On Saturday, March 24, 1984, Karen Slattery went Easter dress shopping with her younger sister, Debbi. Karen had to be back by a certain time because she was babysitting that night. Debbi, who was ten, later said it was the last good memory she had of her sister. That evening Karen called her best friend and complained a little about the job; she had tried to get out of it, and the two girls had tickets to a baseball game the next day. At about 10 p.m. she called home and spoke to her mother. A little after midnight the couple she was sitting for came home to a house with the lights and the television off. Karen did not meet them at the door, as she usually did.
Two months later, on the morning of May 29, the daughters of Georgianna Worden found their mother dead in her bedroom in Boca Raton. Both women had been attacked at night, in homes where children were sleeping, by a man who had come in through a window. The children were not harmed in either house.
The man was Duane Eugene Owen, then twenty-three. He confessed to both killings in June 1984 and was sentenced to death for each. The legal fight over how detectives questioned him changed Florida law on police interrogations and lasted until his execution on June 15, 2023, thirty-nine years after Karen Slattery died.
Owen was born on February 13, 1961, and grew up in the Midwest, according to WPTV's account of his court record. The details of his childhood come mainly from mitigation evidence at his trials and from the lawyer who defended him at his 1999 retrial, Carey Haughwout, who later became Palm Beach County's elected public defender.
The trial judge in the Worden case accepted as mitigating facts that Owen's mother died when he was very young and that his alcoholic father killed himself about a year later. Owen and his brother were moved among foster homes until the brother ran away, and Owen was physically and sexually abused in foster care. Haughwout described the family home in more detail in 2023: severely alcoholic parents, a violent father, routine physical and sexual abuse, a half-brother locked in the basement. She said Owen was nine when his mother died slowly of cancer and thirteen when his father killed himself in the family garage. According to Haughwout, the two boys were afraid of being separated and left their father's body in the car for several days.
Owen then lived in a Michigan orphanage until he was eighteen. Haughwout said the defense later learned that it had been closed because of widespread sexual and physical abuse of the children there, and found former residents who described it. Owen enlisted in the Army twice and, according to the trial judge's mitigation findings, wanted to become a police officer. He said he had months of court-ordered therapy in Michigan in 1983.
After the orphanage he traveled around the country. In 1982 he came to South Florida, where his brother lived. That year he was arrested on burglary charges, and between 1982 and 1984 he was arrested on various charges, including attempted murder and sexual battery, according to WPTV. By 1984, according to McCoy, he lived not far from the Worden home, on the other side of the railroad tracks.
Karen Slattery was fourteen and a freshman at what was then Pope John Paul II High School in Boca Raton. Her father was Eugene Slattery; she had a brother and a younger sister, Debbi. She did gymnastics, and Debbi copied her in everything. "I'm sure I was the annoying sister," Debbi said in 2023. "Everything she did, I had to do."
Her best friend, Margaret Garetano-Castor, said the two were "more like sisters." She remembered Karen as small and "spunky," and "a force." A classmate, Diane Brewer, then a sophomore, called her "kind" and "vivacious." A neighbor, Mary Kay Lorne, said Karen babysat for her own children and was "so loving to our kids."
On March 24, 1984, she was babysitting two young sisters at a home in an upscale part of Delray Beach. Garetano-Castor spoke to her on the phone a few hours before she died. "In hindsight, had I known, I would have kept her on the phone forever," she said.
The facts below come from the Florida Supreme Court's opinions. Owen cut the screen of a bedroom window to get into the house. He went in once, saw Karen fixing one of the children's hair, and left. He came back after the children were asleep, armed himself with a hammer and a knife, and attacked her. The medical examiner found that she had been stabbed or cut eighteen times, and five of the wounds went into her lungs. Owen dragged her into a bedroom and sexually assaulted her. He then showered, set the clocks back to give himself an alibi, and left. He left behind a bloody footprint.
The couple she was babysitting for came home shortly after midnight and called police. The two children had slept through the attack in another room and were not hurt.
Debbi Slattery woke in the night to the sound of sobbing. Her mother ran to her, took her by the shoulders and told her that Karen was dead. "I was 10. Fifth grade," Debbi said nearly four decades later. "Everything in my life changed after that." At Karen's school, Brewer recalled, the students were called to Mass and told. "This rocked us to our core," she said.
No one was arrested. Delray Beach detectives, led by Lt. Rick Lincoln, kept the case open.
