Louis Bernard Gaskin was 22 and living in Bunnell, in Flagler County, Florida, when he shot and killed Robert and Georgette Sturmfels in their Palm Coast home on the night of December 20, 1989. The couple, 56 and 55, were from New Jersey and were spending the winter in Florida. The same night he shot a man at a second house in the same neighborhood; the man and his wife escaped by car and survived. Ten days later Gaskin was arrested, and after waiving his rights he confessed.
A Flagler County jury convicted him in June 1990 of two first-degree murders, an attempted murder and robbery and burglary counts, and voted 8 to 4 to recommend death. Circuit Judge Kim Hammond imposed two death sentences on June 19, 1990. State records also list life sentences, entered under a plea agreement in 1990, for a Volusia County first-degree murder committed in September 1989 and for a 1986 Flagler County count. Gaskin spent 33 years on death row while his case went through the Florida Supreme Court, the federal courts and the United States Supreme Court. Governor Ron DeSantis signed his death warrant on March 13, 2023, and he was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on April 12, 2023. FlaglerLive, the county's independent news site, reported that he was the first Flagler County death-row inmate to be executed.
Gaskin was born on March 11, 1967, according to the Florida Commission on Capital Cases, a legislative body that tracked death-penalty cases until it closed in 2011. The commission's file lists him also as Louis B. Gaskins, and gives a nickname, "Pappa."
What is known of his childhood comes almost entirely from his court cases, and much of it was disputed. At his 1990 trial, two relatives testified briefly for the defense in the penalty phase: a cousin, who said the two of them had been raised by their great-grandparents, who were strict, and an aunt, who said he had lived mainly with the great-grandparents and had been kept largely to the family property. According to the Florida Supreme Court's 1999 summary, the two women described him as well liked and a hard worker at a lumber mill, with nothing in his background that pointed toward violence. The aunt said he had been an ordinary young man, an average student, "until he got grown," in the words quoted in his lawyers' 2023 petition to the United States Supreme Court.
His later lawyers told a different story. In his first postconviction motion, filed in 1995, they alleged that his mother was an unwed teenager, that his elderly great-grandparents abused him, that he failed at school, and that he suffered from serious mental illness. The Florida Supreme Court, describing those allegations in 1999, did not find them proven; it sent the case back for a hearing. In 2023 his lawyers described the great-grandparents as illiterate and said they beat him, that his mother was absent for years and that he never knew his father. A cousin testified at a hearing in 2000 that the household was very strict, that he was bullied for being poor, that he sucked his thumb into his teens and rocked back and forth when he was alone, and that he hurt his head in a bicycle accident as a child.
Apart from the cases described further on, the court files note little earlier trouble. The 1999 opinion mentions that as a teenager he was arrested for stealing a bicycle. The commission's file lists two burglary charges from June 1988, for which he received sentences of two and a half years each in 1990.
Robert and Georgette Sturmfels had come down from New Jersey to their winter home in Palm Coast, in Flagler County. The Associated Press gave their ages as 56 and 55. Little more about their lives was reported, and no relatives of the couple arranged to attend the execution in 2023, according to the Associated Press.
On the night of December 20, 1989, Gaskin drove from Bunnell and parked in a wooded area near their house, armed with a loaded gun, according to the Eleventh Circuit's summary of the record. He saw the couple through a window and shot them both. He then went into the house and took lamps, video-cassette recorders, cash and jewelry. FlaglerLive reported that the killings were random and that he had robbed the home.
The press later called him the "ninja killer." The Associated Press reported that the name came from the all-black ninja clothing he wore that night.
From the Sturmfels house Gaskin went to the home of another couple in the same Palm Coast neighborhood, the federal appeals court wrote. When the husband came out to investigate a noise, Gaskin shot him. The couple got to their car and drove to a hospital, and the husband survived. Gaskin then burglarized the house.
The case broke through a relative of Gaskin's girlfriend. According to the court record, Gaskin left several items with his girlfriend's cousin as Christmas presents and boasted that he had stolen them and left the owners dead. After the cousin saw news coverage of the killings, he went to the authorities. The items were identified as property of the Sturmfels couple. The Associated Press, citing investigators, reported that a clock, two lamps and a video recorder taken from the house were found at Gaskin's residence and were meant as Christmas gifts for his girlfriend.
Gaskin was arrested on December 30, 1989. A search of his home turned up more stolen property. He signed a form waiving his rights and confessed, and he led investigators to more evidence in a canal nearby, the Florida Supreme Court and the Eleventh Circuit both recorded.
The confession was tape-recorded. FlaglerLive, in a 2023 account drawn from the trial record, reported that he described a desire to kill. At trial, State Attorney John Tanner told the jury that "the best evidence in this case surely is Mr. Gaskin's own statement," and called the killings cold-blooded, premeditated, inexcusable and unjustified. Tanner also quoted Gaskin's girlfriend as recalling that he told her, "I did the crime, now I've got to do the time."
