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Florida Executes Samuel Lee Smithers for the 1996 Pond Murders of Christy Cowan and Denise Roach

Smithers, 72, a former Baptist deacon, was put to death on October 14, 2025, the oldest person executed in Florida's modern death-penalty era.

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Illustration: narrow aisle of evidence shelving with boxes and paper bags

On May 28, 1996, a woman who owned a 27-acre property with three ponds in rural Plant City, Florida, stopped by and found the man who did her landscape work, Samuel Lee Smithers, cleaning an ax in the carport. She knew him from church, where he was a Baptist deacon. He said he had been using the ax to trim tree limbs. She noticed a pool of blood in the carport. Someone must have come by and killed a small animal, he told her. She contacted law enforcement.

By the time a deputy met her at the property later that day, the blood had been cleaned up. But the deputy noticed drag marks leading to one of the ponds, and that is where authorities found the bodies of Christy Cowan and Denise Roach. According to court records, Smithers had met each woman on a different date that May at a Tampa motel to pay her for sex. Both had been severely beaten, strangled and left in the pond to die.

Twenty-nine years later, on October 14, 2025, Florida executed him. Smithers, 72, was pronounced dead at 6:15 p.m. after a lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke. He had been convicted in 1999 of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, and he was put to death under a warrant signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The curtain to the death chamber rose at the scheduled 6 p.m., with Smithers already strapped to a table and an IV in his arm. Asked whether he had a final statement, he answered, "No sir." The drugs began almost at once. His breathing was heavy and he convulsed slightly before all movement stopped; a warden shook him and shouted his name and got no response. A medic checked his vital signs at 6:14 p.m., and he was declared dead a minute later. A Department of Corrections spokesman, Ted Veerman, said the execution was carried out without incident.

His lawyers had argued that his age should make him ineligible for execution under the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The week before, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the elderly are not categorically exempt from the death penalty, and on the evening of the execution the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a final appeal without comment. Smithers became the oldest person executed in the modern era of Florida's death penalty.

He was also the 14th person Florida executed in 2025, a state record. Since the U.S. Supreme Court restored the death penalty in 1976, Florida's highest annual total had been eight, in 2014.

The details of the crimes come from court records as summarized by the Associated Press; both accounts used here are versions of the same AP report by David Fischer, one published after the execution and one updated that evening. No Florida Department of Corrections or court page could be opened.

Sources