Georgianna Worden was thirty-eight, a single mother of two daughters, Kara and Stephanie. At the time of her death she was an instructor at the College of Boca Raton, which later became Lynn University. Her nephew, Trevor Staniec, said she worked two jobs to raise and protect her daughters. She was barely five feet tall; one of her daughters described her as "small body, small face, huge smile, all the time." Staniec's family, from the New York area, visited every year, and he remembered her organizing beach days so that the cousins could be together. Her best friend, Mary Lou Metzger, called her "this little pip-squeak" with "the energy she had and the pistol she was."
On the evening of May 28, 1984, Worden and Metzger watched a Barry Manilow concert on television at Metzger's home. Later that night her daughters, then thirteen and nine, came in to say good night while she sat in bed reading a book. The girls slept in the front bedroom.
Owen had been watching the house. Retired Boca Raton police Sgt. Kevin McCoy, the lead detective, said Owen could see Worden through her bedroom window on the northeast side of the house and "was intent on getting in." According to the Eleventh Circuit's account of the trial record, Owen broke in that night, took a knife and a hammer from the kitchen, took off his outer clothes so they would not be stained, put socks on his hands, and blocked the door of the room where the children slept. He struck Worden on the head as she slept. She woke, and he hit her four more times on the head and face. Her neck was compressed hard enough to break bones, and she was sexually assaulted. The medical evidence suggested that she lived for several minutes to an hour after the first blow. In his videotaped confession, Owen said he had planned to wake her and threaten her with hostages.
The next morning one of the daughters, getting ready for school, found her mother's bedroom door locked and a kitchen window broken. She unlocked the door and found her mother. Paramedics were called, but Worden was dead. Her nephew, then ten, was in Florida with his family on their annual visit. "We were present when the authorities called the house," he said.
McCoy said the investigators had to establish her identity circumstantially because her injuries were so severe and she had never been fingerprinted.
The Delray Beach and Boca Raton detectives saw the similarities at once: a woman attacked in her home at night, and children left alone and untouched. "That was a big factor," McCoy said. Lincoln, of Delray Beach, and McCoy, of Boca Raton, began working together.
McCoy had a sketch from the victim of an indecent exposure case nearby. When it was compared with other cases under investigation, Owen's name came up. He had been active within a few blocks of the Worden house and lived nearby. "We just couldn't eliminate him," McCoy said. Two burglary victims identified Owen from photographs, and there were outstanding warrants for his arrest.
A few days after the murder, according to McCoy, Owen was spotted riding a bicycle not far from the Worden house. Boca Raton police stopped and arrested him on the burglary charges and the warrants. The 1992 Florida Supreme Court opinion gives the date of the arrest as May 30, 1984; the Eleventh Circuit gives May 29. Either way he was in custody within about a day of the discovery of Worden's body, and at first he was held on charges that had nothing to do with either murder.
What happened over the next three weeks became the center of the legal case for the rest of Owen's life.
Owen talked. The courts that reviewed the videotapes found that most of the sessions were started by Owen himself. He expressed contempt for lawyers, said he did not want one, and said he wanted to help "clean up" crimes. He asked that Lt. Mark Woods, a Delray Beach officer he knew, be present. He was told his rights repeatedly and waived them. He confessed to numerous burglaries, sexual batteries and lesser crimes. Some of those confessions described a pattern: he would undress, break into a house, and choke or beat a sleeping woman before sexually assaulting her. McCoy said Owen called his prowling "going out on maneuvers."
When the questions turned to the Worden murder, Owen stopped talking and ended the session. On June 18 he contacted the police again. On June 21, Delray Beach police took an inked impression of his feet, and Boca Raton police told him he was being charged with first-degree murder on the strength of fingerprint and other evidence. His fingerprint had been found on a library book in Worden's home. After seeing the evidence, he confessed to the burglary, the sexual battery and the murder. "It was like once he knew you had him pretty good, he gave it up," McCoy said in 2023. "Eventually, he went down through certain other aspects of the crime that only he would know."
Later the same day, Delray Beach detectives questioned him about Karen Slattery. Lincoln led that session. Owen first denied it. Then he was shown the bloody footprint from the house and his own inked footprint, and he confessed.
Twice during that session he balked. Asked whether he had picked out the house in advance, he said, "I'd rather not talk about it." The officers asked him why and pressed him to explain. Later, asked about a bicycle, he said, "I don't want to talk about it." An officer answered, "Don't you think it's necessary to talk about it, Duane?" He went on, and the statements he made afterward were the ones used to convict him.
