On the night of March 11, 1988, Robyn Novick, thirty, an exotic dancer, drove out of the parking lot of the Redlands Tavern, south of Miami, in her yellow Corvette, and a witness later identified the man beside her as Marshall Lee Gore. A few hours later Gore pulled up outside a friend's house in that Corvette, its license plate reading "Robyn," and told the friend his girlfriend had loaned it to him and that he should call him Robyn too. On the way to Coconut Grove he lost control of the car and wrecked it, tried to drive it away, abandoned it a few blocks on, and told his friend to run when a marked police car appeared, because the Corvette was stolen. The officers who reached it found Novick's credit cards, her driver's license and her cigarette case inside, along with a power of attorney signed by Gore. Her body was found on March 16, nude and partly hidden under a blue tarpaulin beside a rural road in Dade County used for dumping trash, within a few hundred feet of the house where Gore had been staying. She had been stabbed in the chest, and a belt was tied around her neck; the medical examiner gave the causes of death as the stab wounds and mechanical asphyxia.
By then Gore was already a man the police wanted. Six weeks earlier, on January 30, 1988, he had been waiting at a convenience store in Cleveland, Tennessee, for a friend who was to drive him to Florida when he struck up a conversation with Susan Roark, nineteen, and got into her black Mustang. She took him along to a party at a friend's house, where she had planned to spend the night, and between eleven-thirty and midnight she left to drive him home. She never came back, and her grandmother, who had expected her by seven the next morning, reported her missing. Gore reached Tampa on January 31 driving a black Mustang and persuaded a friend to help him pawn jewelry that was later identified as hers. In Miami the police recovered the Mustang after it was abandoned following a two-car accident; Gore's fingerprint was inside, and so was a traffic ticket that had been written to him in Miami. On April 2 Roark's skeletonized remains were found, naked, in woods in Columbia County, Florida, that people used as an unofficial dump for household garbage. The neck was missing entirely, which the State's pathologist attributed to an injury there, a stab wound or strangulation, that had drawn the insects first. Experts testified that the body had been left where it lay at or within two hours of death, and that it could have been there anywhere from two weeks to six months.
On March 14, two days after Novick died, Gore attacked a woman who knew him only casually. He beat her with a rock, raped her, choked her, stabbed her and left her for dead at the side of a road near the place where Novick's body would be found. Then he took her red Toyota sports car, with her two-year-old son inside, and drove north. The boy was left in Georgia, naked and locked in the pantry of a burned, abandoned house in freezing weather. His mother survived, and she testified against Gore at every trial that followed; because she was the victim of a sexual battery she is not named here. On March 17 FBI agents arrested Gore in Paducah, Kentucky, on unrelated federal charges. He had her Toyota, and her bank and credit cards were in his jacket pocket.
He told the agents in Paducah that he would answer no more questions once they asked how he had got there, and they stopped. A week later, on March 24, detectives from the Metro-Dade police came to the federal prison, read him his rights again, and he talked. He denied knowing Roark, Novick or the woman who survived, and denied any part in the crimes. When the detectives prepared to show him a photograph of Novick, he asked them to make sure it was not gory because his stomach could not take it; no one had yet told him she was dead. Detective David Simmons testified that Gore's eyes swelled with tears when he looked at the picture, and that he said, "If I did this, I deserve the death penalty."
The first trial was for the woman who lived. Thirteen days in, after the State had rested, his lawyers asked the judge to remove the television cameras from the courtroom, offering a psychologist who said Gore had attention deficit disorder and a severe personality disorder that would make him want to perform for them. Under questioning from the judge, the psychologist admitted he could not tell when Gore was lying. When Gore took the stand and complained that he was not going to be able to do this, the court had the camera moved out of his sight and appointed three doctors to examine him overnight. One psychiatrist testified that Gore had no major illness and was manipulative and simply making an issue of the camera; a psychologist said the cameras would not affect his competency; a second psychiatrist found a severe personality disorder and thought the camera would affect his testimony but could not say Gore was unable to answer questions if he chose to. The cameras stayed. He was convicted of attempted murder, kidnapping, sexual battery, burglary, robbery and theft, and the Third District Court of Appeal affirmed all but one of the convictions in January 1991. Press accounts at his execution disagree about the sentences in that case: one gives seven life terms and another 110 years, another five life terms and three thirty-year terms.
