On the morning of November 15, 1984, two Tampa detectives, Charles Wolfe and Carson Helms, were driving back to headquarters after a shift spent watching for one particular car when they saw it: a maroon Dodge Magnum, with a white man of about thirty at the wheel, brown hair, a mustache. They pulled him over with a cover story about a hit-and-run involving red Magnums. Up close they could see what they had been told to look for, the word "Magnum" on the dashboard, a digital clock, white seats, red carpet. The driver’s license read "B. J. Long." He let them take his photograph, and they let him drive away and reported to their superiors. The next day Robert Joe Long, who had gone by Bobby Joe since boyhood, was arrested on a warrant as he walked out of a Tampa movie theater. Before the questioning ended he had begun to talk about the women whose bodies had been turning up around Tampa Bay since the spring.
He would plead guilty to eight of those murders in Hillsborough County. He would be sentenced to death for one of them, the killing of a 22-year-old woman named Michelle Denise Simms, and he would spend nearly thirty-four years on death row before the State of Florida carried it out in May 2019. A ninth killing, in neighboring Pasco County, sent him to death row three separate times and ended in a court-ordered acquittal. A tenth was attributed to him but never charged.
Long was born on October 14, 1953, in Kenova, a small river town in the far western corner of West Virginia. His mother was seventeen. According to testimony at his 1989 sentencing hearing, she left his father when the boy was about eight months old, and the next several years were unsettled: the family moved back and forth between West Virginia and Miami, and by the defense’s count about a dozen different people looked after him between the ages of two and eight. He shared a bed with his mother until he was about ten or older, the hearing was told, and later lived in a crowded house in North Miami Beach with his mother, her mother and her sisters. His mother worked as a cocktail waitress, the Associated Press reported in 2019.
The Florida Supreme Court, summarizing the defense evidence in 1992, listed a run of childhood head injuries: a fall from a swing that knocked him out briefly, a fall down a flight of stairs that left him unconscious for fifteen to twenty minutes, being struck by a car at the age of seven and spending a week or more in the hospital, and being thrown from a horse. The Herald-Dispatch of Huntington, West Virginia, reported that he had been attending Cammack Elementary School when the car hit him, and that the family returned to Florida afterward. At fifteen he had surgery to remove an enlarged breast, which a doctor attributed to a hormone imbalance; the Herald-Dispatch reported that he had been born with an extra X chromosome. He left school at fifteen, according to the court record, to do electrical work.
In 1972 he enlisted in the army. At about twenty, while still in the service, he was thrown from a motorcycle in Miami and suffered serious head injuries; the recovery took about a year. In January 1974 he married his childhood sweetheart. They had two children and divorced in 1980.
His former wife described the change in him at his 1989 resentencing, and again to the Associated Press in 2019. After the accident, she said, he had explosive outbursts, was sensitive to noise, and used amphetamines for nine months to a year. The violence at home escalated. She told the AP that he turned violent toward her. In the years that followed he supported the children with a disability check of $250 a month, according to her testimony.
The Herald-Dispatch reported that after the accident he earned an associate degree in radiology from Broward College and spent much of his working life moving from state to state, and that in 1983 he worked for about two months at two Huntington hospitals before being fired for what the paper described as unethical conduct involving patients. By 1984 he was living in Tampa and was on three years' probation for an aggravated assault on a woman.
Long was first known to investigators not as a killer but as a man who found women to attack through the newspaper. Detectives working a long series of attacks gave him the name "the Classified Ad Rapist," the Associated Press reported: he answered advertisements for household items, made an appointment to see them, and, if the woman who came to the door was alone, attacked her. The AP said investigators tied him to dozens of such attacks, and WTSP reported that, by investigators' account, he had claimed forty in three states. Most of those cases never reached a courtroom; the Herald-Dispatch reported that he was suspected in several assaults in California that were never prosecuted.
Two of the 1984 attacks did reach court, and both would later count against him as prior violent felonies. On March 6, 1984, he forced his way into a house in Pasco County and attacked the woman inside; a Pasco jury convicted him on April 17, 1985, of burglary, kidnapping and robbery, with other charges. On May 29, 1984, in Palm Harbor in Pinellas County, he attacked a woman who had advertised furniture for sale. On July 12, 1985, he pleaded guilty in that case to kidnapping, armed robbery and armed burglary, with other charges, and Pinellas County imposed four life sentences.
