Michael Alan Durocher was convicted of five murders committed in northeast Florida between 1983 and 1988. Police caught him for only one of them. In August 1988 Jacksonville officers arrested him for the killing of a man named in the court papers as Dwayne Childers. The other four came to light because Durocher himself told investigators about them, first a store clerk shot in a robbery in January 1986 and then his former girlfriend, Grace Reed, and her two young children, whom he killed in Clay County around Thanksgiving 1983.
He told a detective early on that he wanted a death sentence, and he spent the rest of his life working toward one. He pleaded guilty in the middle of his Clay County trial, told his lawyers to present no mitigating evidence, and later refused to let state lawyers file appeals in his name. He was executed in Florida's electric chair on August 25, 1993. United Press International reported that he was the only one of the 31 people executed in Florida since 1979 to die on his first death warrant.
The fullest accounts of Durocher's early life are in court filings made by his lawyers, who were trying to show that his background and mental health should weigh against the death penalty. Those papers are advocacy, and the state did not accept all of their claims.
According to a petition filed in 1993 by the Capital Collateral Representative, the state office that handled appeals for death-row prisoners, his father was a career Navy man who was often at sea, drank heavily, ran up gambling debts and was physically abusive. His mother worked several jobs and was often away from home. He had an older brother who was born with an intellectual disability and needed special care. His parents divorced in 1973, when he was in the seventh grade, and the family later moved into public housing.
He had a severe stutter from childhood. The petition said he received speech therapy and special education, suffered high fevers as a child, and was diagnosed in 1976 with a brain lesion after a neurologist noticed problems with his speech. It said he began using drugs at about 13 or 14 and first tried to kill himself at about 14, and that he made more than five suicide attempts in all. A state brief filed in his Clay County appeal gave a slightly different picture drawn from his own statements to examiners: his parents divorced when he was young, he said neither had abused him, and he earned A's and B's before leaving school in the tenth grade, citing boredom and a worsening speech problem. His public defender's brief in the same case said he dropped out at 16 and that his speech impediment kept him from holding a job for long.
The 1993 petition said he joined the Navy in 1978 and was discharged because of his speech impediment and mental problems. It listed a criminal record that included shoplifting in 1976, grand theft in 1979, armed burglary and probation violations in 1980, and an escape in 1981. While in prison he earned a high school equivalency diploma and learned cabinet-making, the petition said. It also described a 1984 incident in which he barricaded himself with a shotgun during a standoff with police.
When a Duval County judge sentenced him to death in 1989, the only mitigating factor the court found was a loving relationship with his mother and his brother. He lived with his mother at the time of the 1986 killing, a few blocks from the store where it happened, according to his appellate brief.
Durocher met Grace Reed, who lived in New Jersey, through a mutual friend in 1981. She had a three-year-old daughter, Candy. In 1983 Reed gave birth to a son, Joshua. She said Durocher was the father. He denied it at first, according to his own lawyers' account of the trial record, and later admitted to his brother that the boy was his child. For a time Reed lived with Durocher's mother in Orange Park, Florida.
Little is on record about Grace Reed herself beyond her relationship with Durocher, not even her age. Candy was five years old in 1983, according to the state. Joshua was a baby. The family had no money and no stable place to live, Durocher's lawyers wrote.
Durocher brought Reed and the two children from New Jersey back to Florida in 1983. His appellate lawyers said the move was partly driven by pressure from New Jersey welfare officials over child support. He later told a Clay County detective that he had come to believe that Joshua was not his son, and that after the welfare authorities pursued him for support he decided to kill Reed and the children once they were back in Florida.
Around Thanksgiving 1983 he killed the three of them in Clay County. His accounts of that night differed. In one, given at trial through the detective's testimony, he and Reed had been drinking whiskey and had agreed on a suicide pact in which he would kill her and the children and then himself. In another, he said he had meant to kill Reed and the children but not himself. Afterward, according to the trial record as described by his lawyers, he got rid of the car and the gun.
He told his brother at first that he and Reed had fought and that she had driven off with the children. A few months later, the state said, he told his brother that he had killed them under a murder-suicide pact. He also told co-workers. When he was arrested in Jacksonville in 1988 and asked about Reed, he told the detective that she and the children had died in a car accident in Paulsboro, New Jersey. Authorities there had no record of any such accident.
