Jeffrey Joseph Daugherty was born in Detroit on September 26, 1955. By most accounts his mother abandoned him at two, and he was raised by his grandparents; his father was a drifter and an alcoholic who spent time in mental hospitals, married five times, and had been jailed for child abuse. Daugherty married and had two children, and the marriage ended in divorce. By 1976 he was living in Taylor, Michigan, and 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, at Hammock in Flagler County, he shot Carmen Abrams, sixty-eight, a store attendant, during the robbery of a food store, and left her husband gravely wounded. On March 1, by the Florida Supreme Court's account of the record, he and Heath picked up Lavonne Patricia Sailer, forty-nine, who was hitchhiking in Melbourne, took her to an isolated spot near the Brevard County dump, ordered her out of the car and robbed her, and after he and Heath had debated whether she had to die, he shot her five times at close range with a .22 pistol. Then they went back to a bar nearby to collect his uncle. By most accounts it was the same day that he killed Betty Campbell, fifty, the part-owner of a pizzeria at Edgewater in Volusia County, in a robbery; one account puts that killing earlier in the week.
They then drove north. At Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, he robbed a convenience store and shot the clerk, Elizabeth Shanks, twenty-eight, five times in the head; her name is also spelled Shank, and the date is given as March 4 and as March 9. On March 11, at Duncansville nearby, he robbed a service station and shot the attendant, George Karns, eighteen, five times in the head. The next day, March 12, 1976, the pair were arrested in Virginia, where he was later given eighteen years for a separate armed robbery. Every one of the five was a robbery, and the sums were small.
Pennsylvania tried him first. In December 1976 a Blair County jury convicted him of the Shanks murder and he got life. In January 1977 a separate Blair County jury convicted him of Karns's murder and sentenced him to death; on March 13, 1981, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned that and ordered a new trial, which never took place. He was then sent to Florida, where the prosecutors intended to seek the death penalty.
In July 1980 he pleaded guilty to Betty Campbell's murder and got life, to run after his other sentences. The next month, at a hearing of about three hours, he pleaded guilty to Carmen Abrams's murder and got life again; the prosecution had meant to seek death but dropped it when her husband was found too ill to testify. In November 1980 he pleaded guilty to the murder of Lavonne Sailer, and a Brevard County jury recommended death. He was sentenced on April 27, 1981.
Bonnie Heath was acquitted of murder in Pennsylvania but convicted of conspiracy and robbery, sentenced to ten to twenty years and five to ten, and had those convictions reversed on appeal in 1981. In Florida she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder under an agreement to testify, was sentenced to twenty-five years, and was released on July 10, 1987, after more than ten years inside, sixteen months before he was executed.
On September 14, 1982, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed his conviction and sentence, rejecting his argument that his confession had been involuntary; he had been read his rights and signed a waiver, and physical evidence tied him to the scene. At sentencing the state had put in a letter he wrote in jail, in which he said he had killed seven people and robbed about twenty places across the country. The United States Supreme Court turned him down in April 1984, the Florida Supreme Court rejected a second appeal unanimously on April 9, 1987, and the Eleventh Circuit refused him on February 12, 1988. An execution set for October 15, 1987, was stayed. On October 8, 1988, Governor Bob Martinez signed a second warrant. Less than an hour before the execution, the Supreme Court refused a last appeal by five votes to four.
He was electrocuted at Florida State Prison on November 7, 1988, and pronounced dead at 5:16 in the afternoon, the nineteenth person put to death in Florida since executions resumed, in a chair then sixty-five years old. He had seen his father, his former wife and his two children hours earlier. He turned down the standard last meal and accepted root beer and ice cream his father bought him. Protesters outside held a vigil, among them the actress Margot Kidder. His last statement took six minutes. He asked the men still on death row not to give up the fight, and said, as the wire reports quoted him, that he had been in prison thirteen years and was now going to be free.