He made his first court appearance on the murder charge on June 22 and was indicted on July 11, 1984.
Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Richard Burk presided over both of Owen's first trials. Sandra Kabboush, later Sandra McSorley, prosecuted both.
The Slattery case went first, in 1985. Owen was defended by Michael Salnick, who described himself to WPTV as "a baby lawyer" at the time, and Barry Krischer, who later became Palm Beach County's elected state attorney. Burk ruled that the confession could be used. "At trial, there was overwhelming evidence," Salnick said in 2023. "There was the confession. There was physical evidence. You know, we argued reasonable doubt." A podiatry expert testified that the bloody footprint was "consistent with" Owen's foot, though he could not say it was Owen's alone. The jury convicted Owen of first-degree murder, burglary and sexual battery, and Burk sentenced him to death. Karen's mother testified at trial, and family members testified at the penalty phase.
The Worden trial followed in 1986. Owen's lawyers, Craig Boudreau and Don Kohl, attacked the police investigation and argued that the confession was a ploy for attention. Before trial Owen complained that Boudreau had a conflict of interest, because he was a former assistant state attorney who shared a townhouse with a prosecutor; Burk refused to let Boudreau withdraw. The evidence included the confession, the fingerprint on the library book, and testimony from McCoy. On the stand McCoy described a conversation in which Owen said he would go to trial "anyway" because he had nothing to lose. McCoy asked what would happen if he were acquitted. "No one would be the winner," Owen said. "Then the hurting will start all over again," McCoy replied, and Owen nodded. The defense moved for a mistrial over that testimony and was refused.
The jury convicted Owen of first-degree murder, sexual battery and burglary and recommended death by ten votes to two. Burk found four aggravating factors: a prior violent felony conviction; that the murder was committed during a burglary or sexual battery; that it was especially atrocious or cruel; and that it was cold, calculated and premeditated. He weighed them against the mitigating evidence of Owen's childhood and the finding that Owen's mind had "snapped" during the murder, and imposed death.
On March 1, 1990, the Florida Supreme Court threw out the Slattery conviction. In Owen v. State, the court found that the confession was voluntary and that the questioning had not been coercive. But it held that Owen's two remarks were "at the least, an equivocal invocation of the Miranda right to terminate questioning, which could only be clarified." Under the law as the court then understood it, the detectives could either stop or ask questions limited to clarifying what Owen meant. Instead they had pressed him to keep talking about the crime. Because his statements were "the essence of the case against him," the court could not call the error harmless, and it ordered a new trial. Justice Barkett, joined by Justice Kogan, wrote that Owen's right to cut off questioning had not been "scrupulously honored." Justice Grimes, joined by Chief Justice Ehrlich, dissented: in his view, Owen had been declining to discuss particular subjects, not asking to end the interview.
The Worden conviction survived. In January 1992 the same court affirmed it. It rejected the challenges to the stop, the arrest and the interrogation, and held that Owen's right to counsel on the murder charge had not attached until his June 22 court appearance, the day after he confessed. The court found that the penalty-phase use of the Slattery conviction, by then reversed, was harmless, because the prior-violent-felony aggravator was still supported by a separate conviction for attempted first-degree murder. That conviction concerned an attack on a woman named Marilee Manley, who survived. Barkett and Kogan dissented, arguing that the confession violated Owen's right to counsel under the Florida Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case later in 1992, and the Worden death sentence became final.
The Slattery retrial was delayed for years. In 1991, with the family's permission, Karen Slattery's body was exhumed so that prosecutors could compare her wounds with a knife believed to have been the murder weapon.
In the meantime the law changed. In 1994, in Davis v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court held that after a suspect has knowingly waived his rights, police may keep questioning him unless he clearly asks for a lawyer. Palm Beach County prosecutors used Davis to try to get Owen's confession back into evidence. On May 8, 1997, in State v. Owen, the Florida Supreme Court agreed. Writing for the majority, Justice Grimes, who had dissented in 1990, held that the Davis reasoning applied to equivocal requests to stop questioning as well as to requests for a lawyer, and that "police in Florida need not ask clarifying questions" when a suspect who has validly waived his rights makes only an ambiguous request to end the interview. The court said the intervening Davis decision justified setting aside its own 1990 ruling, even though that ruling was the law of the case. Owen's original conviction was not reinstated; he would be retried, and the confession's admissibility would be judged under the new rule. Justice Shaw concurred but said "clearly" needed a definition that took account of a suspect's schooling and command of English. Chief Justice Kogan dissented and would have kept the clarification rule under the state constitution.