The three were not found until October 1990.
On Sunday, January 12, 1986, Durocher was walking past a store in Jacksonville that sold ready-made and custom curtains when he noticed its back door propped open. In his later confession he said he decided it would be a good place to get money and a car. He wanted to drive to his father's house in Louisiana; before his sworn statement he told the detective that he was very upset with his father and had wanted to go there to kill him.
He went home, a few blocks away, then returned to the store armed. The clerk on duty was Thomas J. Underwood III. Durocher demanded money, and Underwood told him there was none, because the store dealt only in credit. Durocher shot him. He said in his confession that he had intended only to rob the man but decided to kill him so that the police could not pin the robbery on him.
He took 30 to 40 dollars and drove away in Underwood's car. In Louisiana his father told him to take the car back and get rid of it. He drove back to Jacksonville and destroyed the car, then returned to his father's for three or four weeks.
Little is on record about Thomas Underwood beyond his name and his job, not even his age. Investigators found no fingerprints in the store or on the car, and the gun was untraceable. The detective who took Durocher's confession three years later testified that, before it, there had been nothing to tie Durocher to the crime.
The appellate records describe the Childers case only briefly. The victim is named in the state's brief in the Underwood appeal as Dwayne Eddie Childers, in the public defender's brief in the Clay County appeal as Dwayne Childers, and in the state's brief in that appeal as Edward Childers. A later court filing described the case as a Duval County homicide that ended in a life sentence. The opinions do not say when or how he died.
Jacksonville police arrested Durocher for the Childers murder on August 24, 1988. According to his lawyers' brief, officers cornered him in a house in Jacksonville. He told them he wanted to die and made an unsuccessful attempt to kill himself. The detective who arrested him was John Bradley of the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. The next day, Durocher signed a form prepared by the Public Defender's office saying that he did not want to talk to the police without his lawyer. That notice became the center of his later appeal.
A Duval County jury found Durocher guilty of first-degree murder in January 1989 and recommended a sentence of life imprisonment. His public defender had told him he would probably receive life without the possibility of parole for 25 years. Within a day of the verdict, the Public Defender's office hand-delivered a letter to the detective asking that no one speak with Durocher without his lawyer, and his lawyer had also written to Bradley on January 6, 1989.
Durocher was sentenced to life. The First District Court of Appeal affirmed the conviction on April 6, 1990, in a decision reported as Durocher v. State, 560 So. 2d 1174.
On January 17, 1989, while he was in the jail awaiting sentence, Durocher asked a jail mental health counselor to call Bradley. She told the detective that Durocher wanted to talk about another murder case. Bradley checked with an assistant state attorney, Jon Phillips, who told him it would be acceptable as long as he was satisfied that Durocher had started the contact.
Bradley went to the jail on January 18. He showed Durocher the public defender's letter. Durocher signed a statement on it saying that he was aware of the letter and wanted to speak with the detective without counsel present. After being advised of his rights, he asked whether a death sentence could be guaranteed if he gave information about another murder. Bradley told him it could not. Durocher said he wanted to think about it, and the two agreed that the detective would come back on Monday.
When Bradley returned, Durocher told him that he would confess to the robbery killing and, if he received a death sentence for it, would give information about three more. He was advised of his rights again and that afternoon gave a recorded confession at the homicide office describing the killing of Thomas Underwood. He read over and signed the transcript.
A Duval County grand jury indicted Durocher on February 16, 1989, for first-degree murder and armed robbery. His motions to suppress his statements were denied. The case was tried before Judge Wiggins, and his confession was read to the jury by Bradley and the prosecutor. In June 1989 the jury found him guilty of both premeditated murder and felony murder, and of armed robbery. By a vote of 7 to 5 it recommended death.
On July 7, 1989, the judge imposed a death sentence. The sentencing order found five aggravating factors: that Durocher had a prior conviction for a capital felony, that the murder was committed during an armed robbery, that it was committed to avoid arrest, that it was committed for financial gain, and that it was cold, calculated and premeditated with no pretense of moral or legal justification. The only mitigating factor found was his loving relationship with his mother and his brother.
