DeSantis signs death warrant for murder, convicted in 1994

TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday signed the death warrant for Anthony Wainwright, who was convicted of luring a woman from the parking lot of Lake City’s Windixie supermarket in 1994 and luring a woman with rape and murder in rural Hamilton County.

Wainwright, who fled from a North Carolina prison before killing 23-year-old Carmen Gayhart, is scheduled to be killed by a fatal injection at the Florida prison on June 10th.

In the order of the 1995 sentencing by Circuit Judge E. Vernon Douglas, the murders were described as “very evil, evil and mean. The victims of this case were accused at the muzzle while they were left with groceries in their car as they were on their way to welcome two small children at a daycare center.”

Gayheart said that it was “made to contemplate her destiny” for over an hour as she was strangled and driven to the spot where she was shot twice in the back of her head with a .22 caliber rifle.

Wainwright and co-defendant Richard Hamilton were arrested the day after a shooting with police in Mississippi.

Wainwright, 54, is set to become the sixth inmate executed in Florida this year. Four men were executed, and Glen Rogers is scheduled to be killed Thursday in the 1995 murder of a woman in a room at the Tampa Motel. Wainwright’s death warrant came the day after the Florida Supreme Court refused Rogers’ appeal.

Although past appeals by Wainwright have failed, the Florida Supreme Court on Friday issued a schedule of what could be the final attempt to prevent his lawyer from spareing him from execution.

Documents filed last year by the Attorney General’s Office in the U.S. Supreme Court say Wainwright and Hamilton fled from a prison in Newport, North Carolina, stealing a Cadillac and robbing a home with two rifles.

According to court documents, after driving to Florida, the Cadillac was overheating on April 27, 1994, and decided to steal another car. They drove into the parking lot at Windixie in Lake City and saw Gayhart loading groceries into the Ford Bronco.

Hamilton thrusts her into the Bronco at the muzzle and chases after Wainwright in the Cadillac. They then abandoned the Cadillac and said they would head north on Interstate 75 before pulling into the wooded area where Gayheart was raped and killed.

Jim Sanders, Florida news service