On July 30, 1993, Dustin Lee Honken walked into a federal courtroom in Iowa for a plea hearing. He had told the court he would plead guilty to conspiring to manufacture methamphetamine. That day he declined. He told his lawyer he had heard a rumor that the government's main witness had skipped town, and he handed the lawyer a VHS tape on which that witness, Greg Nicholson, said Honken was not guilty.
Nicholson had not skipped town. Five days earlier he had disappeared together with Lori Duncan, the woman whose house he was staying in, and her two daughters, Kandi, 10, and Amber, 6. In November a second man who could have testified against Honken, Terry DeGeus, also disappeared. None of the five was found for seven years. Their bodies were recovered only after Honken's girlfriend, Angela Johnson, drew maps of the graves in a county jail for a man she believed could get another prisoner to take the blame.
Honken grew up in Iowa and was later described in press reports as formerly of Britt, a small town in north central Iowa. According to the Associated Press, he learned to make methamphetamine after studying chemistry in college. In 1992 he and his best friend, Timothy Cutkomp, began manufacturing the drug near Tucson, Arizona. The 1999 Eighth Circuit opinion says the operation started with money from Honken's brother.
Honken sold to only two dealers, the court found, and both were in the Mason City area of northern Iowa: Greg Nicholson and Terry DeGeus. In 1993 Honken met DeGeus's girlfriend at the time, Angela Johnson. The Johnson opinion says DeGeus had sent her to deliver drugs or money to Honken. Honken and Johnson began a relationship, and later that year she became pregnant with his child. Johnson already had a daughter.
In March 1993 law enforcement began investigating Nicholson. After officers searched his house, he agreed to cooperate. On March 21, 1993, officers set up a recorded meeting at Nicholson's home in Iowa, at which he and Honken talked about methamphetamine and Nicholson paid Honken $3,000 for past deliveries. Officers arrested Honken and Cutkomp the same day.
Honken moved from Arizona to Mason City after the arrest. He was first charged with state drug offenses. After Nicholson testified before a federal grand jury in April 1993, Honken was indicted for conspiracy to manufacture methamphetamine and the state charges were dropped in favor of the federal case. He was released on bond and told the court he would plead guilty. The plea hearing was set for July 30.
In June and July 1993, Honken and Johnson went looking for Nicholson. They often asked Johnson's friend Christi Gaubatz to babysit Johnson's daughter while they searched, and they borrowed Gaubatz's car so that Nicholson would not recognize them. On July 7, 1993, Johnson bought a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol at a pawn shop about an hour from home.
Greg Nicholson was one of Honken's two dealers, he had agreed to cooperate after the search of his home, he had recorded Honken and he had testified before the grand jury. He was the witness the government's 1993 case depended on.
Lori Duncan had no connection to Honken's business. The Eighth Circuit described her as a single, working mother raising two girls, Kandi, then 10, and Amber, then 6. A mutual friend introduced her to Nicholson in mid-July 1993, and he began staying at her house. He had been there only a short time when Honken and Johnson found him. Prosecutors told Johnson's jury, in words the Eighth Circuit quoted, that the victims "were murdered because they were witnesses, not because they were involved in the drug trade." Lori Duncan and her daughters were not even that. They were in the house.
On the night of July 24, Honken and Johnson again asked Gaubatz to babysit and again borrowed her car. They usually came back around midnight. That night they came back at about five in the morning.
What happened in between was laid out in the evidence at Johnson's trial. Johnson knocked at Lori Duncan's door carrying a cosmetics bag and said she had an appointment for a product demonstration, which got her and Honken inside. The two of them rushed the people in the house. Nicholson was videotaped making statements that cleared Honken; this is the tape Honken later gave his lawyer. Johnson took Kandi and Amber upstairs and had them pack, either so the girls would think they were going on a trip or so that anyone who came to the house later would think the family had left.
The adults were bound and gagged, and all four were driven to a wooded area. Honken shot the two adults while Johnson waited in the car with the children, the court said, and then the girls were taken out and shot. All four were buried in a single grave that had been dug in advance. When the bodies were found in 2000, Kandi and Amber each had a single gunshot wound to the back of the head; Nicholson and Lori Duncan had been bound, gagged and shot several times, including once in the head.