On appeal his lawyer, Assistant Public Defender David A. Davis, argued that the confession should have been suppressed because the police had talked to him in spite of his written notice that he wanted a lawyer present. The appeal also challenged a prosecutor's remark in closing argument that Durocher was sitting smiling in the courtroom.
The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and the death sentence on February 13, 1992, in Durocher v. State, 596 So. 2d 997. The majority held that the right to counsel is specific to each offense, so the notice filed in the Childers case did not bar questioning about a crime with which he had not been charged, and that because Durocher himself had started the contact, his Fifth Amendment rights had not been violated. It found that any overlap between the robbery and financial gain aggravators was harmless. Justice Kogan, joined by Justice Barkett, dissented. He would have treated the signed notice as Durocher's own request for counsel, held that the police had begun the later questioning, suppressed the confession and ordered a new trial. Rehearing was denied on April 29, 1992.
On July 18, 1989, an assistant state attorney received a letter from Durocher claiming that he knew of five homicides in Clay County. The next day a Clay County detective, James Redmond, visited him at Florida State Prison. Durocher agreed to show the police on July 25 where the bodies of Grace Reed and her children were buried.
When the day came, he said the timing was not good. The police took him out anyway under a court order. At the sheriff's office he admitted the murders, then laughed and said he had not done it. Investigators learned that he had confessed to his brother and to co-workers.
On January 10, 1990, Redmond arrested Durocher, by then on death row, for the murders of Reed and her two children. The bodies still had not been found.
In October 1990 the state asked the court to allow expert testimony about Durocher's truthfulness. After a hearing on October 10, he told Redmond that he wanted to give up the bodies, and he wrote to the detective the next day offering to do so. He said he wanted the state to have a stronger case so that he could get to the electric chair. He led officers to the burial site near Green Cove Springs. A search on October 11 found nothing. The children's remains were found on October 16, 1990, and Grace Reed's on October 22.
A Clay County indictment charging three counts of first-degree murder was filed on February 12, 1991, according to the public defender's brief. The Florida Supreme Court described the indictment as coming early in 1991. Before trial, motions to suppress his statements were denied, a motion to appoint a psychiatrist was granted and a motion to rule out the death penalty was denied. The court ordered a competency examination, and he was found competent to stand trial.
The trial began before Judge William Wilkes on March 4, 1991. The next day, while Redmond was testifying about the confessions and before the defense had cross-examined him, Durocher decided to plead guilty to all three counts. His lawyer asked to withdraw, and the court refused. A psychiatrist, Dr. Miller, examined him again; his report of March 6, 1991, found Durocher competent. The judge questioned Durocher about the change of plea and found that it was made freely, knowingly and voluntarily.
Durocher then told his lawyer not to present any mitigating evidence and not to contest the state's case for death. The judge questioned him on two different days about that decision, and he confirmed it each time. The state called one detective and otherwise relied on the trial testimony. It also put before the jury his two earlier murder convictions. His lawyer told the court that, if allowed, he would have presented evidence about Durocher's life and family.
The jury unanimously recommended death for each of the three murders, and the judge imposed three death sentences. He found two aggravating factors for each: a prior conviction for a violent felony, and that the murders were cold, calculated and premeditated. Although the defense had offered nothing, the judge weighed what could be drawn from Durocher's own statements and from mental health reports. He noted that Durocher had tried to kill himself several times and had been depressed but had never been treated as a psychiatric inpatient; that Reed may have consented to a murder-suicide but her children had not; his age of 23; an alcohol problem that the judge found had not impaired his capacity; a lifelong severe stutter; and a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder with histrionic and narcissistic features. Experts had found him both competent and sane.
On appeal Davis argued that the trial court should have appointed special counsel to present the mitigating evidence that Durocher had refused to allow, so that the penalty phase would be a real contest. He also argued that the judge had rejected mitigation for improper reasons, including the uncontradicted evidence that Durocher had drunk almost a quart of whiskey on the night of the murders.
