On the night of July 27, 1977, a man who said he worked for Florida Power and Light knocked at a house in Carol City, a neighborhood in northern Dade County, and told Margaret Wooden that he needed to check the electrical outlets. She let him in. He went from room to room, then drew a gun, tied her up and blindfolded her, and opened the door to two other men. By the end of the night six men were dead in that house and two other people had been shot in the head and survived. At the time it was the worst mass killing in the county's history.
The man at the door was John Errol Ferguson. Less than six months later, while under indictment for the Carol City killings and still free, he shot two seventeen-year-olds from Hialeah who had left a church youth meeting. He was convicted of all eight murders in 1978, and then spent thirty-five years on Florida's death row while courts heard, again and again, the question of whether he was too mentally ill to be tried, to take part in his appeals, or to be put to death.
Ferguson was born on February 27, 1948, according to the Florida Department of Corrections. CBS Miami, drawing on Miami Herald reporting, said he was the fourth-oldest of eight children, repeated three grades and dropped out of school in the ninth grade. Much of what is known about his childhood comes from the evidence his lawyers gathered for his appeals. In federal habeas proceedings they said he was raised in extreme poverty, at times without running water or electricity; that his father drank and died when John was thirteen; and that he was abused by his mother's boyfriends. His appeals lawyer, Christopher Handman, told the Associated Press in 2013 that relatives said the hallucinations began after his father's death, and that his mother later left and he was raised by his sisters in a vermin-infested shack in Dade County. The courts treated these as claims for mitigation, not as findings.
His criminal record began early. The Florida Commission on Capital Cases lists a 1965 conviction for assault with intent to rape, for which he was sentenced to ten years, a 1971 robbery conviction, and a 1976 conviction for resisting an officer with violence, for which he served eighteen months and was on probation at the time of both sets of murders. The Death Penalty Information Center, citing court records, reported that visual hallucinations were noted as early as 1965.
In 1969, when he was about twenty-one, Ferguson was shot by a Miami police officer. The Eleventh Circuit's 2009 opinion records that the officer, Edward Hartmann, shot him four times in that incident, that Ferguson was acquitted of assault and convicted of robbery. CBS Miami described the same episode as an attempt by Ferguson to kill an officer, and the Associated Press said he was shot in the head. The accounts differ, and the difference later became one of his appeal claims.
Through the late 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, Ferguson was repeatedly diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. The Eleventh Circuit wrote in 2013 that those diagnoses led to commitments to a state psychiatric facility and to "potent antipsychotic medications." Hands Off Cain, citing the Gainesville Sun, dates his admission to a state hospital to 1971. His lawyers said he was twice found not guilty of crimes by reason of insanity; CBS Miami reported that in 1975 he was acquitted on that basis of six robberies and two assault charges.
A 1975 evaluation, quoted by the Death Penalty Information Center from court records, warned that he had "a long-standing, severe illness which will most likely require long-term inpatient hospitalization" and that he was "dangerous and cannot be released under any circumstances." In 1976, according to the Eleventh Circuit, he was deemed competent and discharged. CBS Miami's account says he escaped from the hospital after the 1975 acquittal, then received eighteen months in prison and two years' probation and was released in May 1977. These two versions do not match, and no source opened explains how he left the hospital. Handman said in 2013 that the reasons for the release were "still unclear."
CBS Miami, citing the Herald, reported that in May 1977, the month he was released, Ferguson robbed, beat and shot an elderly couple at a motel. David Waksman, a former Dade prosecutor, told the Associated Press in 2012 that the gun Ferguson used was also traced to the killings of an elderly couple outside a Miami motel, but that he was never charged because there was no other corroborating evidence. The two accounts differ on whether that couple died. Ferguson was never tried for it.
The house on the night of July 27, 1977, belonged to Livingston Stocker. Police described it to the Associated Press as a local hangout for marijuana dealers, and the robbers went there for drugs and cash. The Eleventh Circuit noted in 2009 that "ripping off drug dealers" was a stated purpose of the home invasion. Waksman said most of the people killed were friends who happened to drop by while the robbers were there.