On July 25, Nicholson, Lori Duncan and her daughters were simply gone. Five days later Honken appeared at his plea hearing and declined to plead.
Around August 2, 1993, after warrants were issued for Nicholson and officers could not find him, the government realized he was missing. Investigators turned to Honken's only other dealer, Terry DeGeus. Honken told Cutkomp he was worried DeGeus would testify against him, and he believed DeGeus had been subpoenaed to the grand jury.
DeGeus was 32, according to the Associated Press. He was also Johnson's former boyfriend and the father of a 10-year-old daughter. On the evening of November 5, 1993, he dropped his daughter off at his mother's house and told his mother he was going to meet Johnson. He said he would be back shortly to pick his daughter up. He never returned. The Johnson opinion says he agreed to meet her because he still had feelings for her, even though he suspected something had happened to Nicholson.
The evidence showed that DeGeus was shot and beaten with a baseball bat. One witness testified that Johnson told her she had held a gun on DeGeus while Honken beat him. His body was later found a few miles from the other grave, face down in a shallow hole in a field behind an abandoned house.
In the winter of 1993 to 1994, Christi Gaubatz was cleaning a bedroom closet when she found a large black handgun with a silencer attached, in a cosmetics bag that belonged to Johnson. She called Johnson and told her to take it away. Johnson told her not to worry, because Honken would take care of it. That winter Honken asked Cutkomp to help him destroy a large black pistol. The two men cut and melted it with a torch and threw the pieces into ditches along a country road. The 1999 opinion records Cutkomp's testimony that it was a Tec-9.
With Nicholson and DeGeus missing, the government had no witnesses, and the court dismissed the 1993 drug charges for lack of prosecution. Honken kept working. He built a complex methamphetamine laboratory, the Eighth Circuit found, and in the fall of 1995 recruited a co-worker, Dan Cobeen, to help him. Cobeen went to the police. With his help officers ran an undercover investigation, and on February 7, 1996, they searched Honken's house and seized a methamphetamine lab, chemicals and equipment, along with notes and books on making drugs and on how to bind and gag prisoners.
Honken was charged again. While that case was pending he plotted to kill Cobeen and certain police officers and chemists, and to destroy evidence. This time Cutkomp cooperated. He wore a wire and recorded hours of conversations in which Honken referred to eliminating witnesses in 1993 and described a plan to beat the new charges by killing witnesses and officers. The 1999 opinion adds that Cutkomp testified Honken had talked about burying bodies and building an incinerator.
On the strength of those tapes, the court revoked Honken's release and he was held in the Woodbury County Jail in Sioux City. There, the Eighth Circuit found, he told other inmates in detail that he had killed witnesses to avoid the earlier charges. He gave one inmate directions to Cutkomp's house and asked him to kill Cutkomp; according to the 1999 opinion, that inmate, Dean Donaldson, went to the police. With another inmate Honken tried to escape by breaking a hole in a cell wall and arranging for Johnson to bring a hacksaw and rope. Jailers found the hole.
On June 2, 1997, Honken pleaded guilty to the drug charges. The district court gave him credit for accepting responsibility. The government appealed, and in 1999 the Eighth Circuit reversed that credit, calling his conduct "a methodical, continued effort to obstruct justice" and "conduct that strikes at the very heart of the administration of justice." He was resentenced and received 324 months, or 27 years, in prison. He was sent to the federal penitentiary at Florence, Colorado.
The murder investigation stayed open. In 2000 Christi Gaubatz decided to cooperate and told investigators about the nights she had babysat while Honken and Johnson searched for Nicholson, and about the gun in her closet. In July 2000 a federal grand jury indicted Johnson for the murders of Nicholson, the Duncans and DeGeus.
Johnson was held in the Benton County Jail in Iowa. There she got to know Robert McNeese, a federal prisoner serving a life sentence for an unrelated crime, who was working for the government. McNeese claimed ties to organized crime, according to the Johnson opinion, and proposed a plan: another inmate already serving life would falsely confess to all five murders. To make the confession believable, he said, that inmate would have to lead the authorities to the bodies. Johnson drew maps and wrote notes showing where the five victims were buried, and gave them to McNeese. He turned them over to law enforcement.
Using Johnson's maps, officers found Greg Nicholson, Lori Duncan, Kandi and Amber buried together in one hole in a wooded area outside Mason City, and Terry DeGeus a few miles away. The Gazette dates the discovery to October 2000. DeGeus's skull had been so badly broken that it required significant reconstruction.
