Jeffrey Joseph Daugherty was born in Detroit on September 26, 1955 and was living in Taylor, Michigan by 1976. He already had convictions for violent felonies. In January 1976 he drove south to Florida with his girlfriend, Bonnie Jean Heath, and an uncle, looking for work and visiting Heath's children.
The killings took seventeen days. On February 23, 1976 he shot Carmen Abrams, sixty-eight, during the robbery of a food store in Flagler County, and left her husband badly injured. Within the same week he killed Betty Campbell, part-owner of a pizzeria in Volusia County. On March 1 he and Heath picked up Lavonne Patricia Sailer, forty-nine, hitchhiking near Melbourne, drove her to waste ground near the Brevard County dump, took twelve dollars and some clothing from her, and shot her five times at close range.
They then drove north. On March 4, at Hollidaysburg in Pennsylvania, he robbed a convenience store and shot the clerk, Elizabeth Shank, five times in the head. On March 11 he killed a service station attendant, George Karns. The pair were taken in Virginia, and his arrest is dated March 12, 1976.
Every one of the five was a robbery. The sums involved were small.
The order of the prosecutions is the unusual part. Pennsylvania tried him first. Accounts of that outcome conflict: some say he received life imprisonment for both Pennsylvania murders, others that he was sentenced to death for the killing of Karns and to life for Shank, and that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court then reversed the death sentence. What is agreed is what happened next. Pennsylvania handed him over to Florida because prosecutors there undertook to seek the death penalty.
Florida convicted him of all three. He received life for Abrams and for Campbell, and death for Sailer. In 1982 the Florida Supreme Court affirmed that conviction and sentence, rejecting the argument that his confession had been involuntary; he had been given the Miranda warnings and had signed a waiver, and there was physical evidence tying him to the scene. The state court refused a second appeal in April 1987, and the Eleventh Circuit and the Supreme Court disposed of the last of them in early 1988. An execution set for October 1987 was stayed. Governor Bob Martinez signed a second warrant in October 1988.
Bonnie Heath was convicted twice of second-degree murder, in two of the three Florida cases, and was released from the Florida Correctional Institution on July 10, 1987, sixteen months before he was executed.
He was electrocuted at Florida State Prison on November 7, 1988 and pronounced dead at 5.16 in the afternoon, the nineteenth person to die in a chair then sixty-five years old. He had seen his father, his former wife and his two children hours earlier. Protesters outside included the actress Margot Kidder.
His last statement asked the men still on death row not to give up the fight, and said that he had been in prison fifteen years and was now free.