The state answered that Durocher had knowingly waived mitigation and that the record supported both aggravating factors. The Florida Supreme Court agreed with the state on July 23, 1992, in Durocher v. State, 604 So. 2d 810. It held that neither Durocher nor his lawyer had asked for special counsel, that the law did not require it when a defendant knowingly and voluntarily waived mitigation, and that the trial judge had carefully considered all the evidence about Durocher that could be gleaned from his statements, the expert reports and counsel's remarks. Chief Justice Barkett concurred, holding to her earlier dissent in Hamblen v. Dugger. Rehearing was denied on September 30, 1992.
Durocher had been asking state officials to execute him since 1991, when he first wrote to Governor Lawton Chiles. "I am a believer in capital punishment," he wrote, according to UPI.
Clemency proceedings were held before the governor, with the Duval County public defender appointed as clemency counsel. Dr. Jethro Toomer carried out a mental health evaluation for that process; the petition said it reportedly found significant mental health problems. Clemency was denied when Chiles signed a death warrant in May 1993; the Florida Supreme Court gave the date as May 23, and the collateral lawyers' petition gave it as May 26. The execution was set for 7 a.m. on August 25, 1993. Durocher sent the governor a note thanking him for the warrant, according to the petition.
On May 25, 1993, the Florida Supreme Court received a letter from him. "I am a death row inmate, I have four (4) death sentences, all of which have had a direct appeal and [have] been affirmed," he wrote, adding that he had made it known to everyone involved that he wished to drop all of his appeals. The next day he signed an affidavit at the prison saying that he refused to see any lawyer from the Capital Collateral Representative's office and did not wish to appeal any of his death sentences further.
The Capital Collateral Representative, Larry Helm Spalding, and his chief assistant, Martin J. McClain, filed a petition in Durocher's name on June 25, 1993, asking the Florida Supreme Court to stay the execution. The petition argued that his competence was in doubt: to plead guilty, to waive lawyers, and to be executed. It described a long history of mental illness, including the 1976 diagnosis, organic brain damage reported by a psychologist at DeSoto in 1981, depression, suicide attempts and a borderline personality disorder. It cited evaluations that called him psychotic, depressed and suicidal, and experts who said he could not appreciate his own death. At one evaluation, the petition said, he could not speak and wrote all of his answers.
The petition also said Durocher had alternately cooperated and refused to cooperate with lawyers and doctors, had refused to see the lawyers who filed it, and had spoken to one of the office's attorneys only on condition that she not act as his lawyer. It said he had written a letter to a prosecutor claiming to have killed "J.R. and Laura Palmer," names of fictional television characters, and had played what the lawyers called silly games with investigators. It complained that many agencies, former defense lawyers and doctors had not turned over records, and it argued that none of the evidence of his mental illness had reached the jury.
Durocher wrote to the court again in a letter received July 6, 1993. He said the office had never had his approval to do anything for him and asked the court to deny the petition and anything else it might file on his behalf.
On August 12, 1993, in Durocher v. Singletary, 623 So. 2d 482, the Florida Supreme Court held that a competent death-row prisoner may waive representation by the Capital Collateral Representative, and that the office had no duty or right to represent a prisoner without his permission. The court said it could not deny Durocher "his right to control his destiny to whatever extent remains." It ruled that the office could not act as his "next friend" because it was a volunteer with no shown right to act for him. It directed the trial judge to hold at once an inquiry of the kind used when a defendant asks to represent himself, to confirm that the waiver was knowing, intelligent and voluntary. If the waiver was valid, the petition would be dismissed.
Chief Justice Barkett agreed with the result but wrote separately. The role of the state in imposing a death sentence, she wrote, "transcends the desires of a particular inmate to commit state-assisted suicide." She said the appropriateness of the death sentence in his case had never been subjected to true adversarial testing, and that public counsel should have been appointed at his trial to present mitigating evidence.
Durocher was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison in Starke on the morning of Wednesday, August 25, 1993. He was 33. He was pronounced dead at 7:15 a.m., according to UPI. The day before, the U.S. Supreme Court had rejected an appeal filed on his behalf.