At Florence, Honken became convinced he would be charged with the murders. According to the Eighth Circuit, he planned to call associates as witnesses at his trial in Sioux City, overpower and kill the guards, escape, and then kill witnesses, law enforcement officers and a federal prosecutor. He and his associates practiced taking an officer's weapon and removing handcuffs with minimal tools, and trained in martial arts scenarios built around an armed escort. He was charged with the five murders on August 30, 2001.
Honken and Johnson were tried separately in the Northern District of Iowa before Judge Mark W. Bennett. Iowa has no state death penalty, but federal law allows a death sentence for a killing committed in furtherance of a continuing criminal enterprise or a large drug conspiracy, and the government sought death against both.
Before trial Honken argued that his 1997 drug conviction barred a second prosecution. Judge Bennett rejected that argument in 2003, and the Eighth Circuit later agreed, noting that the delay in charging the murders was Honken's own doing: "Honken himself deliberately concealed the bodies by burying them in a remote wooded area."
Honken's trial began in August 2004 in Sioux City. Because of his escape attempts and threats, Judge Bennett ordered him to wear a stun belt and to be shackled and bolted to the floor. To keep the jury from seeing the restraints, Honken was never moved in front of the jurors, skirts were hung on the counsel tables, and the shackles were fitted with enough chain to let him move naturally and to make no noise. The Associated Press reported that the jury was anonymous.
The government called 54 witnesses, introduced more than 300 exhibits and presented 13 days of testimony. Gaubatz testified about the borrowed car, the night the couple came home near dawn and the gun in her closet. Cutkomp testified that he helped Honken destroy a gun. Several inmates testified that Honken admitted killing witnesses, and the jury heard the recordings in which he talked about eliminating witnesses in 1993. Johnson's maps were admitted over Honken's objection; on appeal the Eighth Circuit called their importance to the government's case "relatively minor" beside the rest of the evidence.
On October 14, 2004, the jury found Honken guilty on all 17 counts.
Penalty deliberations began on October 21, 2004, and were interrupted almost at once. One juror, known in the record as Juror 523, asked for an excuse from work because, she said, her boss had been making comments to her about the trial, such as "guilty, guilty, guilty." Judge Bennett questioned her and then each of the other jurors individually. All who knew anything of the comments said they did not affect their ability to be fair. Honken moved for a mistrial; the judge denied it and gave him the choice of going ahead with eleven jurors or seating an alternate. Without waiving his objection, Honken chose an alternate who had heard nothing of the remarks, and the reconstituted jury started its penalty deliberations over.
On October 27, 2004, the jury voted for death for the murders of Kandi and Amber Duncan and for life imprisonment for the murders of Greg Nicholson, Lori Duncan and Terry DeGeus. At a hearing that December the judge questioned Juror 523, her boss and co-workers, and found that the only remark supported by credible testimony was a joking suggestion, made before she was seated, that she say something "outrageous" to get out of jury duty.
The Gazette later reported that the verdict was the first time in 40 years that an Iowan had been sentenced to death. The last federal execution carried out in Iowa itself, according to the Bureau of Prisons, was that of Victor Feguer, hanged at the Iowa State Penitentiary at Fort Madison in 1963 for a kidnapping.
Honken was formally sentenced in October 2005 in federal court in Cedar Rapids. Judge Bennett imposed death for the two girls' murders, life for the adults' and prison terms on the other counts. In an interview with The Gazette just before he was sentenced, Honken, then 37, denied killing the five victims but said he knew who did. He said he was "not worried about" the death penalty. "It doesn't even faze me," he said, adding that it would be years before any execution. "I'm not acting like I'm some kind of brave dude."
Judge Bennett, who said he generally opposed the death penalty, told the Associated Press years later that he agreed with the jury. "I am not going to lose any sleep if he is executed," he said. "Normally I would, but the evidence was so overwhelming."
Honken was sent to federal death row at Terre Haute, Indiana, in 2005.