The killings that the courts would later lay at his door began, by the account of the families and the Associated Press, in March 1984. The first woman on their list was Artis Wick, eighteen, whose name appears in court papers both as Wick and as Wicks. Prosecutors in Pasco County later placed her death somewhere between March 28 and November 22, 1984, and said they would not offer evidence about it at trial. Long was never charged with her death.
Lana Long, twenty and no relation to him, was the first of the eight women whose murders he would admit in court. She was found in Hillsborough County on May 13, 1984. She had been strangled. Tire impressions collected in her case were later compared at the FBI Laboratory in Washington.
On May 27, 1984, Michelle Denise Simms was found dead near Plant City. She was twenty-two and, according to testimony from the sheriff’s office, had been in the Tampa area only a short time. The associate medical examiner, Dr. Lee Robert Miller, listed several possible causes of death, strangulation among them. Her fingerprints identified her. Years of litigation would turn on this one killing, and Long’s own account of it, given to Lt. Randy Latimer of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office on the day of his arrest, became the center of the State’s case for death: he said he had made his preparations the evening before and gone out looking for a woman. Asked later why he had killed her, he said it was "his secret."
Elizabeth Loudenback was twenty-two. Prosecutors put the date of her death between June 8 and June 24, 1984. She was one of the four women whose cases were added in the penalty phase of a later trial, and one of the eight whose murders Long admitted by his plea.
In the autumn the deaths came close together. Prosecutors placed the death of Vicky Elliott, twenty-one, between September 7 and November 16, 1984, and the death of Kimberly Hopps, a woman in her twenties, between late September and October 31. Chanel Williams was eighteen. Prosecutors placed her death between October 1 and October 7, 1984, and her family later said she had been found shot to death that month. Her younger sister remembered her as funny and quick to help anyone who asked. "She was my older sister," she said in 2019.
Karen Dinsfriend was twenty-eight. She was found dead near Thonotosassa, east of Tampa, on October 14, 1984. She had been strangled. Virginia Lee Johnson, eighteen, was last seen around the middle of October; a public health nurse who saw her on October 15 was among the last people known to have spoken with her. She was found dead near Zephyrhills, in Pasco County, on November 6, 1984. The chief medical examiner, Dr. Joan Wood, gave the cause of death as homicidal violence, probably by strangulation.
Kimberly Swann was twenty-one. Her father reported her missing on November 11 or 12, 1984, and on November 12 her body was found in Hillsborough County. She had been strangled.
By then investigators believed they were looking for one man. Cpl. Lee Baker of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office worked the Swann, Dinsfriend, Simms and Lana Long cases, and the Johnson case across the county line, and he later testified that he had concluded the same person was responsible for all of them. In mid-November the Tampa Police Department, the sheriff’s office and the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office formed a task force.
What tied the cases together was not a witness but a carpet. The FBI’s hair and fiber examiner, Michael Malone, found red trilobal nylon fibers on several of the women, and once Long’s car was in custody he matched them to its carpet. He testified that fibers and hairs moved between the car and the victims in six of the cases, fourteen separate transfers in all, and that a bleached blonde hair found in the car was microscopically indistinguishable from Virginia Johnson’s. An FBI tire examiner, David Attenburger, testified that an unusual tire on Long’s car could have made the impressions found near Michelle Simms, and that a tire of the same make as another of his could have made those near Lana Long.
The fiber evidence was strong enough to point a task force toward a car. It was never strong enough, on its own, to convict a man in a court of law, and more than a decade later the Florida Supreme Court said exactly that.
The break came from someone he let go. In the early hours of November 3, 1984, a 17-year-old was abducted in Tampa and held for more than a day before he let her go. She had spent that time, as she later told the Associated Press, studying the man who held her. She gave detectives a description of him, white, about thirty, a little heavy through the middle, with neatly cut brown hair and a brown mustache, and an exact description of his car: a maroon two-door Dodge with white seats, red carpet, the word "Magnum" in silver letters on the dash, and a green digital clock. She remembered that he had stopped at a bank.
Detective Polly Goethe interviewed her on November 4 and two days later circulated a memo asking officers to look out for the man and the car. The FBI Laboratory reported on November 14 that fibers from her clothing matched the fibers in the murder series, and the same day officers from the city and the county met and compared what they had. On the morning of November 15 Wolfe and Helms made their stop. That afternoon Detective Steve Cribb set a list of Dodge Magnum owners in Hillsborough County against a list of automated teller transactions near places the girl had described. One name appeared on both. A withdrawal at 3:49 in the morning, at a bank in that area, had been made with a personal identification number belonging to Robert Joe Long.
