On May 28, 1996, Marion Whitehurst drove out to check on a vacant house she owned near Plant City, in eastern Hillsborough County, Florida. The house stood on 27 acres with three ponds. The man who mowed the grass for her, Sam Smithers, was someone she knew from church. When she arrived his truck was parked outside the carport and he was sitting on the carport cleaning an ax. He told her he had come back to cut some tree limbs. She saw a pool of blood on the concrete. Smithers suggested that someone must have killed a small animal there, and he said he would clean it up.
Whitehurst was bothered enough to call the sheriff's office. When a deputy met her at the property later that day, the blood was gone. The deputy noticed marks in the grass that looked as if something had been dragged from the carport toward one of the ponds. In the water was the body of a woman, later identified as Cristy Cowan. A dive team searched the pond and found a second woman, Denise Roach, who had been dead for more than a week.
The man on the carport was a Baptist deacon, a husband and the father of a teenage son, and he lived in a two-story house in the Walden Lake subdivision. He was convicted of both murders in 1998, sentenced to death in 1999, and executed in October 2025 at the age of 72.
Samuel Lee Smithers was born on January 30, 1953, according to Florida's Commission on Capital Cases and the Department of Corrections. Evidence about his childhood came out at his penalty phase in 1999. His brothers testified that their mother beat the boys with a belt. Family members described head injuries: a fall when he was an infant and, at age 27, a blow from the butt of a shotgun. His defense presented the injuries as part of a case for brain damage.
In Plant City, the public picture was different. When he was arrested, the Tampa Bay Times described Sam and Sharon Smithers as good neighbors who kept up their property, went to church regularly and hosted family gatherings in their Walden Lake home. At his trial in December 1998, the Times called him a man "with a wife, a teenage son, a suburban home and a workaday job." Witnesses at his penalty phase described a devoted husband and father who did good in his community. People familiar with the case told FOX 13 in 2025 that he was active in his son's life and was known as a polite man who often helped others.
He was a deacon at his church, and that is where he came to know Marion Whitehurst. In 1995 he agreed to look after the lawn at her empty property outside Plant City. She gave him a key to the gate but not to the house. In 1996 he took on the job again. He mowed the property during the week of May 20, and she paid him on May 26.
According to the case record, there was another side to his routine. Investigators and later the prosecution established that he picked up women who sold sex in Tampa. The Florida Supreme Court's opinion places both victims in the area around the Luxury Motel. The Associated Press, summarizing court records, said he met the two women on different dates in May 1996 at a Tampa motel to pay them for sex. FOX 13 said he met them on Nebraska Avenue; the Times placed Roach's last sighting on East Hillsborough Avenue. A woman who worked the same area, Bonnie Kruse, later recognized him as a former customer.
Denise Elaine Roach was 24. The Tampa Bay Times reported on June 1, 1996, after her body was identified, that she had last been seen alive on May 14 in the 4100 block of East Hillsborough Avenue in Tampa. Court records describe her as a woman who worked as a prostitute in the same area as Cristy Cowan. Little more has been reported about her life, her family or what she hoped for. Hillsborough State Attorney Susie Lopez, speaking as the execution approached in 2025, spoke of "these two families of these young women who were taken away during the prime of their lives."
Cristy Elizabeth Cowan's first name appears in three spellings across the record: Cristy in the trial judge's sentencing order and the Florida Supreme Court's opinions, Christy in the 2025 death warrant and much of the press, and Christie in filings by Smithers' own lawyers, who said that was correct.
She had wanted to be a nurse. The Times reported on May 31, 1996, that she had graduated from high school near the top of her class, become a certified nurse's aide and cared for the elderly. By 1996 her life had become harder. At the trial in 1998, the Times wrote that she had "lived a hard life on the streets of Tampa," making "dates" with strangers for money and somehow surviving. Another woman who knew her testified that she had given Cowan a condom on the day she disappeared.
Her father, John Cowan, would play an unusual part in the case. At the sentencing stage he asked the judge not to impose death. He was still opposed to the execution in 2025, when he was in his eighties.
What happened to each woman at the property comes from three sources that do not agree: Smithers' confession to detectives, his very different testimony at trial, and the physical evidence presented by the state. The trial judge's 1999 sentencing order, as quoted by the News Service of Florida, gives the court's finding: he picked up each woman at a motel at a different time in May 1996 for "sex for money" and drove her to the secluded property.