In Columbia County a jury convicted him of Roark's murder, kidnapping and robbery and recommended death by eleven votes to one, and the judge imposed it. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed in April 1992, rejecting his argument that the statements to the Metro-Dade detectives should have been suppressed because he had cut off the FBI's questioning a week before. The Novick case took longer. He was tried in Dade County in 1995, convicted and sentenced to death, and in October 1998 the Florida Supreme Court threw the conviction out. Before trial the judge had ruled that the jury could hear about Roark and the woman who survived, because the State argued the three crimes shared a signature, but must not hear what happened to the two-year-old. The prosecutor raised the boy anyway, in cross-examining Gore and again in closing, along with other improper argument, and the court held that the cumulative effect had so tainted the trial that only a new one would do. It took the unusual step of saying that the assistant attorney general defending the conviction on appeal was not the prosecutor who had tried it.
At the retrial Gore testified in his own defense, and his account was the most elaborate he ever gave. He said he owned an escort service and that Novick, Roark, the woman who survived and the friend he had visited in the Corvette all worked for it, Novick as a nude dancer. He admitted being with Novick at the Redlands Tavern that night and driving her car, but said she and the surviving woman had gone off with three men in a Mercedes to a warehouse in Homestead, that a member of a pro-Castro group answered when he telephoned there, and that the men were angry about missing drugs and drug money. He said he had spoken to Novick later that night and told her to report the Corvette stolen and collect the insurance. He claimed reporters had told him Novick was dead before the detectives did, that the police had covered the walls of the interview room with photographs of the murders, and that he had passed a polygraph. The jury convicted him again. He represented himself in the penalty phase, the jury recommended death unanimously, and the Florida Supreme Court affirmed in April 2001.
Over the next twelve years the state courts turned down every post-conviction claim he brought, including a request for DNA testing and his argument, made in 2009 and 2010, that a forensic anthropologist could show Roark had been dead only about three weeks when she was found, at a time when he had been in jail. Governor Rick Scott signed his death warrant on May 13, 2013, for an execution on June 24. Gore's state lawyer wrote to the governor that he had reason to believe his client was insane to be executed, and a commission of three psychiatrists interviewed him for three hours. He told them that state officials, the governor among them, were part of a conspiracy to harvest the organs of condemned prisoners, and that a state senator was waiting for his eyes. They found him competent. The Eleventh Circuit had granted a stay less than two hours before the first execution date, and on June 27 it affirmed the dismissal of his federal petition, and on August 13 the Florida Supreme Court upheld a circuit judge's finding that Gore was feigning and understood he was to die for murdering Novick. The date was moved again, to October 1, after it emerged that the one set in September clashed with a political fundraiser for Attorney General Pam Bondi, who apologized.
He was put to death by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on October 1, 2013, after twenty-three years on death row, with members of both victims' families watching, and was pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m. He made no final statement. Afterward Novick's sister, Pamela Novick of Cincinnati, read a statement calling Robyn a vibrant young woman whose trust in others had been grossly misplaced in Gore, and said that his having been able to eat, exercise, watch television and go on breathing for twenty-five years after the crimes was "reprehensible beyond belief." Newspaper summaries at the time said he had also been suspected in some fifteen sexual assaults and another attempted murder; none of those suspicions was ever tested in court. What the courts established was two murders, Susan Roark's and Robyn Novick's, and the attack on a third woman who lived to identify him, and the official record still disagrees with itself over one date: the opinions put Novick's last sighting on March 11 and her death in the hours that followed, while the execution summaries compiled in 2013 give March 10.