Detectives obtained two warrants: one for Long’s arrest on the kidnapping, one to search his apartment and his car. Det. Harold Winset arrested him in the parking lot as he left the theater on November 16, put him on the ground, read him his rights and told him about the search warrant for the car.
At the sheriff’s office he read and signed a printed waiver of his rights. By the State’s account he talked with Lt. Latimer and Sgt. Price for about an hour and a half and confessed fully to the abduction of the girl. Then one of the detectives left the room and came back with photographs of the dead women, and asked Long whether he had ever picked up prostitutes in the area. "I would prefer not to answer that," Long said. The detectives laid out the photographs. Long remarked that the complexion of things had changed, and said, "I think I might need an attorney."
The questioning went on. One of the officers later testified that he told Long, "Nothing has changed. I’m still being honest with you," and told him not to fool himself. Before the questioning ended Long had confessed to eight murders in Hillsborough County and one in Pasco. Those few sentences in the interrogation room would decide the fate of the Pasco case for years to come.
On November 28, 1984, a Hillsborough County grand jury indicted him for the kidnapping, sexual battery and first-degree murder of Michelle Simms. Pasco County indicted him for the murder of Virginia Johnson on December 6.
Pasco went first. Long’s trial for the Johnson murder began on April 22, 1985, with his confession in evidence. On April 27 the jury convicted him and unanimously recommended death, and the judge, Ray E. Ulmer Jr., sentenced him to death in May. On April 17 a separate Pasco jury had convicted him in the March home-invasion case, and in July he pleaded guilty in Pinellas County.
On September 23, 1985, in Hillsborough County, Long pleaded guilty to everything the county had charged: eight counts of first-degree murder and nine of kidnapping, with other charges, and a probation violation. The eight women were Lana Long, Michelle Simms, Karen Dinsfriend and Kimberly Swann, and Chanel Williams, Kimberly Hopps, Elizabeth Loudenback and Vicky Elliott, and the plea also covered the kidnapping of the 17-year-old, with other charges. In exchange the State agreed to life sentences on every count except the Simms murder, where a jury would hear a full penalty phase and decide whether to recommend death. Long gave up the right to challenge his confession and the evidence seized from his car and apartment. The State agreed that the Hillsborough convictions themselves would not be used as aggravating factors in the Simms sentencing; convictions from other counties could be.
Within weeks he tried to back out. In December he moved to withdraw the pleas, citing a missing defense witness and a misunderstanding about his right to appeal. The trial court allowed it, and on December 12, 1985, after the judge questioned him at length in open court, Long decided to keep the pleas. The Florida Supreme Court would later uphold the bargain more than once, describing it as a tactical choice made by an intelligent defendant "to avoid multiple trials and possibly multiple death sentences."
In November 1986, while the cases were on appeal, Long sat for an interview of about ninety minutes with Victoria Corderi of CBS. His former lawyer later claimed that the network had promised editorial control; a trial judge found there had been no such agreement. CBS broadcast four short excerpts on December 26, 1986. In one he spoke of seeing women walking down the street, "like A, B, C, D." In another, quoted by his own lawyers in a later brief, he said that all in all he must have "destroyed about a hundred people." Prosecutors played parts of the tape at his later trials, and the network fought, all the way to a Florida appeals court, to keep its unaired footage out of the courtroom.
On November 12, 1987, the Florida Supreme Court threw out the Pasco conviction. Long’s words, "I think I might need an attorney," had been equivocal, the court held, but they put the officers on notice; from that moment they were allowed to ask only questions that clarified whether he wanted a lawyer. Instead they kept going and got a confession. Under Miranda and the cases that followed it, the confession to the Johnson murder was inadmissible. The court vacated the conviction and the death sentence and sent the case back for a new trial. The confession to the girl’s abduction stood, because it had come before he raised the question of a lawyer.
Seating a jury in Pasco County for the second trial proved impossible, and the case moved to Fort Myers. Jury selection began on October 31, 1988. With the confession gone, the State built its case on the forensic links and on the other killings: Malone testified about the hairs and fibers, Cpl. Baker described the cases he had worked, and the jury heard that Long had pleaded guilty to the Hillsborough murders. The survivor of the November abduction testified. On November 7 the jury found him guilty, and on November 10 it recommended death by nine votes to three. The judge, Wayne L. Cobb, imposed it on March 2, 1989.
