judge, following the Florida Supreme Court's decision in Chestnut v. State, refused to let the jury hear expert evidence about his mental condition on that question. The defense proffered it outside the jury's presence. A psychologist, Dr. Robert Berland, had tested him; a geneticist testified about the physical signs of fetal alcohol effects; and a neuropsychologist testified that his memory placed him in the lowest one percent of the population. The State's own psychologist, Dr. Harry McClaren, acknowledged signs of brain damage.
On February 26, 1991, after a trial of about two weeks, the jury found Dillbeck guilty on all three counts. According to the defense brief, the verdict form showed that jurors found both premeditation and felony murder.
At the penalty phase the State presented the evidence of Deputy Hall's killing and the officer's account of what Dillbeck had shouted in the ditch. The defense presented his childhood, his brain damage and his prison record, and his adoptive parents pleaded for his life. In rebuttal, Dr. McClaren testified that Dillbeck was of average intelligence, was not schizophrenic, and was capable of purposeful, goal-directed behavior, pointing to his choice of a woman alone, his disguise, his purchase of the knife and his flight. He concluded that Dillbeck understood that what he was doing was wrong and could have conformed his conduct to the law.
On March 1, 1991, the jury recommended death by a vote of 8 to 4. On March 15, 1991, Judge Steinmeyer sentenced Dillbeck to death for the murder and to consecutive life terms for armed robbery and armed burglary.
The judge found five aggravating circumstances: Dillbeck was under a sentence of imprisonment; he had a prior conviction for a capital felony, the murder of Deputy Hall; the killing happened during a robbery and burglary; it was committed to avoid arrest or to effect an escape; and it was especially atrocious and cruel, the factor Florida courts abbreviate as HAC. He found one statutory mitigating circumstance, that Dillbeck's capacity to conform his conduct to the law was substantially impaired, and several others: an abused and deprived childhood, fetal alcohol effect caused by his mother's drinking, mental illness that could be treated, imprisonment at an early age in a violent prison, good behavior as an inmate, a loving family, and remorse. He gave the mitigation little weight. Dillbeck was sent to death row at Florida State Prison.
On April 21, 1994, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and the death sentence in Dillbeck v. State, 643 So. 2d 1027. Chief Justice Barkett did not take part.
The main issue was the excluded fetal alcohol evidence. The majority held that the trial judge had been wrong to keep it from the jury: a condition "beyond one's control," such as a fetus's exposure to alcohol, was the kind of evidence a jury could weigh on specific intent, and "a jury is eminently qualified to consider this." But it found the error harmless, because Dillbeck's own testimony showed that he had planned hours in advance to take a car and its driver, so the excluded evidence could have had only a minimal effect on the robbery and burglary that underlay the murder. Justice McDonald agreed with the result but wrote that the evidence had been properly excluded and that the conviction stood on a felony murder basis in any case.
The court also upheld the State's right to have its own expert examine a defendant who planned to offer mental health evidence at sentencing, observing that no fair tribunal could make one side fight by the Marquess of Queensberry rules while the other "fights ungloved." It approved the escape aggravator even though the killing came two days after the walk-away, because Dillbeck was still near the prison, had not abandoned his flight and was trying to get transportation. Rehearing was denied in October 1994, and on March 20, 1995, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Dillbeck filed his first motion for postconviction relief in Leon County in April 1997 and amended it in 2001. It argued that his trial lawyer had conceded his guilt of first-degree murder, and the HAC factor, without his consent, and that counsel had made other errors. After a hearing at which Dillbeck and his trial lawyer testified, the circuit court denied the motion in September 2002.
In August 2004, the Florida Supreme Court rejected the concession claim, noting that Dillbeck's own testimony had matched his lawyer's concession and that the judge had told him he could object, but sent the remaining claims back for proper findings (Dillbeck v. State, 882 So. 2d 969). It also denied a habeas petition based on Ring v. Arizona, the 2002 ruling on the role of juries in death sentences. On remand the circuit court again denied relief, and the Supreme Court affirmed in May 2007 (964 So. 2d 95). A federal habeas petition in the Northern District of Florida was denied in February 2010, and in January 2011 the Eleventh Circuit refused to allow an appeal.