The court receded from Long v. State, a 1987 decision, and other rulings to the extent they had required Florida police to stop or clarify.
The Slattery case was tried again in 1999 before Circuit Judge Harold Cohen, with Haughwout as Owen's lawyer. The confession was admitted. The jury found Owen guilty of first-degree murder, burglary of a dwelling while armed, and, according to the Florida Supreme Court's later opinion, attempted sexual battery with a deadly weapon. In March 1999 the jury recommended death by ten votes to two, and on March 23 Cohen imposed it.
Cohen found four aggravating factors, including a prior violent felony, that the killing was especially atrocious or cruel, and that it was cold, calculated and premeditated. He found three statutory mitigating factors: extreme mental or emotional disturbance, substantially impaired capacity, and Owen's age, twenty-three. He also weighed sixteen others, among them the abusive childhood and organic brain damage. Reading from his sentencing order, Cohen said he had considered Owen's tortured childhood. "Nevertheless, he was not so sick that he was unable to become mean, calculating, cruel and evil, a wicked person who now deserves to die."
On October 23, 2003, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed. It held that the confession was voluntary and that, because Owen's remarks were equivocal, the detectives had had no duty to stop. In upholding the finding that the murder was especially cruel, the court relied on the wounds, Karen's conscious suffering, and testimony from Owen's own expert about his desire for his victim's fear.
The Worden case went through the usual rounds of postconviction review, and Owen lost them all. In 1997 a judge granted him an evidentiary hearing on claims that his trial lawyers had been ineffective or had conflicts. Owen called one witness, Krischer, and then refused to go on. He said that litigating the Worden claims would force him to give up attorney-client privilege in the Slattery case, which was then awaiting retrial. The judge warned him that ending the hearing would end his claims. The Florida Supreme Court held in 2000 that he had waived them. Further state motions and a state habeas petition failed in 2003.
In federal court, Owen's petition was denied in the Southern District of Florida. On May 18, 2009, a panel of the Eleventh Circuit (Judges Dubina, Hull and Marcus, opinion by Judge Hull) affirmed. It held that Owen had waived the claims he refused to litigate in 1997, and it rejected the rest on the merits. Those included his challenge to the confession, his argument that Worden might already have been dead when she was assaulted, a claim that prosecutors withheld notes from his 1983 therapist in Michigan (the court found the state never had them), and a claim about McCoy's "hurting will start all over again" testimony.
In 2016 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down part of Florida's death penalty system in Hurst v. Florida. Owen, whose jury had voted ten to two for death, sought relief. In 2018 the Florida Supreme Court held that Hurst did not apply retroactively to his death sentence, which had become final in 1992.
He spent thirty-seven years on death row and was one of the longest-held prisoners there.
On May 9, 2023, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a death warrant for Owen in the Worden case and set the execution for 6 p.m. on June 15. It was the fourth execution scheduled in Florida that year, after a pause with none since 2019.
Owen's lawyers, from the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel, told the governor that Owen appeared to be insane. They relied on a May 2023 evaluation by a neuropsychologist, Dr. Hyman Eisenstein, who concluded that Owen had schizophrenia and gender dysphoria. According to Eisenstein's report, as quoted by WPTV, Owen believed he was a woman in a man's body and "was trying to fully become the woman he really was." The lawyers also argued that he had dementia. A Palm Beach County judge, Jeffrey Gillen, refused to stay the execution, ruling on May 19 that the request was "premature" because the governor had not yet decided the sanity question.
On May 22, DeSantis temporarily stayed the execution. His order said the allegations were "insufficient assertions of insanity," but that his duty required "the exercise of utmost caution." He appointed three psychiatrists, Drs. Wade Myers, Tonia Werner and Emily Lazarou, as a commission to decide whether Owen understood "the nature and effect of the death penalty and why it is to be imposed upon him." They examined him on May 23. On May 25 the governor adopted their finding that he did and lifted the stay.