On October 15, 1992, the Supreme Court reversed again. The Hillsborough murders, it held, had become "the central feature of this trial," and his plea in those cases was not to be turned against him in this one or used to argue for his death. It set rules for a third trial: the CBS tape could come in, if the jury could see all of it; the girl could testify to identify him, but not about what happened to her; the other murders were to stay out.
The third trial ended on February 10, 1994, with a third guilty verdict, and a jury split seven to five recommended death. Judge Charles W. Cope sentenced him to death on April 12, 1994. On March 6, 1997, the Florida Supreme Court reversed the conviction for the last time, and this time it ordered an acquittal. The hair and fiber evidence, the court wrote, raised "a very strong suspicion" that Long was guilty, but suspicion was not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. No one had seen him with Virginia Johnson. He had made no admissible statement that he killed her. "Hair comparisons cannot constitute a basis for positive personal identification," the court said, and the State had not shown that the red fiber in her hair could have come only from his car. The case went back to Pasco County with directions to enter a judgment of acquittal. Long had been sentenced to death for her murder three times, and in law none of those convictions stands.
The Simms penalty phase began in Hillsborough County on July 10, 1986, before Judge John P. Griffin. The jury recommended death by eleven votes to one, and Griffin imposed it on July 25. Among the aggravating factors he relied on was the Pasco murder conviction, and when that conviction fell in 1987 the Simms sentence fell with it. On June 30, 1988, the Supreme Court upheld the guilty pleas but vacated the death sentence and ordered a new sentencing before a new jury.
Pretrial publicity moved the second penalty phase to Daytona Beach, in Volusia County, where Circuit Judge Richard A. Lazzara heard it from June 26 to June 29, 1989. Long had tried once more to withdraw his pleas, arguing that his former public defender had never explained them; the motion was denied.
The hearing became an argument about his mind. Dr. John Money, a professor of medical psychology at Johns Hopkins University, diagnosed sexual sadism, which he described as a brain disorder, together with temporal lobe epilepsy, and testified that a head injury could be "one hundred percent responsible" for the condition. Long knew what he was doing, Money said, but could not stop himself. Dr. Robert Berland, a forensic psychologist appointed by the court, measured his IQ at 118, higher than average, and found bipolar disorder, an organic personality syndrome from brain damage, and antisocial personality disorder; he believed Long had killed Simms in a rage and that his ability to conform his conduct to the law was substantially impaired. The State’s rebuttal witness, the psychiatrist Daniel Sprehe, found a severe antisocial personality disorder and no mental illness, and testified that Long had told him he killed Simms "to eliminate a witness" and would not have done it with a policeman present. His mother, his father and his former wife testified about his childhood and the accident.
The jury voted twelve to nothing for death on June 29, 1989. On July 21 Lazzara imposed it, finding four aggravating factors (a killing committed during a kidnapping, a prior violent felony, a killing that was cold, calculated and premeditated, and one that met the statute’s test of an especially cruel killing) and two statutory mitigating ones, extreme mental or emotional disturbance and substantially impaired capacity. The judge wrote that Long’s mental and emotional problems did not give him "a license to deliberately stalk and abduct" a woman. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed on October 15, 1992, the same day it reversed the second Johnson verdict, and the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case on October 4, 1993. The sentence was final.
Long spent the following decades on Florida’s death row; in 2019 he was held at Union Correctional Institution. A state post-conviction motion filed in December 1994 was denied, and a second, filed in October 1995 and amended in 2003, was still pending in 2007, when a hearing was set on his competency. The Florida Supreme Court rejected it on July 11, 2013, finding that his lawyers had not failed him when they advised the 1985 plea.
The next challenge went to the heart of the forensic case. In September 2013 the United States Department of Justice issued a letter about questionable practices by thirteen FBI examiners, Michael Malone among them, and sent ten independent reviews of Malone’s work in Long’s cases. The reviews found that Malone "did not perform his testing in a scientifically acceptable manner" in those cases. Long argued that he would never have pleaded guilty had he known. On January 21, 2016, the Florida Supreme Court rejected the claim as late, noting that he and his lawyers had received an earlier government report on Malone, and the reviews of his own cases, in December 2000. Even on the merits, the court held, there was no reasonable probability that he would have refused the plea: there were his confessions, and other circumstantial evidence the State had described in 1986. The court called the motion "a thinly disguised attempt to challenge, for the fourth time, the validity of his plea agreement." A further motion was rejected in 2018. In federal court a district judge denied his petition for habeas corpus on August 30, 2016, and the Eleventh Circuit refused to take an appeal on January 4, 2017.