The facts as the Florida Supreme Court and the federal courts set them out are these. Ferguson entered as a utility worker, bound and blindfolded Margaret Wooden, and let in Marvin Francois and Beauford White to search the house. About two hours later Stocker came home with five friends. The three robbers, armed, searched them, tied their hands and blindfolded them. Wooden's boyfriend, Michael Miller, arrived next and was bound and searched in the same way. Six of the men were made to kneel in the living room. Miller and Wooden were taken to her bedroom and put on their knees with their upper bodies across the bed.
Then Francois's mask fell, and at least one of the captives saw his face. According to the Associated Press account of the trial evidence, the decision was then made to kill everyone in the house. The six men in the living room were shot one at a time in the back of the head with their hands tied behind them. In the bedroom, Wooden heard the shots, saw Miller shot beside her, saw a pillow coming toward her head and was shot. She heard Ferguson run from the room. Despite her wound she reached a neighbor's house and called the police. In the living room, Johnnie Hall had survived a shotgun blast to the head.
Police found six men dead, all shot in the back of the head with their hands bound. The dead were Livingston Stocker, Michael Miller, Henry Clayton, Randolph Holmes, Charles Stinson and Gilbert Williams. The sources opened give almost nothing more about them: no ages, no occupations, no family statements. Waksman, who saw the scene, said it was the first time he had seen six dead bodies and that it was difficult even for experienced detectives.
A fourth man, Adolphus Archie, drove the car that dropped the three off and picked them up. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, was sentenced to twenty years, and testified at Ferguson's trial. According to the Florida Supreme Court, he said he drove the three men to a Carol City drug house and later saw weapons and jewelry in the possession of Francois and White.
Brian Glenfeldt and Belinda Worley were both seventeen and lived in Hialeah. On the evening of Sunday, January 8, 1978, they left a Youth for Christ meeting there. They were supposed to meet friends at an ice cream parlor and never arrived. The courts spell Brian's surname Glenfeld; the Associated Press, CBS and the Miami press spell it Glenfeldt.
Belinda's mother, Edna Worley, waited more than three decades for the sentence to be carried out. Her son Michael, Belinda's brother, told the Miami Herald in 2012 that she often said that "if she could, she would pull the switch." She died in May 2012, months before the first death warrant. "She planned on attending the execution," Michael Worley said. "She wanted to be there for her daughter." No source opened says anything more about who Brian was, about his family, or about what either teenager hoped to do after school.
According to trial testimony reported by the Associated Press, the couple had pulled off the road at a lovers' lane, and Ferguson approached them dressed as a police officer. He fired through the car window and hit Brian in the arm and chest. Belinda ran. He caught her several hundred feet away in dense undergrowth, raped her, and shot her in the head. He then returned to the car and shot Brian in the head. He took the cash from Brian's wallet and Belinda's jewelry: two rings, a gold bracelet and a pair of earrings. Two passersby found the bodies the next morning.
AP reporters later wrote that the randomness of the crime and the age of the victims stunned many people in Miami, which was then a slower-paced place than the city of the drug wars of the 1980s.
CBS Miami, citing the Herald, reported that between Carol City and Hialeah, Ferguson was suspected in rapes on October 14 and October 30, 1977; that on October 30 he shot and wounded two teenagers in a parked car after they refused to unlock the door, and they drove away alive; and that he raped a woman on Halloween. The same report says his record included shooting fourteen people, eight of whom died. None of these suspected crimes was tried, and no court opinion opened mentions them. The Associated Press summed it up in 2012 by saying he was convicted of two sets of murders and "suspected in a third."
Ferguson had already been indicted with Francois and White for the Carol City killings on September 15, 1977, but he was not in custody. On April 5, 1978, police arrested him at his apartment on a warrant for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. In a search of the apartment, to which the Commission on Capital Cases says he consented, they found a .357 Magnum revolver, capable of firing the .38-caliber bullets used to kill the Hialeah teenagers. The gun was registered to Livingston Stocker and had been taken from the Carol City house. After his arrest Ferguson confessed to killing "the two kids." He was indicted for the Hialeah murders on April 13, 1978.