The fight then moved to two courts. In Palm Beach County, Gillen rejected Owen's fourth motion for postconviction relief, which argued that brain damage and a declining mental condition were new evidence, that severe mental illness should bar execution, and that thirty-seven years on death row was itself cruel and unusual. He also refused requests for a competency determination and for MRI and PET scans. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed on June 5. It held that the brain-damage claim was not new, since Owen's lawyers had raised it in 1997, and that better imaging was "at best" a tool, not new evidence. Justice Jorge Labarga recused himself.
In Bradford County, where the execution would take place, Circuit Judge James Colaw held a two-day hearing on June 1 and 2 on whether Owen was sane enough to be executed. Eisenstein, who had examined Owen twice in May, testified for the defense, along with a former mental health counselor, Lisa Wiley, who said Owen had told her of gender dysphoria in 1996, and three of his current and former lawyers. Two experts from the 1990s, Drs. Faye Sultan and Frederick Berlin, could not attend and submitted affidavits; neither had seen Owen since 1999. The three state psychiatrists testified that Owen had no mental illness, met the criteria for antisocial personality disorder and was malingering. According to the AP's reading of the record, they said he had a good memory and did not present himself as female, that his schizophrenia was an act he had discussed during evaluations, and that he was sexually sadistic. Four correctional officers testified about his behavior on death row.
Colaw found that Owen was feigning his delusions and had "a rational understanding" of his execution and the reason for it. He found the state's experts "both credible and compelling" and Eisenstein "less credible," noting that Eisenstein had described Owen as a "passive individual who possessed no violent tendencies." On June 9 the Florida Supreme Court affirmed, holding that the question under Panetti v. Quarterman and Madison v. Alabama is whether a prisoner rationally understands why the state seeks to execute him, "not whether he has any particular memory or any particular mental illness."
Owen's lawyer, Lisa Fusaro, then asked the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay, arguing that Owen "lacks a rational understanding of the connection between his crime and impending execution due to his fixed psychotic delusions and dementia," and that the commission's psychiatrists had seen him for about 100 minutes and done no testing. The state answered that it was "not in the public interest" to delay further and that Owen was "a malingering defendant." On June 14 the Court denied the stay in a two-line order, without explanation.
Owen woke at 7 a.m. on his last day and ate his last meal at 9:45: a bacon cheeseburger without a bun, onion rings, strawberries, a vanilla milkshake, cherry ice cream and coffee. He had no visitors, according to the Florida Department of Corrections. He had been moved from Union Correctional Institution to Florida State Prison, a mile away, for the execution.
Outside, in a thunderstorm, members of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty held a vigil. Two people who had befriended Owen in prison over about five years, Ted Wilson and Melanie Edwards, held up pictures of him as a boy. Wilson described him as funny and "obsessed with science" and said he had expressed regret. In Boynton Beach, Karen Slattery's childhood friends gathered at her grave. "We choose today, with everything going on tonight, to celebrate Karen," Garetano-Castor said.
Twenty-one witnesses watched the execution, among them members of both families, retired detectives, and Haughwout, who sat three seats from Debbi Johnson, as Karen's sister was now named. The procedure began at 6:01 p.m. Asked whether he wanted to make a final statement, Owen said, "No." His eyes stayed closed. He breathed heavily and twitched, then stopped moving after about 6:06. A physician pronounced him dead at 6:14 p.m. He was sixty-two. He was the fourth person executed in Florida in 2023 and, by WPTV's count, the third person convicted of a Palm Beach County murder to be executed by the state.
Reporters were later given a handwritten statement that Owen wrote that morning. The anti-death-penalty group posted it: "I have transcended space and time. I have seen the visions of the crow, my energy and particles will transform ad infinitum (forever), I will live on. I am Tula. 13."
Johnson, a sheriff's deputy in Monroe County, spoke to reporters afterward. She had promised to look into Owen's eyes as he died, because, she said, he had looked into her sister's. "He didn't open his eyes," she said. "I know because I looked at them." She said closure was a myth, but justice was real. "Thirty-nine years of this process is finally over. The Slattery family may now close Karen's book, put it on a shelf and move forward." And: "He served his sentence. The end."
Karen Slattery's family lost more after 1984. Her father, Eugene Slattery, died in a plane crash on Father's Day five years after her murder and is buried beside her in Boynton Beach. Debbi Johnson's husband, Brent, died in a boating accident on Mother's Day 2013. Johnson said her mother used to tell her that a rainbow meant "Karen smiling down on us," and on the rainy day of the execution she had hoped to see one.