The Sturmfels murders were the cases that sent Gaskin to death row, but they were not the only killings in his record.
The Florida Commission on Capital Cases file lists, under a plea agreement, a Volusia County conviction for first-degree murder and robbery with a firearm, with an offense date of September 15, 1989, and a life sentence imposed on June 26, 1990. The file does not name the victim. It also lists a Flagler County case with an offense date of November 20, 1986, recorded as first-degree premeditated murder or attempt, together with armed burglary, for which he received life sentences on August 9, 1990. Again, no victim is named. According to the commission, Gaskin entered those pleas as part of an agreement under which he avoided further death sentences.
In 2023, state lawyers fighting his last appeals spoke of a third killing. At a hearing in March 2023, an assistant attorney general argued that if Gaskin's trial lawyer had put mental-health evidence before the jury in 1990, the jury would have heard about a prior murder, a prior attempted murder and evidence of sexual deviancy. FlaglerLive, reporting that hearing, said Gaskin had confessed to a third murder. In a later report written with the News Service of Florida, it said prosecutors had argued that he confessed to a 1986 murder of a man named Charles Martin, which was not introduced at his trial. In another March 2023 report, FlaglerLive said he had told police he killed Charles Martin three years before the Sturmfels murders to rob him of what he believed was several hundred dollars.
A Flagler County grand jury indicted Gaskin on March 27, 1990, on ten counts: premeditated and felony first-degree murder for each of the Sturmfels deaths, armed robbery and armed burglary at both homes, and attempted first-degree murder of the husband and the wife at the second house. Separate cases charged aggravated assault with a weapon and possession of a firearm by a felon.
His lawyers asked to move the trial out of the county because of the press coverage. The judge refused, and the Florida Supreme Court later upheld that ruling, noting that the jurors said they could set aside what they already knew. Gaskin was represented by Assistant Public Defender Raymond Cass Jr. Tanner, the state attorney for the Seventh Judicial Circuit, tried the case with Assistant State Attorney Stephen Nelson before Circuit Judge Kim Hammond.
On June 15, 1990, the jury found Gaskin guilty on nine of the ten counts. It acquitted him of the attempted murder of the wife at the second house.
The defense case for a life sentence was brief. Cass called two witnesses, the cousin and the aunt, and no mental-health expert. A psychologist, Harry Krop, had been retained by the defense but did not testify. The jury did not hear about Gaskin's other crimes, which state lawyers later said was the point: an expert's testimony would have brought them out.
On June 18, 1990, the jury recommended death for each murder by a vote of 8 to 4. By 2023, the Associated Press noted, Florida required a unanimous jury for a death sentence, and lawmakers were moving to change that.
The judge also considered a report by Jack Rotstein, a psychiatrist, and the record of a prior burglary judgment. According to Gaskin's 2023 petition, Rotstein reported that Gaskin had schizotypal personality disorder and believed he was a ninja.
On June 19, 1990, Judge Hammond sentenced Gaskin to death. He found three aggravating factors for both murders: that they were cold, calculated and premeditated; that Gaskin had a prior conviction for a capital or violent felony; and that the killings were committed during a robbery or burglary. He found a fourth, that the killing was especially cruel, for Georgette Sturmfels only. In mitigation he found that Gaskin acted under extreme mental or emotional disturbance and that he had a deprived childhood. On the other counts Gaskin received life for the attempted murder and for each burglary, and 30 years for each armed robbery; in August 1990, by agreement, the robbery terms were changed to life.
On December 5, 1991, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and sentences in Gaskin v. State, but held that each death could support only one first-degree murder adjudication. It ordered two of the four murder adjudications vacated, leaving one death sentence for each victim. A Flagler judge carried out that order in 2014, according to the court's 2017 opinion.
Gaskin took the case to the United States Supreme Court. In June 1992 the Court vacated the judgment and sent it back for reconsideration in light of Espinosa v. Florida, a decision that year which found Florida's standard jury instruction on the especially-cruel aggravator too vague. On March 18, 1993, the Florida Supreme Court again affirmed. It held that the issue had not been preserved at trial and, in the alternative, that any error was harmless as to Georgette Sturmfels. The United States Supreme Court denied review on October 12, 1993, and the sentences became final.
Gaskin filed his first postconviction motion in March 1995. A circuit judge denied it without a hearing in January 1997. In July 1999 the Florida Supreme Court ordered a hearing on whether Cass had failed to investigate and present mitigating evidence and failed to argue for his client in closing, and on a claim that Cass had a conflict of interest because of his status as a deputy sheriff. It upheld the rest of the ruling, holding among other things that the prosecutor's trial-preparation notes were not public records. Justice Wells dissented.