Honken raised eleven issues on direct appeal. On September 12, 2008, a panel of Judges Riley, Gruender and Shepherd affirmed in every respect. The court held that his drug conspiracy murder counts duplicated his CCE murder counts, a point the government conceded, but that he had waived the issue by not raising it in the trial court. It held that the successive prosecution did not violate double jeopardy; that Johnson's maps were not testimonial and that any error in admitting them was harmless; that the shackles, bolting and stun belt were justified by his escape history, threats and martial arts training; that substituting the alternate juror during penalty deliberations was permitted; and that the boss's remark did not taint the verdict. In that last ruling the court held for the first time that Federal Rule of Evidence 606(b) bars a juror from testifying after the verdict about whether an outside influence affected his or her impartiality. It also rejected his arguments that he had a right to address the jury without cross-examination and that the death penalty is unconstitutional because innocent people may be executed, noting that Honken did not claim to be one of them.
On December 14, 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case, The Gazette reported. Honken then sought relief from his convictions in the district court. On October 4, 2013, Chief U.S. District Judge Linda Reade denied it in a 404-page ruling, finding that he had received a fair trial and effective lawyers. "In sum, (Honken's) convictions and sentences of death withstand scrutiny even in light of the heightened standards that are applied in capital cases," she wrote.
Johnson went to trial in 2005. A jury convicted her of aiding and abetting the five murders in furtherance of a continuing criminal enterprise and while engaged in a drug conspiracy. It imposed death for the murders of Lori, Kandi and Amber Duncan and Terry DeGeus, and life for Greg Nicholson's. The Gazette reported that she was the first woman sentenced to death in the federal system since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.
In 2007 the Eighth Circuit affirmed her convictions and death sentences, but sent the case back so that the duplicate drug conspiracy murder counts could be vacated. It rejected her claim that she had played a minor role. "There was thus sufficient evidence that Johnson was an essential participant in the murders," the court wrote. It also held that the difference between her sentences and Honken's did not violate the Eighth Amendment.
On March 22, 2012, Judge Bennett threw out Johnson's death sentences in a 448-page ruling, while leaving her convictions in place. He said the evidence of her guilt was overwhelming, but that her trial lawyers had been "alarmingly dysfunctional." In the penalty phase, he found, they had failed to present expert testimony about her mental health, including brain impairments, personality disorders and her earlier methamphetamine use, and had failed to present evidence that might have undercut the government's claim that she took part in DeGeus's killing out of revenge for their abusive relationship. Bennett acknowledged that he had tried to assemble a "dream team" for her defense, because few Iowa lawyers had capital experience. "I believe that I have done my duty, in light of what is required by the Constitution," he wrote. At the time she was 48, a mother of two, held at the federal medical center for women in Fort Worth, Texas.
On December 17, 2014, federal prosecutors filed notice that they would not seek the death penalty against her again. The filing gave no reason. The Gazette reported that she would likely be sentenced to life in prison without parole.
For years after Honken's appeals ended, no federal executions took place. In July 2019 Attorney General William Barr announced that they would resume using a single drug, pentobarbital, and Honken's execution was set for January 15, 2020. On November 20, 2019, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington put that date and three others on hold, finding the inmates were likely to show that the new protocol conflicted with the Federal Death Penalty Act. Because Iowa has no death penalty, The Gazette explained, the government had chosen to follow the law of Indiana, where Honken was held.
In April 2020 the appeals court in Washington threw out Chutkan's order. On June 15, 2020, the Justice Department announced new dates for four federal prisoners convicted of killing children. Its release said Honken "shot and killed five people," two men who planned to testify against him "and a single, working mother and her ten-year-old and six-year-old daughters," and set his execution for July 17. On June 29 the Supreme Court refused to block the executions, with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissenting.
Honken's lawyer, Shawn Nolan, said his trial and sentencing had been "plagued by misconduct and the ineffectiveness of counsel," and described him as "a deeply remorseful and devout Catholic and loving father of two children." The Iowa Catholic bishops asked President Donald Trump to commute the sentence. Honken's spiritual adviser, Father Mark O'Keefe, 64, joined a lawsuit seeking a delay, saying he was "morally and spiritually obligated" to give Honken last rites but feared the risk of the coronavirus at the prison.
The federal government executed Daniel Lewis Lee on July 14, 2020, its first execution since 2003, and Wesley Ira Purkey on July 16. In the same week a federal judge refused Honken's request to delay his execution because of the pandemic, saying the Bureau of Prisons was best placed to weigh the health risks. Early on Friday, July 17, a federal appeals court denied his last request to block it.
