Michael Alan Durocher was born on January 22, 1960, and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. He dropped out of high school and worked as a carpenter and doing yard work. He was arrested several times as a juvenile, and in 1980, at twenty, he was jailed for grand theft.
In 1981, in New Jersey, he met Grace Reed, twenty-nine, and her three-year-old daughter, Candice, and for two years went back and forth to see them. In early 1983 Grace gave birth to his son, Joshua Michael. After three months in New Jersey with them he brought all three to Florida. Between November 25 and 30, 1983, over Thanksgiving, he killed them. He bought a shovel and drove them to a deserted area in Clay County. By one of his accounts he and Grace drank Jack Daniel's and agreed on a murder-suicide pact; he had her tell Candice they were going on a picnic, shot the girl with a shotgun as she walked down the path, stabbed the baby, and shot Grace in the back of the head as she lay in a grave, then left and lived in a motel. In another account he said he had intended to kill her and the children but not himself, and that he had decided on it after New Jersey welfare authorities came after him for child support for a boy he did not believe was his. The bodies were buried and nobody found them for seven years; Grace's brother reported her missing only in January 1986.
On January 12, 1986, passing a window decorations store in Jacksonville, he saw the back door propped open and planned a robbery to pay for a trip to his father's house in Louisiana, where he meant to kill his father. He came back with a gun and held up the clerk, Thomas Underwood III, twenty-seven, who told him the store took only credit. Durocher shot him dead, took thirty or forty dollars from his pockets, wiped away his fingerprints and left in Underwood's car. In Louisiana he found his father dying of cancer and let him be.
On August 6, 1988, he beat his roommate, Eddie Dwayne Childers, thirty-eight, to death with a claw hammer as he slept, over two weeks' wages he said Childers owed him for selling goods at a flea market, then took the body to a lake, doused it and set it on fire. Passersby saw the smoke. His sixteen-year-old girlfriend told police he had bragged about the killing, and on August 24 officers cornered him in the street, where he held them off with a shotgun for five hours, saying he would rather die than be taken, before he surrendered. That is the killing that got him arrested, and the only one police came to on their own.
Everything after that he gave them himself. In January 1989 a Duval County jury convicted him of the Childers murder and recommended life, and on January 30 Judge David C. Wiggins imposed it. On January 17, while awaiting sentence, he had asked to speak to the detective on the case, John Bradley, and confessed to killing Underwood. He was tried for that and sentenced to death on July 7, 1989, and sent to Florida State Prison. That month he wrote to an assistant state attorney saying he knew of other murders, and over the following months he admitted the 1983 killings. A Clay County grand jury indicted him on January 11, 1990. A week before his trial, set for October 16, 1990, searchers found the skeletons of Candice and Joshua with the help of a map he had drawn, and Judge William Wilkes postponed it.
At the 1991 trial he pleaded guilty, then instructed his counsel to present no mitigating evidence and not to contest anything the prosecution put forward. The jury recommended death unanimously on each of the three counts, and the judge imposed it. On appeal the argument made for him was that the court should have appointed separate counsel to run an adversarial penalty phase; the Florida Supreme Court held in 1992 that he had understood what he was doing and had waived the penalty phase freely, knowingly and voluntarily.
He then set about getting the sentence carried out. In April 1993 he wrote to Governor Lawton Chiles saying he believed in capital punishment and asking that justice now be served, and that he had not expected anyone to oppose his wish to die. Chiles signed the death warrant on May 26. Durocher wrote to thank him the next day. The appeals filed to stop the execution were filed over his objections, and the courts found him competent to refuse the state-appointed lawyers who wanted to fight for him. The Supreme Court upheld his right to die the night before.
He was brought into the death chamber at one minute past seven on the morning of August 25, 1993, smiling and talking to the guards who walked him in, and sat quietly while he was strapped into a chair seventy years old. Asked whether he had any last words, he had none. He was pronounced dead at 7:15. He was Florida's first volunteer for execution, at the time the only person in the state executed on a first death warrant, and the two hundred and sixteenth person executed in the United States since 1976.
The 1983 killings were committed in Clay County, although some accounts place them in Jacksonville; the two later killings were in Jacksonville, in Duval County.