Both cases were tried in the Dade County circuit court before Judge Richard S. Fuller, and the prosecutor in both was Robert Kaye. Frederick Robbins and Michael Hacker, special assistant public defenders, represented Ferguson. Before the Carol City trial, four court-appointed experts found him competent. Some of them thought he was malingering and was sociopathic rather than schizophrenic, and two who had found him psychotic in the early and mid-1970s now receded from that view. His lawyers entered and then dropped an insanity plea.
Ferguson was tried alone. Johnnie Hall testified about the killings in the living room. On May 25, 1978, the jury found him guilty of six counts of first-degree murder, two counts of attempted murder and armed robbery, acquitting him on one count. It recommended death by a majority vote, and Fuller imposed six death sentences. His mother, Dorothy Ferguson, was the only defense witness at sentencing. Her testimony filled less than three pages of transcript; she said he had always been a good son and confirmed that he had mental problems and had been in a mental hospital.
Before the Hialeah trial the court heard at least seven experts on his competency. Three found him incompetent and three competent, and the judge found him fit to stand trial. This time the defense presented an insanity case, and it failed. On October 7, 1978, the jury convicted him on all counts, and he received two more death sentences. Ferguson's lawyers later told the federal courts that the jurors had seen him strip off his clothes in the courtroom during trial.
Francois and White were tried separately and convicted on all counts. Francois was executed on May 29, 1985. White's jury recommended life, but the judge sentenced him to death, and he was executed on August 28, 1987.
On July 15, 1982, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed all of Ferguson's convictions but vacated every death sentence. In the Carol City case it held that Fuller had relied on two invalid aggravating factors: that the crimes created a great risk of death to many people, and that Ferguson was under sentence of imprisonment, when in fact he was on probation. It also held that Fuller had applied the wrong standard, the test for legal insanity, in rejecting the mitigating factors about Ferguson's mental state. In the Hialeah case it held that the judge had not properly considered statutory mitigating factors. Justice Boyd would have upheld the death sentences.
Fuller had left the bench. On May 27, 1983, a different judge resentenced Ferguson to death on all eight counts, without a new jury or an evidentiary hearing. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed in 1985. The resentencing judge found five aggravating factors in the Carol City case, among them three prior violent felony convictions, killings committed during multiple robberies, killings to avoid arrest, and killings that were cold, calculated and premeditated. A clemency hearing was held on March 10, 1987, and clemency was denied. At it, former assistant state attorney Leonard Glick called Ferguson "the most vicious, dangerous and violent murderer in Dade County."
From 1987 on, the main question in the case was Ferguson's mind. In October 1987 he and his mother, as his next friend, filed for postconviction relief and asked to stop the proceedings because he was not competent to help his lawyers. The court refused in February 1989. A 1990 hearing on the remaining claims ended in denial, and the Florida Supreme Court affirmed in 1992. A state habeas petition failed in 1993.
His federal habeas petition was filed in March 1995. After the Florida Supreme Court required competency hearings in some postconviction cases, his lawyers went back to state court. In August 1998 a state court held a three-day hearing with six experts. It found that he did not have a major mental disorder, that he was malingering, and that he was competent; the Florida Supreme Court upheld those findings in 2001. In December 2004 a federal district court held a five-day hearing with six more experts. It found that he had once had a disorder with the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, that the disorder was in remission, and that he was exaggerating his symptoms to avoid punishment. It denied his petition on May 19, 2005.
The Eleventh Circuit affirmed on August 26, 2009, in an opinion by Judge Birch. Among the claims it rejected:
That Robbins failed to investigate his family history and psychiatric record. The courts found this a tactical choice, because the evidence could have opened the door to testimony that he was a malingerer with antisocial traits, and held that it would not have changed the outcome.
That the state hid evidence that three detectives who testified, Robert Derringer, Charles Zatrepalek and Michael MacDonald, were under investigation for robbing drug dealers and other crimes, which later led to a forty-count federal indictment and Derringer's conviction. The court found the evidence would not have been admissible and was not material.
That Officer Hartmann testified falsely at the Carol City trial that Ferguson had been convicted of assault with intent to murder over the 1969 shooting. The court found this claim procedurally barred.
That the prosecutor struck Black jurors. A law student's research found both juries were all white, but the court held that Ferguson had not shown systematic exclusion over time.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case on June 1, 2010.