Roach was killed first. The Department of Corrections and the Commission on Capital Cases list the date of the offense as May 12, 1996. In his confession, Smithers placed the confrontation on May 13. Judge William Fuente's sentencing order said Smithers killed Roach after a dispute with her in the garage at the property, and that the attack included "smashing her face, fracturing her skull, puncturing her brain, and strangling her, causing her hyoid bone to fracture." He then put her in the pond. "Whether she was alive or conscious at this time is not known," the judge wrote.
Cowan was killed on May 28, one to two weeks later. According to the sentencing order, Smithers "took her to the same secluded property, locked the gate behind him, had sex with her and then violently killed her," inflicting head and facial injuries with an ax and a hoe, strangling her and possibly drowning her. A convenience store's security camera recorded Smithers and Cowan together about an hour before Marion Whitehurst arrived and found him on the carport. In other words, Cowan had been brought to the property the same day her body was found, and Roach's body had been in the pond, on the same property, for more than a week while Smithers continued to come and go.
The medical examiner, Dr. Laura Hair, an associate medical examiner for the district, testified at trial that Cowan had not been dead for more than a couple of hours when she was found. A cone of foam around her mouth suggested she might have drowned. She had an injury to her eye, a cut under her lip, a blunt injury to her jaw, a chop wound on top of her head that reached the brain, another behind her ear, and injuries consistent with manual strangulation. The doctor gave the cause of death as strangulation combined with the chop wounds.
Roach's body had been in the water seven to ten days and was badly decomposed. Two slits in her clothing had been made by a sharp instrument. Her face and skull were fractured, and there were sixteen puncture wounds to the skull, several of which went through it. Her hyoid bone was broken, consistent with manual strangulation. Death was attributed to the combined effects of strangulation, stab wounds and blunt impact to the head.
The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office worked the scene and the house. "There are hundreds and hundreds of photographs that were taken at the scene, because when these two women were found, nobody really knew what happened," Susie Lopez, who was not involved in the original prosecution, told FOX 13 in 2025. "It took a very thorough investigation and just good old detective work."
Inside the house, to which Smithers did not have a key, investigators found a condom wrapper and a semen stain in a bedroom, and a fingerprint in the kitchen that was identified as his. DNA testing matched a bloodstain on the carport to Denise Roach. Shoe prints near the pond matched shoes found at his home. The convenience store video put him with Cowan on the last day of her life. The condom wrapper was similar to the one a friend said she had given Cowan that day.
Craig Latimer, then a lieutenant in the sheriff's office who helped investigate the case and later Hillsborough County's supervisor of elections, recalled to WFLA in 2025 what he had said after the arrest: "What do you define a serial killer as? We've got two bodies here. This subject killed two individuals over a 10-day period."
Two detectives went to the Smithers home after the bodies were found. He agreed to go with them to the sheriff's office and asked that his wife come too. After he was read his Miranda rights, he was questioned for almost three hours and agreed to come back the next morning for a polygraph examination.
The next morning he signed a written waiver and took the test. A detective told him the results showed he was not telling the truth, and he began to make incriminating statements. Other detectives took over the interview. He twice asked for his wife to be present. Detective Flair of the sheriff's office later testified about the confession at trial; her account of it ran to about thirty pages of transcript.
He admitted both killings, but described each as something that had happened to him. Of Roach, he said she had approached him while he was mowing on May 7 and claimed she had permission to be on the property. When he found her still there on May 13 and told her to leave, he said, she hit him on the arm, he hit her in the face, she threw a planter at his truck, and he shoved her against a wall so that a piece of wood fell from a shelf and knocked her unconscious. He said he left and came back the next day to move her body to the pond. Part of his statement described racial prejudice toward Roach; the Florida Supreme Court later considered whether his lawyers should have tried to keep that passage from the jury.
Of Cowan, he said he had stopped to help a woman whose car was off the side of the road, drove her to a convenience store, and that she then demanded money and threatened to accuse him of rape. He said he took her to the property and gave her all his money, that she threw a drink at him, and that he picked up an ax and struck her. He said he dragged her to the pond and was cleaning the ax when Whitehurst arrived, and that he could hear Cowan making noise while he talked to the property owner. After Whitehurst left, he said, he went back, hit her again to quiet her and threw tree limbs on her.
By May 30, 1996, the Times was reporting that the handyman from Walden Lake was in jail. A Hillsborough County grand jury indicted him on June 12, 1996, on two counts of first-degree murder. Before trial his lawyers moved to try the two killings separately and to suppress the confession. Judge Fuente denied both motions. He was represented at trial by Daniel M. Hernandez, a special public defender, and Scott Robbins.
