Duane Owen, 62, is scheduled to get a lethal injection at Florida State Prison at 6.00pm on Thursday (Picture: AP)
Florida is scheduled to execute a man for the brutal rapes and murders of a teenage babysitter and a mother almost 40 years ago.
Duane Owen, 62, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 6.00pm on Thursday evening.
He was convicted on a total of eleven charges, which include assault, sexual battery, an attempted escape, and first-degree murder. He is serving a total of six life sentences, in addition to the two death sentences.
Owen has spent nearly 37 years on the Sunshine State’s death row, making him one of the state’s longest-held inmates serving a death sentence.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed Owen’s death warrant on May 9, 2023. He is set to become the fourth person executed in the state since a moratorium on executions ended this year.
Owen’s killings began in Spring of 1984, when he was 23. His first victim was 14-year-old babysitter Karen Slattery, who was working for a family in Delray Beach that March when Owen struck.
Slattery, a freshman at Pope John Paul II High School in Boca Raton, was stabbed 18 times, then raped. The two children she was babysitting were left unharmed.
Two months later, police found Georgianna Worden, 38, dead in her home in Boca Raton. The mother of two children was raped and beaten to death with a hammer.
Like Slattery, her attacker left her two children unharmed. They discovered her body and the gruesome crime scene the next morning.
Owen was arrested just a day after Worden’s body was found, on May 30, 1984. He was picked up for an unrelated burglary, but ended up confessing to Worden’s murder.
He also confessed to attacking two more women in Palm Beach County, both of whom survived.
Owen received two death sentences for the killings in two separate trials. His conviction for Slattery’s killing was briefly overturned in 1990, but he was found guilty again after his new trial in 1999.
Attorneys for Owen argued that he should not be executed because he suffers from severe schizophrenia. Earlier this month, a psychiatrist testified that Owen believes he absorbed the souls of his victims, which are still living inside of him.
However, both the Florida Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court denied his appeal for a stay of execution in the last few days.
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Duane Owen has spent nearly 37 years on the Sunshine State’s death row, making him one of the state’s longest-held inmates serving a death sentence.