Ferguson's prison record, as the Commission on Capital Cases lists it, includes fighting, disobeying orders, contraband, and in October 2001 possession of escape paraphernalia. The state's later evidence was that he had taken no antipsychotic medication since 2000 and had held the prison system's S-1 classification, for inmates with no mental health problems that impair their functioning, since August 2001.
Governor Rick Scott signed Ferguson's death warrant on September 5, 2012, and set the execution for October 16. Ferguson claimed he was insane to be executed. As Florida law requires, the governor stayed the execution on September 26 and appointed three psychiatrists, Wade Myers, Alan Waldman and Tonia Werner. On October 1 they reviewed his records, interviewed him jointly for about ninety minutes, and spoke to three correctional officers. They found that he understood the nature and effect of the death penalty and why it was imposed on him, and that he was not then mentally ill. The governor lifted the stay.
Ferguson told the commission that he had been anointed the "Prince of God" and would rise after his execution to sit "at the right hand of God." He also said he would be executed for the murders and would physically die. When one psychiatrist said he had been convicted of six homicides, the record shows that someone corrected the number to eight; Myers said it was Ferguson, and Ferguson's lawyer Patricia Brannan said it was another commissioner. Brannan testified that Ferguson said, "they're gonna kill me, like Jesus."
In the state circuit court for the Eighth Judicial Circuit, Judge David Glant held a two-day hearing on October 9 and 10, 2012. For Ferguson, the psychiatrist George Woods testified that he was a late-life paranoid schizophrenic with grandiose delusions: that he was the Prince of God, that a Communist plot threatened the United States, and that the state could not kill him because he had special powers. He described Ferguson's reports of seeing "shadow people," hearing his dead father, and smelling a "sweet smell." Richard Rogers, a specialist in malingering, said that on the whole the tests did not show Ferguson was faking. For the state, Myers and Werner said his delusions, real or not, did not affect his understanding. The neuropsychologist Enrique Suarez said he was not schizophrenic, and prison officers and a death row counselor said they had seen nothing unusual. One officer said Ferguson remarked on the day the warrant was signed that he had not had a warrant signed on him in thirty-five years.
On October 12 Glant found that Ferguson did have paranoid schizophrenia, that he was not malingering in the commission interview, and that his belief that he was the Prince of God was genuine. The judge called his documented history "credible and compelling." But he found "no evidence that he does not understand what is taking place and why it is taking place." He also wrote that Ferguson's belief about the afterlife was not so different from what other Christians believe as to be a sign of insanity. On October 17 the Florida Supreme Court affirmed. It declined to adopt the trial judge's comparison with mainstream Christianity, saying the source of the beliefs did not matter, and held that "Ferguson understands what is taking place and why."
The execution was reset for October 23. On October 19 Ferguson filed a federal habeas petition. On October 20 U.S. District Judge Daniel Hurley stayed the execution, saying his mental condition warranted "reflective consideration." On October 22 a divided Eleventh Circuit panel vacated that stay. On October 23, less than an hour before the scheduled execution, Hurley denied the petition but certified two questions for appeal, and the Eleventh Circuit then granted a temporary stay of its own. The U.S. Supreme Court refused Florida's request to lift it. Chief Justice John Roberts took no part.
On May 21, 2013, the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the denial of relief. Judge Edward Carnes, joined by Judge Pryor, wrote that the Supreme Court's 2007 decision in Panetti v. Quarterman required a "rational understanding" of the execution and its reason but had deliberately left that phrase undefined. Ferguson, Carnes wrote, understood that he would die by execution and that it was for eight murders. He added: "Courts should be reluctant to treat as a symptom of mental illness anyone's belief about what will happen to him after he dies." Because the state courts' decision was not beyond fair-minded disagreement, federal law required deference.
Judge Wilson concurred only in the result. He wrote that the Florida Supreme Court's statement that the Eighth Amendment requires only awareness of the punishment and the reason for it was "patently incorrect" after Panetti, but that he was bound to defer to its factual finding that Ferguson did not believe he could not die.
The Eleventh Circuit lifted its stay on July 23, 2013, and Governor Scott set the execution for August 5. Ferguson's lawyers asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case. The American Bar Association filed a brief supporting review, as did the National Alliance on Mental Illness with the Florida Psychological Association and the Florida Psychiatric Society. The New York Times and the Tampa Bay Times had published editorials against the execution. The Florida Attorney General's office answered that Ferguson had "a very long history of malingering mental illness to avoid legal jeopardy."