The trial opened in Tampa in December 1998, more than two and a half years after the arrest. The state's witnesses included the women who had worked the same streets as Roach and Cowan. One testified that she had given Cowan the condom; another, that Smithers had once offered her money to go with him to Seffner. Detective Flair took the jury through the confession, and the state put on the fingerprint, the DNA, the shoe prints and the video.
Smithers testified in his own defense and told a third story. He said he had lied to detectives because he feared his family would be harmed. According to his testimony, a young woman he called Mimi had been doing court-ordered community service at his church; when she could not finish her hours, she offered him sex to falsify them, and he agreed. Weeks later, he said, an unknown man approached him, threatened to expose the arrangement, and demanded to use the Whitehurst property for drug deals. The Florida Supreme Court's summary describes the man, called "Mr. X," as having a compromising photograph of Smithers. Smithers testified that he saw this man kill both women and was forced to help get rid of the bodies.
The jury did not believe him. On Friday, December 18, 1998, it found him guilty of two counts of first-degree murder. The Times reported that his former wife sobbed in the courtroom as he hung his head and heard the verdict.
The penalty phase in January 1999 was a long contest of experts. The defense called three mental health witnesses, Dr. Wood, Dr. Berland and Dr. Michael Maher. They testified to brain damage, to extreme emotional disturbance and to an impaired capacity to control his conduct. Dr. Maher diagnosed a dissociative disorder. Dr. Berland described chronic psychotic disturbance, and told the jury that Smithers' former wife had described behavior associated with hallucinations. A PET scan with abnormal findings was offered as evidence of brain damage. The state answered with three experts of its own, who disputed the brain damage and the psychosis; one, Dr. Stein, found antisocial personality traits.
Family members testified about the beatings he had taken as a boy and about the man they knew as an adult. The Times reported that his former wife testified before the jury. On January 24, 1999, the jury voted 12 to 0 to recommend death on each count.
At a later hearing before the judge, two people asked for his life. One was his former wife. The other was John Cowan. The Times reported in April 1999 that Cowan hoped his daughter's killer would change and help other inmates.
On June 25, 1999, Judge Fuente sentenced Smithers to death on both counts. For Cowan's murder he found three aggravating factors: a prior violent felony (the Roach murder), that the killing was especially atrocious or cruel (the factor Florida law abbreviates as HAC), and that it was cold, calculated and premeditated (CCP). For Roach's murder he found the prior violent felony (the Cowan murder) and HAC. On the other side he found both statutory mental health mitigators, extreme emotional disturbance and substantially impaired capacity, and gave each moderate weight. He found seven other mitigating circumstances, also of moderate weight, and gave great weight to John Cowan's request. He concluded that the aggravating factors outweighed all of it. Smithers arrived on death row on July 15, 1999.
The Florida Supreme Court heard the direct appeal and affirmed both convictions and both death sentences on May 16, 2002, in Smithers v. State, 826 So. 2d 916. It rejected six arguments.
On severance, the court acknowledged that the killings were seven to ten days apart and not causally linked, but held that they were meaningfully related: the victims were similar, the method was similar, and the bodies were found together in the same pond. On the confession, it found that a detective's religious remarks during the interview were not coercive, that the Miranda warnings did not have to be repeated after his waivers the night before and that morning, and that his wife had not been used as an agent of the state because he himself asked for her. It held that the trial court erred by holding a pretrial hearing without his written waiver of presence, but that the error was harmless. It upheld the HAC finding for Roach and the CCP finding for Cowan, reasoning that the killings were similar and close in time and that he knew Roach's body was still on the property when he took Cowan there. It found no abuse of discretion in the denial of a mistrial over a witness's brief reference to lack of remorse, and held the sentences proportionate. There was no dissent; Justice Anstead concurred in result only as to the sentences, and Justice Pariente concurred in result. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case on February 24, 2003.
Smithers filed for postconviction relief in Hillsborough County in December 2003 and amended the motion in April 2006. At an evidentiary hearing in 2007, his new lawyers argued that his trial team had failed him at the penalty phase.
The hearing turned on two points. The first was Dr. Maher. A 1998 report by a defense investigator, Diane Fernandez, had recorded Smithers' account of a man getting out of a Bentley to talk to him. A neighbor, Dean Snyder, testified in 2007 that he had never seen any such thing, would have remembered it, and had never been asked by the defense. Maher said that if he had been given the report and known the neighbor would not back it up, he would have diagnosed recurrent psychotic episodes rather than a dissociative disorder. The second point was the medical evidence. A defense pathologist, Dr. Ronald Wright, testified that Cowan died of manual strangulation and that drowning was highly unlikely.
