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 landscaper.
In November 1983 he killed his girlfriend Grace Reed, her five-year-old daughter Candice, and Joshua, the six-month-old son he had with Reed. He bought a shovel, drove them to a deserted area in Clay County, shot one of the children with a shotgun he had in the car, and stabbed and beat the other. He told investigators later that he and their mother had made a suicide pact, and in the same account that he had intended to kill her and the children but not himself. The three bodies were buried and nobody found them for seven years.
In 1986 he robbed a window decorations store in Jacksonville and killed the clerk, Thomas Underwood III.
In August 1988 he beat his roommate, Eddie Dwayne Childers, to death with a hammer. 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. Convicted of the Childers murder and awaiting sentence, he confessed to the 1986 killing. Convicted of that and sentenced to death, he wrote to an assistant state attorney in July 1989 saying that he knew of other murders. Over the next fifteen months he made a series of statements, and in October 1990 he confessed to the three 1983 killings and drew a map of where the bodies were buried.
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, as had happened in another Florida case; 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 was a believer in capital punishment and asking that justice now be served, and he told the governor 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 that were 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, and at the time the only person in the state to have been executed on a first death warrant. He was the two hundred and sixteenth person executed in the United States since 1976.
Sources place the killings variously in Jacksonville, in Duval County and in Clay County; the 1983 murders were committed in Clay County and the later two in Jacksonville, which is in Duval.