The Florida Commission on Offender Review took up the question of clemency in September 2018. The governor denied it, and Long was notified in April 2019.
Ron DeSantis took office as governor in January 2019. In March the attorney general, Ashley Moody, wrote to him about Long’s eligibility for execution, and on April 23 DeSantis signed the first death warrant of his administration, setting the execution for May 23. Long was sixty-five.
His lawyer, Robert A. Norgard, filed in every court still open to him. In state court he argued that new science on brain injury changed the case for mercy, that the three-drug lethal injection protocol, and its first drug, etomidate, carried a particular risk of pain for a man with a traumatic brain injury and temporal lobe epilepsy, that his decades on death row were themselves cruel, and that his history of mental illness should exempt him from execution altogether. Circuit Judge Michelle Sisco held a hearing on the lethal injection claim and denied the motion. The Florida Supreme Court rejected the stay request and a habeas petition by unanimous orders reported on May 13, and on May 17 it affirmed the denial of his final post-conviction motion.
He took the drug claims to federal court as a civil rights suit. A district judge denied relief, and on May 22, 2019, a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit, in an opinion by Chief Judge Ed Carnes, held the claims barred, both because they had already been decided and because they came far too late. Florida had used a three-drug protocol since 2000. "Nineteen years is too long to wait," the court wrote, and "Long has known about his medical conditions for decades."
On May 20 the executive director of the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops, Michael Sheedy, wrote to DeSantis asking him to commute the sentence to life without parole. "Although he caused much harm," Sheedy wrote, "society has been safe from his aggressive acts in the decades of his incarceration." Churches across the state held prayer vigils on the day of the execution.
Long woke at 7:30 that morning and ate his last meal at 9:30, a roast beef sandwich, bacon, French fries and a soda, according to a Department of Corrections spokeswoman. He had no visitors. The execution was set for 6 p.m. at Florida State Prison near Starke. At 6:10 it was held while the United States Supreme Court considered his last applications, At 6:20 the Court denied the application and the petition without comment.
Twenty-six witnesses sat in the viewing room besides the media and prison officials, among them women he had attacked and relatives of the women who died. When he was asked whether he had a final statement, he said, "No." The injections began at 6:43 p.m. He kept his eyes closed. He was pronounced dead at 6:55 p.m. The spokeswoman said the execution "took place without incident." He was the 98th person executed in Florida since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1976, and the first since the previous December.
Outside the prison, the families had waited under a tent, and when it was over they held one another. For the mother of Chanel Williams, who had said beforehand that she wanted to see pain on his face, the death seemed too easy, but she said she felt relieved. "I’m glad it’s over," she said. "We go on day-by-day." Chanel’s younger sister said the family had never thought the day would come, and that a burden had been lifted. An uncle said that his niece had suffered and Long had not.
The sister of Kimberly Swann said she had never expected it to take so long, and that she believed Long had expected to die of natural causes in prison. The brother of Vicky Elliott thanked the governor for signing the warrant. One witness wore a shirt with a victim’s photograph and the words "Gone But Not Forgotten"; on the back were the faces of all ten women the families counted as his victims, under the words "The Ones That Matter."
His former wife, who had divorced him in 1980 and is the mother of their two children, said before the execution that it should have happened many years earlier, and that all of the victims and their families were in her prayers. She told the Associated Press that she had learned what he had done in a telephone call in which he told her he had killed "the girls," and that a sheriff’s sergeant then came on the line to confirm the charges.
The courts settled less than the headlines did. At his execution the Associated Press, and the families, counted ten women killed in 1984. In law Long was convicted of eight murders, all in Hillsborough County and all by his own guilty plea, and was sentenced to death for one. The death of Virginia Johnson produced three convictions and three death sentences, every one of them reversed, and finally a judgment of acquittal. The death of Artis Wick was attributed to him but never charged. Patch reported in 2019 that he remained a suspect in the deaths of two other women, without naming them, and in his taped statement to detectives he referred to a girl missing from Minnesota, who was not named.