On August 5, 2013, less than two hours before the scheduled time, the Supreme Court denied a stay. Ferguson's last meal was the ordinary prison meal of that day. His two lawyers and a spiritual adviser visited him. In the death chamber at Florida State Prison in Starke, before twenty-five witnesses who included relatives of victims, he said calmly: "I just want everyone to know that I am the prince of God and will rise again." The lethal injection began at 6:01 p.m., and he was pronounced dead at 6:17. He was sixty-five. About three dozen people protested across the street. He was the seventy-eighth person executed in Florida since 1976, after thirty-five years on death row.
Handman said in a statement that his client "has a fixed delusion that he is the 'Prince of God' who cannot be killed and will rise up after his execution to fight alongside Jesus and save America from a communist plot."
No new law or policy change in Florida is tied to the case in the sources opened. Its main legacy is legal. The Harvard Law Review's 2014 comment on the Eleventh Circuit decision argued that the case showed how vague Supreme Court law on execution competency, combined with the deference federal courts must give state courts, leaves states room to set their own standards with little federal review.
For the families the record is thin. Edna Worley died before the execution she had waited for. The names of the six Carol City dead appear in the warrant coverage and the execution stories, and little else about them was published in the sources found.
Who fired in Carol City. Ferguson's lawyers argued that trial evidence showed at least five of the six killings were done by Francois and that Ferguson tried to comfort some victims. The courts did not accept this as mitigation, and the 2013 opinion describes the three men killing together. Wooden did not see who shot her; she heard Ferguson leave the room.
How many died. The courts, the Commission on Capital Cases and most AP reports count six dead at Carol City. One AP version and a CBS rewrite say "the other seven men were shot," which counts Hall, who survived.
The 1969 police shooting: Ferguson shot four times and acquitted of assault (Eleventh Circuit); an attempt to kill an officer (CBS Miami).
The hospital release: discharged as competent in 1976 (Eleventh Circuit) or escaped (CBS Miami).
The motel couple, May 1977: shot and robbed (CBS Miami) or killed (Waksman to AP). Never charged.
The October 1977 rapes and shooting: reported as suspicions only. Never charged.
Mental illness: the state courts in 1978, 1998 and the federal court in 2004 found malingering or remission; the state court in 2012 found genuine paranoid schizophrenia and no malingering, yet competence to be executed.
February 27, 1948: born (Florida Department of Corrections).
1965: assault with intent to rape conviction, ten-year sentence; hallucinations first noted in court records.
1969: shot four times by a Miami police officer.
1971: robbery conviction; in a state hospital in the early 1970s.
1975: acquitted of robberies and assaults by reason of insanity; a doctor warns he cannot be released.
1976: discharged as competent; conviction for resisting an officer with violence.
May 1977: released on probation.
July 27, 1977: Carol City home invasion; six killed, two wounded.
September 15, 1977: indicted with Francois and White.
January 8, 1978: Brian Glenfeldt and Belinda Worley killed near Hialeah.
April 5, 1978: arrested; Stocker's gun found; confesses to the Hialeah killings.
May 25, 1978: convicted and sentenced to death for Carol City.
October 7, 1978: convicted and sentenced to death for Hialeah.
July 15, 1982: Florida Supreme Court affirms convictions, vacates death sentences.
May 27, 1983: resentenced to death; affirmed 1985.
May 29, 1985: Marvin Francois executed.
March 10, 1987: clemency denied.
August 28, 1987: Beauford White executed.
1987 to 2001: state postconviction litigation; found competent and malingering in 1998.
March 1995: federal habeas petition filed; denied May 19, 2005.
August 26, 2009: Eleventh Circuit affirms; Supreme Court denies review June 1, 2010.
September 5, 2012: death warrant signed.
October 12 and 17, 2012: state courts find him competent to be executed.
October 20 to 23, 2012: federal stay, reversal, second stay.
May 21, 2013: Eleventh Circuit affirms.
July 23, 2013: new execution date set.
August 5, 2013: executed at Florida State Prison, 6:17 p.m.