In 2016 the United States Supreme Court, in Hurst v. Florida, struck down Florida's sentencing system, which had let judges impose death after a non-unanimous jury recommendation. The Florida Supreme Court applied the decision only to death sentences that became final after the 2002 Ring ruling. Dillbeck's had been final since 1995, and in 2018 the court confirmed that he could not benefit (Dillbeck v. State, 234 So. 3d 558); the United States Supreme Court declined review that year. An earlier successive motion challenging the escape aggravator had been rejected in 2015.
In 2018 a psychologist, Dr. Faye Sultan, evaluated Dillbeck and raised the possibility of a more specific diagnosis. In 2019 three doctors, using brain imaging and neurological testing that had not existed in 1991, concluded that he met the criteria for neurodevelopmental disorder associated with prenatal alcohol exposure, or ND-PAE, a condition within fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. His lawyers filed a new claim in May 2019. On September 3, 2020, the Florida Supreme Court held it untimely: Dillbeck had known before his 1991 sentencing that he had brain damage from fetal alcohol exposure, ND-PAE had been in the psychiatric diagnostic manual since 2013, and "Dillbeck and his counsel failed to exercise diligence" by waiting until 2018 (Dillbeck v. State, 304 So. 3d 286).
His lawyers said he had an IQ in the average range, about 98 to 100, so he did not qualify as intellectually disabled, but that his impairments were the functional equivalent. Under Atkins v. Virginia (2002), the Constitution bars executing people with intellectual disability.
Governor Ron DeSantis signed Dillbeck's death warrant on Monday, January 23, 2023, setting the execution for 6 p.m. on February 23. Dillbeck was 59 and had been on death row for more than 30 years. It was DeSantis's first warrant since 2019 and, if carried out, would be the first execution in Florida since Gary Ray Bowles in August 2019. Leon County State Attorney Jack Campbell said, "I do believe justice is being served, and this is the ultimate form of justice for those victims and our community." Dillbeck's lawyer of the previous decade, Baya Harrison, said the defense would "give it everything we've got."
The Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops asked the governor to spare him, saying that taking his life was unnecessary to keep society safe and "perpetuates the cycle of violence." Amnesty International also campaigned for clemency.
Dillbeck's lawyers raised four new claims in Leon County. Three went on to the Florida Supreme Court. The first was that ND-PAE should exempt him from execution in the same way intellectual disability does. The second was that new evidence undermined the 1979 conviction used as an aggravator: after the warrant, his team obtained statements from five people who had seen him around the time of Hall's shooting, three of whom had given statements to police in 1979. One had said he "seemed like he was kinda depressed"; the arresting officer had called him "bewildered." Amnesty reported the defense position that he had barely slept for three days and had been using drugs, and that two experts who reviewed the material concluded that he probably could not tell right from wrong at the time and doubted he had been competent to plead guilty. The third claim was that more than 30 years on death row was itself cruel and unusual.
On February 2, 2023, Circuit Judge Angela Dempsey denied a hearing and a stay after reading the whole transcript of the 1991 trial. On February 16, in a unanimous decision in cases SC23-190 and SC23-220, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed. It held the exemption claim barred by its 2020 ruling and in any event outside Atkins, which does not extend to other mental conditions; it called the inquiry into the 1979 case "decades late" and noted that the conviction still stood; and it rejected the delay claim, observing that Dillbeck had prolonged his own stay on death row through repeated litigation. It also turned down a habeas petition challenging the non-unanimous jury, the HAC factor and the escape aggravator. Justice Jorge Labarga concurred in the result only, restating his view that the State v. Poole decision on jury unanimity was wrong.
On February 20 Dillbeck asked the United States Supreme Court for a stay. On February 22 the full Court denied it.
On the morning of February 23, Dillbeck woke early and, the Department of Corrections said, was calm and followed his normal routine. He met with a spiritual adviser. At 9:45 a.m. he ate his last meal: fried shrimp, mushrooms, onion rings, butter pecan ice cream, pecan pie and a chocolate bar.
The curtain to the viewing room at Florida State Prison opened at 6 p.m. Asked for his last words, Dillbeck said, "I know I hurt people when I was young. I really messed up." He then criticized Governor DeSantis, AP reported. The lethal injection began at 6:02 p.m.; by 6:07 he appeared to have stopped breathing. He was pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m. "The execution went as scheduled and took place without incident," said the department's spokeswoman, Michelle Glady.
Dillbeck was the 100th person executed in Florida since the death penalty was reinstated, and the third under DeSantis. No member of his family attended. Neither did anyone from Deputy Hall's family or the Lee County Sheriff's Office, WCTV reported.