The number of attacks is just as uncertain. Investigators tied him to dozens, and he claimed about forty in three states, but he was convicted of two home-invasion attacks in 1984 and of the November abduction, and the rest were never tried.
The science that found him has its own history. The fibers and the tire impressions led detectives to the car, and the survivor’s description and a bank record led them to the man. But the Florida Supreme Court held in 1997 that the hair and fiber comparisons could not by themselves prove a killing, and the Justice Department’s later review found that the examiner who performed them had not worked in a scientifically acceptable way in Long’s cases. His Hillsborough convictions rested on his own guilty pleas, which he tried more than once, and failed, to undo.
The question of his mind was never resolved either. Two defense experts found brain damage and a mental disturbance severe enough to count in mitigation, and the sentencing judge accepted both statutory mental mitigators; the State’s psychiatrist found only a severe antisocial personality. A jury in Daytona Beach heard all of it and voted twelve to nothing for death.
• October 14, 1953: Robert Joe Long is born in Kenova, West Virginia.
• 1972: Enlists in the army; at about twenty he is badly injured in a motorcycle crash in Miami.
• January 1974: Marries; the couple have two children and divorce in 1980.
• March 6, 1984: Home-invasion attack in Pasco County, for which he is later convicted of burglary, kidnapping and robbery, with other charges.
• March 1984: Artis Wick, eighteen, is killed; her death is attributed to Long but never charged.
• May 13, 1984: Lana Long, twenty, is found dead in Hillsborough County.
• May 27, 1984: Michelle Denise Simms, twenty-two, is found dead near Plant City.
• May 29, 1984: Attack in Palm Harbor, Pinellas County, on a woman who had advertised furniture.
• June 1984: Elizabeth Loudenback, twenty-two, is killed (prosecutors' window June 8 to 24).
• Autumn 1984: Vicky Elliott, twenty-one, Kimberly Hopps and Chanel Williams, eighteen, are killed (prosecutors' windows run from September 7 to November 16).
• October 14, 1984: Karen Dinsfriend, twenty-eight, is found dead near Thonotosassa.
• November 3, 1984: A 17-year-old is abducted in Tampa; she is released more than a day later.
• November 6, 1984: Virginia Lee Johnson, eighteen, is found dead near Zephyrhills, Pasco County.
• November 12, 1984: Kimberly Swann, twenty-one, is found dead in Hillsborough County.
• November 14, 1984: The FBI Laboratory links fibers from the survivor’s clothing to the murder series.
• November 15, 1984: Detectives Wolfe and Helms stop Long’s Dodge Magnum; an ATM record ties him to the abduction.
• November 16, 1984: Arrested outside a Tampa theater; confesses to the abduction and to nine murders.
• November 28 and December 6, 1984: Indicted in Hillsborough County (Simms) and Pasco County (Johnson).
• April 27, 1985: Pasco jury convicts him of the Johnson murder and recommends death; death sentence in May.
• July 12, 1985: Pleads guilty in the Palm Harbor case; Pinellas imposes four life sentences.
• September 23, 1985: Pleads guilty in Hillsborough County to eight murders and related counts.
• July 1986: Jury recommends death for the Simms murder, eleven to one; sentenced July 25.
• November 25, 1986: Interviewed by CBS; excerpts air December 26.
• November 12, 1987: Florida Supreme Court reverses the first Johnson conviction over the interrogation.
• June 30, 1988: Florida Supreme Court upholds the pleas but vacates the Simms death sentence.
• November 1988 to March 1989: Second Johnson trial in Fort Myers; guilty, death sentence March 2, 1989.
• June 29 and July 21, 1989: Daytona Beach jury recommends death twelve to nothing; Judge Lazzara imposes it.
• October 15, 1992: Simms death sentence affirmed; second Johnson conviction reversed.
• October 4, 1993: United States Supreme Court declines review; the Simms sentence is final.
• February to April 1994: Third Johnson trial; guilty, death sentence April 12.
• March 6, 1997: Florida Supreme Court reverses the Johnson conviction and orders an acquittal.
• July 11, 2013: Florida Supreme Court rejects his post-conviction challenge to the plea.
• January 21, 2016: Florida Supreme Court rejects his claim based on the review of FBI hair and fiber work.
• April 23, 2019: Governor Ron DeSantis signs the death warrant.
• May 17 and 22, 2019: Florida Supreme Court and the Eleventh Circuit reject his final appeals.
• May 23, 2019: Executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison; pronounced dead at 6:55 p.m.