Donald William Dufour was born in 1956.
On the afternoon of July 15, 1982 a postman on Henry Balch Drive in Orlando noticed that mail had not been taken in at Edward Wise's house for several days, and then smelt something 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.
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 the back, with a .25 calibre pistol. A petrol receipt in his pocket identified him as Zack Miller of Boston, Georgia, whose family had reported him missing two days before. His car was found the next day, which gave detectives reason to think 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 Dufour, a thief who had boasted of a recent murder in an orange grove in which the victim was robbed of jewellery, and who had claimed to have killed something like a dozen people altogether.
While Orlando detectives were looking for him, he was arrested at Jackson, Mississippi on October 14, four days after the attempted robbery. He had been charged with the stabbing deaths of Danny King, thirty-two, and Earl Peeples, thirty-four, both killed in the flat Peeples lived in.
A Jackson jury preferred the forensic evidence to his plea of innocence and he was sentenced to death in Mississippi in March 1983. Florida then convicted him and sentenced him to death on July 3, 1983.
Four of the five men killed were gay, and the source records that in the Orlando case the police did not at first suspect the two men of having brought anyone home, because they were not known to go looking for strangers.
The claim of about a dozen killings is his own, made to an accomplice and reported at second hand, and it is not part of the count. The five above are the ones he was tried for.
The Florida litigation ran a long way. Three opinions of the Supreme Court of Florida are on the record, the last of them from 2009. Twenty-six years after the sentence. What became of either death sentence is still not in anything accessible here, and this entry remains on the re-check list for that reason.