That afternoon Honken, 52, was put to death by lethal injection at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute. He was pronounced dead at 4:36 p.m. ET, NPR reported, the third federal prisoner executed that week. For his last words he recited lines from "Heaven-Haven," a poem by the Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. He did not apologize to the victims' families, according to NPR.
Justice Department spokesperson Kerri Kupec said in a statement: "Nearly three decades after Honken coldly ended the lives of five people, including two young girls, all in an effort to protect himself and his criminal enterprise, he has finally faced justice."
Nolan said Honken "recognized and repented for the crimes he had committed, and spent his time in prison atoning for them." "There was no reason for the government to kill him, in haste or at all," he said. "The man they killed today was a human being, who could have spent the rest of his days helping others and further redeeming himself."
Honken's case closed with his execution on July 17, 2020. His was the third of 13 federal executions carried out in the last months of President Trump's first term. In December 2024 President Joe Biden commuted 37 of the 40 remaining federal death sentences to life without parole; Honken had been executed four years earlier, and Johnson had already been off death row since 2012.
Johnson's convictions stand. Her death sentences were vacated in 2012 and the government gave up seeking death in December 2014.
Proven in court: Honken's guilt on all 17 counts, including the five murders, by a jury verdict upheld on direct appeal and on collateral review. Johnson's convictions for aiding and abetting the same five murders were also upheld.
Who did what on the two nights rests on the evidence at the two trials as the Eighth Circuit summarized it: that Honken shot the adults while Johnson waited with the girls, and that Honken beat DeGeus while, by one witness's account, Johnson held a gun on him. Neither defendant testified to it. Honken denied the killings in his 2005 interview, though he said he knew who had done them, and his lawyer later said he had repented.
Press accounts differ on smaller points. Several Gazette and Associated Press reports describe both Nicholson and DeGeus as dealers who had become informants; the courts describe Nicholson as a cooperating witness and DeGeus as a potential witness Honken feared would testify. Some reports say the victims were taken to a field; the Eighth Circuit says the grave of the first four was in a wooded area outside Mason City, and that DeGeus was found in a field a few miles away.
1992: Honken and Timothy Cutkomp begin making methamphetamine near Tucson, Arizona.
March 21, 1993: Nicholson records a meeting with Honken; Honken and Cutkomp are arrested.
April 1993: Nicholson testifies before a federal grand jury; Honken is indicted.
July 7, 1993: Johnson buys a 9 mm pistol.
July 24 to 25, 1993: Greg Nicholson, Lori Duncan, Kandi Duncan and Amber Duncan are killed and buried near Mason City.
July 30, 1993: Honken declines to plead guilty.
November 5, 1993: Terry DeGeus disappears after going to meet Johnson.
Winter 1993 to 1994: Honken and Cutkomp destroy a pistol.
February 7, 1996: Officers search Honken's house and seize a methamphetamine lab.
June 2, 1997: Honken pleads guilty to the drug charges; later sentenced to 324 months.
July 2000: Johnson is indicted for the five murders.
2000: Johnson draws maps for Robert McNeese; the five bodies are found (October 2000, per The Gazette).
August 30, 2001: Honken is charged with the murders.
August 2004: Trial begins in Sioux City.
October 14, 2004: Guilty on all 17 counts.
October 27, 2004: Jury votes death for the murders of Kandi and Amber Duncan and life for the three adults.
2005: Johnson is convicted and sentenced to death on four counts.
October 2005: Honken is formally sentenced in Cedar Rapids.
2007: Eighth Circuit affirms Johnson's convictions and sentences.
September 12, 2008: Eighth Circuit affirms Honken's convictions and sentences.
December 14, 2009: Supreme Court declines to hear Honken's case.
March 22, 2012: Judge Bennett vacates Johnson's death sentences.
October 4, 2013: Judge Reade denies Honken's request for post-conviction relief.
December 17, 2014: Prosecutors drop the death penalty against Johnson.
November 20, 2019: Judge Chutkan halts the January 15, 2020, execution date.
June 15, 2020: Justice Department sets Honken's execution for July 17.
June 29, 2020: Supreme Court declines to block the executions.
July 17, 2020: Honken is executed at Terre Haute, Indiana, at 4:36 p.m. ET.