Judge Fuente denied the motion, and on July 9, 2009, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed, in Smithers v. State, 18 So. 3d 460. It found that Maher's revised opinion largely repeated what Dr. Berland had already told the jury, and that the sentencing judge had already found both mental health mitigators. It found that Dr. Wright's testimony would have hurt rather than helped, because he suggested the head wounds came after Cowan had been strangled into unconsciousness, which supported the finding that she suffered. It found no prejudice from the passage of the confession about Roach's race, which ran a few lines in thirty pages and was mentioned once by the state in the penalty phase. It also rejected a claim about a juror and denied a separate habeas petition, leaving open a claim of incompetency to be executed until a warrant was signed.
Smithers then filed a federal habeas petition in the Middle District of Florida, which was denied on June 15, 2011. The Eleventh Circuit allowed an appeal only on penalty phase counsel. On December 17, 2012, a panel of Judges Tjoflat, Barkett and Martin affirmed in an unpublished opinion. The panel said this was "not a case involving an eleventh hour investigation and the presentation of only some mitigation," noting that the jury had heard family members, friends and three mental health experts and still voted unanimously for death. It agreed that Maher's revised diagnosis and an independent medical examiner would not have changed the outcome. The U.S. Supreme Court denied review on April 15, 2013.
In January 2017, after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Hurst v. Florida on the role of juries in death sentences, Smithers filed another motion. It was denied that June, and the Florida Supreme Court affirmed in 2018.
In July 2014, two Hillsborough County detectives sat across from Smithers in a makeshift courtroom at Union Correctional Institution to ask him about a 1989 cold case, according to the Tampa Bay Times. The Times reported that October that he denied any role in that killing. No charge against him in any other case was reported, and he was never tried or convicted for any death other than those of Denise Roach and Cristy Cowan.
Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Smithers' death warrant on September 12, 2025, setting the execution for 6 p.m. on October 14. Florida had already executed eleven people that year, a record for the modern era. Smithers' lawyers from the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel for the Middle Region, led by Eric Pinkard, filed one claim: that executing a man of 72 was cruel and unusual punishment. They cited Florida laws that give special protection to the elderly, and Death Penalty Information Center figures showing that of 1,638 executions since 1976, only 41 involved people 65 or older and only 16 people over 70. A neuropsychologist, Dr. Hyman Eisenstein, examined him on September 18, 2025, and reported that his full-scale IQ had fallen from 111 in 1997 to 103 and that he was in "an insidious decline of mental function which will progress to a state of dementia."
Hillsborough Circuit Judge Michelle Sisco denied the motion on September 26. She found it untimely, since by his own definition the claim arose when he turned 65 in January 2018, and without merit, since no court had ever held the elderly exempt from execution. She noted that Dr. Berland had told the 1999 jury that the older test overstated his IQ, which on a newer test would have been about 103 or 104, so the record did not show the decline claimed.
The Florida Supreme Court affirmed on October 7, 2025. It held that the claim was barred and that Florida's constitution binds the state court to the U.S. Supreme Court's reading of the Eighth Amendment, which recognizes only one age-based exemption, for people under 18 at the time of the crime. "No opinion of the United States Supreme Court or this Court has held that the elderly are categorically exempt from execution," the opinion said. Five justices joined it; Justice Jorge Labarga concurred in result and Justice Charles Canady was recused. His lawyers then asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the execution, arguing that it "amounts to nothing more than mindless vengeance, offending the dignity of society." The court refused without comment on the afternoon of October 14.
Smithers woke at 6:30 a.m. on October 14, 2025, at Florida State Prison near Starke. His last meal was fried chicken, fried fish, a baked potato, apple pie, vanilla ice cream and sweet tea, according to Ted Veerman, the Department of Corrections communications director.
The curtain to the death chamber went up at 6 p.m. with Smithers already strapped to the table. Asked if he had a final statement, he said, "No, sir." The drugs began almost immediately. Witnesses saw his breathing grow heavy and his shoulders and chest shake; movement appeared to stop by about 6:05. A warden shook him and called his name. A medic checked him at 6:14, and he was pronounced dead at 6:15 p.m. Veerman said the execution was carried out without incident.
Outside, about 30 people gathered on the lawn across from the prison, most of them parishioners of Our Lady of Lourdes in Daytona Beach, according to the Independent Florida Alligator. On the other side of the lawn, a single man, Bill Campbell of Marion County, stood in support of the execution. Earlier that day the group Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty had delivered a petition to the governor. Its organizer, Grace Hanna, told WFLA that John Cowan "has always opposed the execution," that he was now in his eighties, and that he still felt it would not bring him closure. "These were terrible crimes, and I can't make any excuse for that," she said.