The hearing was held on April 13, 2000. Krop testified that Cass never gave him the school and other records he had asked for. He said he had first suspected schizophrenia, then favored a severe personality disorder, and that at the time of trial he would have diagnosed a mixed personality disorder with schizoid and antisocial features; he had recommended a neuropsychological test after hearing of the childhood head injury. A second psychologist, Jethro Toomer, diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia with some neurocognitive impairment.
The state's answer, which the courts accepted, was that Cass had made a deliberate choice. Krop had warned him before trial that his testimony, and the school records, would expose damaging evidence of Gaskin's criminal and sexual history. The judge denied the motion again in August 2000, and on June 13, 2002, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed. It found that counsel reasonably chose not to present the mental-health evidence, that withholding the school records from Krop did not prejudice Gaskin, and that the closing argument was not ineffective.
Gaskin filed a federal habeas corpus petition in the Middle District of Florida in June 2003. The district court denied it on March 23, 2006. On August 3, 2007, a panel of the Eleventh Circuit (Judges Tjoflat, Black and Wilson) affirmed in Gaskin v. Secretary, Department of Corrections.
The panel held that the state courts had reasonably found Cass's choices strategic. Counsel had done some investigation, including talking with teachers, the court noted; this was not a case of no investigation at all. Krop's later review had kept the same diagnosis, adding attention deficit disorder, and the school records showed average intellectual ability. "Further investigation and further evidence would have opened the door to damaging personal history evidence," the court wrote. On pretrial publicity, it found that the articles about the case may have been somewhat inflammatory but that Gaskin had not shown they saturated the community: the case was not "the type of extreme situation" in which prejudice is presumed.
In 2015 Gaskin, whose jury had split 8 to 4, filed a new motion relying on Hurst v. Florida, a United States Supreme Court case on the jury's role in Florida death sentences, and challenging the use of both the premeditated and felony-murder findings at sentencing. On January 19, 2017, the Florida Supreme Court held that Hurst did not apply to sentences that, like his, became final before the 2002 decision in Ring v. Arizona, and that the other claim came too late. Justice Pariente dissented in part; she would have ordered a new penalty phase, noting that the 8 to 4 recommendation may have rested in part on the felony-murder convictions later vacated. Justice Perry also would have applied Hurst. The court turned down a second successive motion in 2018 and dismissed petitions he filed on his own in 2020.
In the meantime, three other men sentenced to death in Flagler County had their sentences commuted to life after courts ruled against death sentences based on non-unanimous juries, FlaglerLive reported. Gaskin's 1990 sentence came too early to benefit.
Governor DeSantis signed Gaskin's death warrant on Monday, March 13, 2023, two days after Gaskin turned 56. It set the execution for 6 p.m. on April 12. It was only the second warrant DeSantis had signed after a pause in Florida executions; Donald Dillbeck had been executed on February 23, the state's first since August 2019.
Gaskin's lawyers went back to court. Before Circuit Judge Terence Perkins in Bunnell, defense lawyer Tracy Henry argued that the jury never heard of his mental illness, that lethal injection was inhumane, and that the outcome was a "manifest injustice." On March 20, 2023, Perkins refused to hold another evidentiary hearing. "I do not find the need for further evidentiary hearing," he said, calling the claims "simply legal arguments on successive motions."
The defense also pointed to one of the twelve jurors from 1990, who told FlaglerLive in March 2023 that she regretted her vote. "I voted for him to die, but I wouldn't make that same decision today," she said. Tanner, by then long out of office, told the same reporter that he had no second thoughts. "This one clearly deserved the death penalty under Florida standards," he said, adding that a case should not take 33 years to conclude.
In a 57-page brief to the Florida Supreme Court, Gaskin's lawyers called the unheard mental-health and childhood evidence "profound and important mitigating evidence," and said the four jurors who voted for life knew "next to nothing" about him. They also challenged the old jury instruction again and argued that executing him after about 33 years on death row, most of it in what they described as near-total solitary confinement, would be cruel and unusual punishment.
On April 6, 2023, the Florida Supreme Court rejected every claim. It held the mitigation claim procedurally barred and, in any case, refuted by the record of counsel's strategy. It held the Hurst claim barred and noted that, under its 2020 decision in State v. Poole, a unanimous recommendation was not required. It said no court had accepted the argument about long years on death row, and that Gaskin had conceded his conditions were similar to those already considered in Dillbeck's case. On the jury instruction, it found the error harmless for Robert Sturmfels as well, given the other aggravating factors.
Eric Pinkard, Gaskin's lawyer, asked the United States Supreme Court to step in, arguing that neither the jury nor the trial judge had heard about his client's mental illness and trauma. Attorney General Ashley Moody's office answered that the petition was an attempt to deprive the victims of justice. On April 11, 2023, the Court denied both a stay and review in a two-sentence order without explanation.
