STARK, Fla. (AP) – A Florida man convicted of killing two women whose bodies were found in a Plant City pond is scheduled to be executed Tuesday night.
Samuel Lee Smithers, 72, is scheduled to receive a lethal injection at the Florida State Penitentiary near Starke starting at 6 p.m. under a death warrant signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. This will be the 14th death sentence to be executed in Florida in 2025, extending the state’s single-year execution record.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, Florida’s highest annual number of executions was eight in 2014. Florida has executed more people this year than any other state, followed by Texas with five.
Smithers was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in 1999.
His execution is one of two scheduled for Tuesday night in the United States, including Lance Shockley, 48, who will be executed in Missouri for fatally shooting a state trooper more than 20 years ago.
According to court records, Smithers met Christy Cowan and Dennis Roach on separate dates at a Tampa motel in May 1996 to pay for sex. At the time, he was doing landscape maintenance on a 27-acre (11-hectare) property that included three ponds in rural Plant City, Florida.
On May 28, 1996, a property owner who had met Smithers at the church where he was a Baptist deacon stopped by and found Smithers cleaning an ax in his carport. He claimed to have used the ax to cut tree branches. The property owner noticed a pool of blood in the carport, and Smithers told her someone must have come and killed the small animal, according to court records.
The woman contacted law enforcement, and a sheriff’s deputy met her at the facility later that day. The blood had been cleaned up, but a deputy noticed a drag trail leading to one of the ponds, according to court records. It was there that authorities discovered the bodies of Cowan and Roach. The two women were severely beaten, strangled and left in a pond to die.
The Florida Supreme Court last week rejected Smithers’ appeal. His lawyers had argued that his age made him ineligible for execution under the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Smithers will be one of the oldest people ever executed in Florida, but the judges ruled that senior citizens are not completely exempt from the death penalty.
Smithers also became known as the “deacon of death” and “the serial killer next door” by Fred Rosen, who wrote a book about the crimes of the murderous church members.
An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was still pending.
A total of 35 people have died in court-ordered executions in the United States so far this year, and at least eight others are scheduled to be executed during the remainder of 2025.
Norman Mir Grimm Jr., 65, is scheduled to be executed for the 15th time in Florida on October 28th. He was convicted of raping and murdering his neighbor, whose body was found by a fisherman near the Pensacola Bay Bridge in 1998.
Brian Fredrick Jennings, 66, is scheduled to be executed for the 16th time in Florida on November 13th. He was convicted of kidnapping a 6-year-old girl from her central Florida home in 1979, then raping and killing her.
According to the state Department of Corrections, executions in Florida are carried out using three types of injection drugs: sedatives, paralytics and drugs that stop the heart.
