On the afternoon of July 15, 1982, a mail carrier on Henry Balch Drive in Orlando noticed that the mail had piled up at Edward Wise's house for several days, and then caught a smell from inside. Police forced the door and found Wise, forty-seven, and John Stinson, forty-four, the man he lived with, shot and stabbed. The medical examiner put the deaths at least a week earlier, perhaps ten days. Friends told detectives the two were not the kind of men to bring strangers home, and at first the police did not suspect they had.
On September 6 a young man riding a motorcycle through a citrus grove outside Orlando found a body beside a dirt road, partly covered by an orange blanket. The man had been shot twice, in the head and in the back, with a .25-caliber pistol. A gasoline receipt in his pocket identified him as Zack Miller of Boston, Georgia, whose family had reported him missing two days earlier. His car turned up the next day, which suggested the killer might still be in the area.
On October 10 three men tried to rob a fast-food restaurant in Orlando, and one of them was caught nearby. He told detectives that the man behind the robbery was Donald William Dufour, a twenty-six-year-old thief, born in 1956, who had boasted of a recent killing in an orange grove in which the victim was robbed of his jewelry, and who claimed to have killed about a dozen people in all.
By then Dufour had left Florida. In the early hours of October 14, 1982, in an apartment at the Windsor Park Apartments in Jackson, Mississippi, Earl Wayne Peeples, thirty-four, and Danny King, thirty-two, who had come to visit him, were killed with knives and screwdrivers. The next morning King's family called the Jackson police because they could not find him; officers found his car in the apartment lot, and the manager let them into Peeples's apartment, where both men lay dead. Dufour was arrested in Jackson the same day.
A Hinds County grand jury indicted him for the capital murder of Earl Peeples during a robbery. The chief witness was Robert Taylor, an admitted companion of Dufour's who testified that he had taken part and gave a detailed account of the killings; the state corroborated it with the physical evidence from the apartment. The jury convicted him, and in March 1983 sentenced him to death. The Mississippi Supreme Court heard his appeal in 1984.
Florida tried him next, for Zack Miller. Stacey Sigler testified for the state, as did Raymond Ryan, who described Dufour getting rid of the murder weapon and taking it apart. The last key witness, Henry Miller, had been in the isolation cell next to Dufour's; in return for immunity on several armed robbery charges, he testified that Dufour had described the murder to him in detail and had tried to arrange through him to have Stacey Sigler killed for $5,000. At the penalty phase Robert Taylor described the Mississippi murder. The jury unanimously recommended death, and on July 3, 1983, the judge imposed it, finding four aggravating circumstances: a prior capital felony, a murder committed during an armed robbery, a murder committed to avoid arrest, and a killing that was cold, calculated and premeditated. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed in 1986.
The state's expert in later proceedings described how Dufour reached his victims: he presented himself as attractive to the two men in Orlando, to Zack Miller and, the expert had been told, to the two men in Mississippi, all of whom the state described as gay, and got them to places where he could kill them. Nothing in the published record shows that he was ever convicted over Edward Wise and John Stinson or Danny King.
The Florida case went through three rounds before the Florida Supreme Court, the last numbered SC09-262. By then his lawyers were arguing that he was intellectually disabled and could not be executed. The state answered with his own history, that he had told a psychologist in 2001 of touring with a production of the musical Hair, and with records from the Lowell Correctional facility calling him the most malingering inmate there. He also said he had hepatitis C.
His claim of about a dozen killings was never tested. It reached detectives at second hand, through an accomplice facing robbery charges. No published record found shows either death sentence carried out, or his death in custody.