Gaskin woke at 4:45 a.m. on the day of his execution, according to a Department of Corrections spokesperson quoted by the Associated Press. He ate his last meal at 9:45 a.m.: barbecue pork ribs, pork and turkey neck, Buffalo wings, shrimp fried rice, french fries and water. His sister visited him. He did not meet with a spiritual adviser.
Asked for a final statement, he said, "Justice is not about the crime. It's not about the criminal. It's about the law." He went on about his legal proceedings and appeals and ended, "Look at my case." A freelance broadcast journalist who witnessed the execution told News4JAX that Gaskin "quietly went to sleep and he died." Opponents of the death penalty demonstrated outside.
The drugs began at 6:02 p.m. The warden checked for consciousness at 6:05 p.m. and got no response, and Gaskin's breathing appeared to stop at 6:07 p.m. A doctor entered at 6:14 p.m. and declared him dead a minute later. The governor's office gave the time of death as 6:15 p.m.
The Associated Press and the News Service of Florida reported that it was Florida's 101st execution since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, and the second of 2023. Before trial, according to the Associated Press, he had told a psychologist that he knew what he was doing. "The guilt was always there," he said, as the AP quoted him. "I knew that I was wrong. I wasn't insane."
The Gaskin case fell in the middle of a political fight over how Florida juries decide death sentences. While his appeals were pending in the spring of 2023, the Legislature was moving a bill to allow a death sentence on the recommendation of 8 of 12 jurors, the same margin as in his trial. Supporters were reacting to the life sentence given to the Parkland school gunman after a jury did not agree unanimously on death, WLRN reported. A spokesperson for Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, protesting the execution, pointed to his childhood and mental illness and to the jury that sentenced him, which she described as all white.
The 1986 killing. State lawyers said in 2023 that Gaskin confessed to a 1986 murder of a man named Charles Martin. The commission's file lists a Flagler County count dated November 20, 1986, with a life sentence, but does not name the victim and records the offense as murder or attempt. The 2023 reports of that confession did not say how the killing was resolved in court.
The Volusia County case. The commission lists a 1989 Volusia County first-degree murder conviction with a life sentence, but the victim and circumstances have not been reported.
The execution count. Some early versions of the Associated Press report called Gaskin's execution Florida's 100th since 1976; the AP later corrected the figure to 101st, the number also given by the News Service of Florida. Dillbeck's execution in February 2023 was the 100th.
The trial date. The jury's verdict is dated June 15, 1990, in the commission's file and his 2023 petition. Some later court summaries give 1989 or 1991 as the year of conviction.
The attempted-murder count. Some 2023 reports said Gaskin attempted to murder both people at the second house. The jury convicted him of attempting to murder the husband and acquitted him on the count naming the wife.
March 11, 1967: Louis Bernard Gaskin is born.
November 20, 1986: offense date of a Flagler County count listed as first-degree murder or attempt, with armed burglary.
June 9, 1988: offense date of two burglary charges.
September 15, 1989: offense date of a Volusia County first-degree murder and armed robbery.
December 20, 1989: Robert and Georgette Sturmfels are killed at their Palm Coast winter home; a man at a second house nearby is shot and survives.
December 30, 1989: Gaskin is arrested and confesses.
March 27, 1990: Flagler County indictment on ten counts.
June 15, 1990: guilty verdicts on nine counts; acquittal on one attempted-murder count.
June 18, 1990: the jury recommends death, 8 to 4, for each murder.
June 19, 1990: Judge Kim Hammond imposes two death sentences.
June 26, 1990: life sentence in the Volusia County case.
August 9, 1990: life sentences in the 1986 Flagler case; robbery terms changed to life.
December 5, 1991: the Florida Supreme Court affirms but vacates duplicate murder adjudications.
June 29, 1992: the United States Supreme Court sends the case back in light of Espinosa v. Florida.
March 18, 1993: the Florida Supreme Court affirms again.
October 12, 1993: the United States Supreme Court denies review.
March 21, 1995: first postconviction motion filed.
July 1, 1999: the Florida Supreme Court orders an evidentiary hearing.
April 13, 2000: evidentiary hearing held.
June 13, 2002: the Florida Supreme Court affirms denial of relief.
March 23, 2006: the federal district court denies habeas relief.
August 3, 2007: the Eleventh Circuit affirms.
January 19, 2017: the Florida Supreme Court rejects his Hurst claim.
March 13, 2023: Governor DeSantis signs the death warrant.
March 20, 2023: Judge Terence Perkins denies a further hearing.
April 6, 2023: the Florida Supreme Court denies all claims and a stay.
April 11, 2023: the United States Supreme Court denies a stay and review.
April 12, 2023: Gaskin is executed at Florida State Prison and pronounced dead at 6:15 p.m.