UPI reported that of the 31 people executed in Florida since the state resumed executions in 1979, he was the only one put to death on his first death warrant; most of the others had gone through several. The Death Penalty Information Center lists him among the prisoners it counts as execution volunteers, people who waived at least part of their ordinary appeals, and says that the appeals filed in the last days were filed over his objections.
How the children died. The court records give differing accounts. The Florida Supreme Court's 1992 summary of his confessions, the state's brief and the public defender's brief describe the children's deaths in different ways. All agree that he killed both children and Grace Reed.
Why he killed them. Durocher gave investigators at least two motives: a suicide pact with Reed, and a plan, formed after New Jersey welfare officials sought child support, to kill Reed and the children without killing himself. The trial judge noted that Reed may have agreed to a murder-suicide but that her children had not.
Other killings. His July 1989 letter claimed knowledge of five homicides in Clay County, and in January 1989 he told the detective he could give information about three more killings if he were sentenced to death for the Underwood murder. Only the three deaths of Reed and her children were charged in Clay County. His collateral lawyers said he had also claimed fictional television characters as victims and had admitted and then denied killings. No other killing is attributed to him in the court records.
His mental state. His trial judges and the Florida Supreme Court found him competent and his waivers knowing and voluntary. His collateral lawyers argued in 1993 that he was mentally ill, brain damaged and unable to appreciate his own death, and that no jury had heard that evidence. Chief Justice Barkett wrote that the appropriateness of his death sentence had never been tested in a true adversarial proceeding.
Dates. The Florida Supreme Court gave the date of the death warrant as May 23, 1993; the petition filed in his name gave May 26. A state brief gave the date of the Clay County sentencing order as December 13, 1990, a date that comes before the March 1991 trial; the sentences were imposed in 1991, according to UPI.
The victim of the 1988 killing. The court papers give his name as Dwayne Eddie Childers, Dwayne Childers and Edward Childers.
1973: His parents divorce, when he is in the seventh grade (1993 petition).
1978: Joins the Navy and is later discharged (1993 petition).
1981: Meets Grace Reed, of New Jersey, and her three-year-old daughter, Candy.
1983: Reed gives birth to a son, Joshua. Durocher brings the family to Florida.
About Thanksgiving 1983: Kills Grace Reed and her two children in Clay County.
January 12, 1986: Kills Thomas J. Underwood III in a robbery at a Jacksonville store and drives his car to Louisiana.
August 24, 1988: Arrested in Jacksonville for the murder of Dwayne Childers.
January 1989: Convicted by a Duval County jury of the Childers murder; the jury recommends life.
January 17 to 18, 1989: Asks to see Detective John Bradley and asks whether a death sentence can be guaranteed.
The following Monday: Gives a recorded confession to the Underwood killing.
February 16, 1989: Indicted for the Underwood murder and armed robbery.
June 1989: Convicted of the Underwood murder and armed robbery; the jury recommends death, 7 to 5.
July 7, 1989: Sentenced to death for the Underwood murder.
July 18, 1989: A prosecutor receives his letter claiming knowledge of five Clay County homicides.
January 10, 1990: Arrested for the murders of Reed and her children.
April 6, 1990: The First District Court of Appeal affirms the Childers conviction.
October 10 to 11, 1990: Offers to give up the bodies.
October 16 and 22, 1990: The children's remains and then Grace Reed's are found near Green Cove Springs.
February 12, 1991: Indicted in Clay County on three counts of first-degree murder.
March 4 to 5, 1991: Trial begins; he pleads guilty the next day.
1991: The jury unanimously recommends death on all three counts, and three death sentences are imposed.
February 13, 1992: The Florida Supreme Court affirms the Underwood conviction and death sentence.
July 23, 1992: The Florida Supreme Court affirms the three Clay County death sentences.
May 1993: Governor Lawton Chiles denies clemency and signs a death warrant.
June 25, 1993: State collateral lawyers file a petition in his name over his objections.
August 12, 1993: The Florida Supreme Court rules that a competent prisoner may refuse those lawyers.
August 24, 1993: The U.S. Supreme Court rejects an appeal filed on his behalf.
August 25, 1993: Executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison, Starke; pronounced dead at 7:15 a.m.