Laura Vann watched the execution with a family friend. Her brother Tony, who had been inside the mall the day their mother was killed and had seen Dillbeck at the entrance, decided at the last minute not to go. The two issued a statement: "11,932 days ago, Donald Dillbeck brutally killed our Mother. We were robbed of years of memories with her, and it has been very painful ever since." They thanked the governor and said the execution "has given us some closure." Laura Vann told WCTV that she was ready to move on with her life.
The execution came as Florida was debating how death sentences should be decided. DeSantis had said he wanted to change the 2017 law requiring a unanimous jury recommendation for death, AP reported, and the Tallahassee Democrat noted on the day of the execution that the 8 to 4 jury vote in Dillbeck's case was the same split Florida Republicans were then proposing as the new standard.
Proven and final: the guilty plea to the first-degree murder of Deputy Hall (1979) and the jury's verdict of guilty of the first-degree murder of Faye Vann, with armed robbery and armed burglary (1991). Both judgments stood at his death.
Contested but rejected by the courts: the claim, raised only in 2023, that Dillbeck was so impaired in April 1979 that he may have been legally insane and not competent to plead guilty. It rests on witness statements gathered after the death warrant and on the opinions of two defense experts. The Florida Supreme Court did not decide whether the claim was true; it held that it came decades too late and that the conviction remained valid.
Contested but rejected: whether ND-PAE should exempt a person from execution as intellectual disability does. Dillbeck's experts diagnosed it in 2019; the courts held the claim untimely and outside Atkins.
Details that vary between sources: Mrs. Vann's age (44 in AP reports, 45 in WCTV's 2023 account); Dillbeck's age at the 1979 killing (15 in the court opinions and press, while one page of the 1991 transcript, as cited in the defense brief, gives 16); the number of stab wounds (20 to 25 in the medical examiner's testimony, "more than 20" in AP, "several" in the court summaries); whether Hall found him asleep in the car (WCTV, Amnesty) or sitting in it (Sheriff's Office); and the place, given as Fort Myers Beach, Estero Beach or Fort Myers.
May 24, 1963: Donald David Dillbeck is born.
Age about four and a half: removed from his biological mother and placed in foster care.
Age about six: adopted by the Dillbecks, an older couple in Indiana.
March 1979: stabs a man who caught him stealing a CB radio in Indiana; the man survives. Dillbeck steals a car and drives to Florida.
April 11, 1979: shoots and kills Lee County Deputy Dwight Lynn Hall, 31, at a county park on Fort Myers Beach; arrested shortly afterward.
June 6, 1979: sentenced to life with parole eligibility after 25 years after a negotiated plea of guilty to first-degree premeditated murder.
1982: tries to climb a wall at the Zephyrhills prison; a year is added to his sentence.
August 1984: disciplinary finding for assault or attempted assault at Sumter Correctional Institution.
1990: transferred to the Quincy Vocational Center in Gadsden County for good behavior.
June 22, 1990: walks away from a prison catering job at a senior citizens' event at Gretna Elementary School.
June 24, 1990: buys a paring knife at a Publix; kills Faye Lamb Vann in her car at the Tallahassee Mall; crashes her car and is arrested.
July 18, 1990: indicted for first-degree murder, armed robbery and armed burglary.
February 26, 1991: found guilty on all counts.
March 1, 1991: jury recommends death, 8 to 4.
March 15, 1991: sentenced to death by Judge F.E. Steinmeyer III.
April 21, 1994: Florida Supreme Court affirms.
March 20, 1995: United States Supreme Court denies review.
April 1997: first postconviction motion filed; denied September 2002.
August 26, 2004: Florida Supreme Court affirms in part and remands.
May 10, 2007: Florida Supreme Court affirms denial of the remaining claims.
February 4, 2010: federal habeas petition denied; the Eleventh Circuit refuses an appeal on January 18, 2011.
2015 and 2018: successive motions rejected, including his Hurst claim.
2019: three doctors diagnose ND-PAE.
September 3, 2020: Florida Supreme Court holds the ND-PAE claim untimely.
January 23, 2023: Governor DeSantis signs the death warrant.
February 2, 2023: Circuit Judge Angela Dempsey denies a hearing and a stay.
February 16, 2023: Florida Supreme Court affirms and denies a stay.
February 22, 2023: United States Supreme Court denies a stay.
February 23, 2023: executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison; pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m.