Smithers was the 14th person executed in Florida in 2025, extending a state record, and the oldest person Florida had executed since 1976. He had been on death row for 26 years.
There is nothing left pending. The Florida Department of Corrections' list of executions since 1976, as it stood on October 14, 2026, lists Samuel L. Smithers as execution number 120, with an offense date of May 12, 1996, a sentencing date of June 25, 1999, and an execution date of October 14, 2025, after 26 years on death row. The same list shows 19 executions in Florida in 2025 and 17 more by the end of September 2026. His record as the oldest man executed in modern Florida lasted until June 25, 2026, when Dusty Ray Spencer was executed at 74. Several older men have been executed since, the oldest of them, Dominick Occhicone Jr., at 80 on July 28, 2026.
Proven: a jury convicted Smithers of the first-degree murders of Denise Roach and Cristy Cowan, the convictions and sentences survived every state and federal appeal, and he was executed for them.
Confessed, then retracted: he admitted both killings to detectives in 1996 but described each as an unplanned reaction to something the woman did. At trial he blamed an unknown man and said he had confessed out of fear. The jury rejected the second account, and the courts held the first was voluntary. Neither of his accounts was accepted as the full story.
Disputed in the medical evidence: the state argued at the penalty phase that Cowan drowned. The defense pathologist who testified in 2007 said drowning was highly unlikely and that she was strangled. Both sides agreed she was strangled; the courts found the difference did not affect the sentence.
Unproven: the Hillsborough detectives' 2014 questioning about a 1989 cold case led to no reported charge, and Smithers denied involvement. The label "serial killer," used by Lieutenant Latimer in 1996, rests on the two convictions alone.
Details that differ between sources: Cowan's first name (Cristy, Christy, Christie); the date of Roach's death (May 12 in state records, May 13 in his confession, last seen May 14 according to the Times); where he met the women (the Luxury Motel area in the court opinion, Nebraska Avenue according to FOX 13, Hillsborough Avenue according to the Times and the Alligator).
For years the case was known in Tampa Bay mostly by the nickname the press gave Smithers, the "Deacon of Death." The two women were usually described in one word, by what they did for money. The fuller record is thin but not empty. Cristy Cowan was a top student who trained as a nurse's aide and looked after old people before her life went wrong. Her father asked the court, and later the state, to spare the man who killed her. Denise Roach was 24.
The legal fight over his sentence lasted more than a quarter century and ended on a narrow question. By 2025 no one was arguing that he had not killed the two women; the last claim was only that he had grown too old to be executed. The Florida Supreme Court answered, as it had in the Gudinas case earlier that year, that the state's constitution ties it to the U.S. Supreme Court's reading of the Eighth Amendment, and that no court had ever recognized such an exemption.
January 30, 1953: Samuel Lee Smithers is born.
1995: He agrees to mow the vacant 27-acre Whitehurst property near Plant City.
About May 12-14, 1996: Denise Roach, 24, is killed at the property and left in a pond. She was last seen May 14 on East Hillsborough Avenue, per the Times.
May 26, 1996: The property owner pays Smithers for mowing the week of May 20.
May 28, 1996: Cristy Cowan is killed. Marion Whitehurst finds Smithers cleaning an ax by a pool of blood; a deputy finds Cowan's body in the pond, and divers find Roach.
Late May 1996: Smithers is questioned, takes a polygraph, confesses and is jailed (reported May 30).
June 12, 1996: Indicted on two counts of first-degree murder.
December 18, 1998: Convicted on both counts.
January 24, 1999: Jury recommends death, 12 to 0, on each count.
June 25, 1999: Judge William Fuente imposes two death sentences.
July 15, 1999: Received on death row.
May 16, 2002: Florida Supreme Court affirms.
February 24, 2003: U.S. Supreme Court denies review.
July 9, 2009: Florida Supreme Court affirms denial of postconviction relief.
June 15, 2011: Federal district court denies habeas.
December 17, 2012: Eleventh Circuit affirms.
April 15, 2013: U.S. Supreme Court denies review.
July 2014: Hillsborough detectives question him about a 1989 cold case; he denies involvement.
2017-2018: Hurst-based motion denied and affirmed.
September 12, 2025: Gov. DeSantis signs the death warrant.
September 26, 2025: Judge Michelle Sisco denies the age-based claim.
October 7, 2025: Florida Supreme Court affirms.
October 14, 2025: U.S. Supreme Court refuses a stay; Smithers is executed at 6:15 p.m., aged 72.
June 25, 2026: Dusty Ray Spencer, 74, is executed and becomes the oldest person executed in modern Florida history (Florida DOC list).