Karen's friends planted a tree in front of their old high school in her memory. "It was a tiny, tiny, little tree, and it's grown so big," Garetano-Castor said. Some of their own children now attend the school. A research center at Florida Atlantic University, the Karen Slattery Education Research Center for Child Development, was named for her; it closed permanently during the COVID-19 pandemic. Years after the murder, Diane Brewer babysat for the same two children in the same house. "They don't remember," she said. "They don't know."
Georgianna Worden's daughters went to live with Staniec's family in New York. "It didn't fracture us," he said. "It didn't destroy us." Both are now adults with careers who visit their mother's grave in Florida. Asked what he would tell his aunt, Staniec said, "She should be very, very proud of her daughters."
WPTV's 2023 guide to the case recorded what became of the people who handled it. Kevin McCoy, a lieutenant at the time of the arrest, later rose to sergeant and retired. Rick Lincoln served as interim Delray Beach police chief in 1990, then worked for the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office and as Lantana police chief before retiring in 2010. Judge Burk died in 2019 at eighty-seven. Kabboush was appointed a circuit judge in 2000 and retired in 2015. Haughwout, who stayed in touch with Owen by mail, phone and visits for more than two decades, said he was "a very complicated man" with "some very severe mental illness," and argued against his execution. "I don't think killing helps prevent killing," she said. "I somewhat understand the desire of victims for this penalty."
Proven: Owen was convicted of the murders of Karen Slattery and Georgianna Worden, with burglary and sexual assault charges in each case. He was also convicted of the attempted first-degree murder and armed burglary of Marilee Manley's home. Besides his two death sentences, the AP reported, he received six life sentences.
Confessed: Owen confessed to both murders and to numerous burglaries and sexual batteries. The victims of the other attacks are not named in the opinions reviewed here.
Reported: the AP reported that he attacked two other women in Palm Beach County who survived, and that all four attacks took place just before and after his twenty-third birthday.
Suspected, not proved: McCoy said in 2023, "In my opinion, there may be more homicides out there," and called Owen "the beginning, in my opinion, of a serial killer." No other killing has been charged or publicly linked to Owen.
Disputed: Owen's mental state. His defense experts described schizophrenia, gender dysphoria, brain damage and dementia; the state's psychiatrists, and the courts in 2023, found no current mental illness and concluded that he was malingering. The Florida courts and the governor's commission all found that he understood why he was being executed. Accounts of his childhood also differ in detail: the court record says his mother died when he was very young and his father a year later, while Haughwout put his ages at nine and thirteen.
February 13, 1961: Duane Eugene Owen born; grows up in the Midwest.
1982: Moves to South Florida, where his brother lives; arrested on burglary charges.
March 24, 1984: Karen Slattery, 14, killed while babysitting in Delray Beach.
May 28 to 29, 1984: Georgianna Worden, 38, killed in her Boca Raton home; her daughters find her the next morning.
May 29 or 30, 1984: Owen arrested in Boca Raton on burglary charges and warrants.
June 21, 1984: Confesses to the Worden murder, then to the Slattery murder.
July 11, 1984: Indicted.
1985: Convicted of the Slattery murder and sentenced to death.
1986: Convicted of the Worden murder; jury recommends death 10-2.
March 1, 1990: Florida Supreme Court reverses the Slattery conviction over the Miranda issue.
1991: Karen Slattery's body exhumed ahead of the retrial.
January 23, 1992: Florida Supreme Court affirms the Worden conviction and death sentence.
May 8, 1997: State v. Owen adopts the Davis rule for equivocal requests to end questioning.
November 1997: Owen walks out of his own evidentiary hearing in the Worden case.
March 23, 1999: Sentenced to death again for the Slattery murder after retrial.
October 23, 2003: Florida Supreme Court affirms the Slattery retrial.
May 18, 2009: Eleventh Circuit affirms denial of federal habeas relief.
June 26, 2018: Florida Supreme Court rules Hurst does not apply to his sentence.
May 9, 2023: DeSantis signs the death warrant in the Worden case.
May 22 to 25, 2023: Execution stayed while three psychiatrists examine Owen; stay lifted.
June 1 to 2, 2023: Sanity hearing in Bradford County.
June 5 and June 9, 2023: Florida Supreme Court rejects both appeals.
June 14, 2023: U.S. Supreme Court denies a stay.
June 15, 2023: Owen executed at Florida State Prison; pronounced dead at 6:14 p.m.