Gainesville – For years, the first goodnight sleep for the daughter of a murdered couple came on the night Florida executed her parents’ murderer last month, she says in a new interview.
“There’s the weight lifted from us,” said 29-year-old Maranda Marnolly in a phone conversation from her home. “We can move forward. We’re never going to get through it, but it’s not always there.”
Marnolly, 29, took less than a month after her second birthday when James Ford murdered her parents Greg and Kim Marnolly in the countryside of Charlotte County in southwestern Florida. Marnolly is left to the element of her father’s blue pickup car seat after the murder of her parents, and the police find her and her parents’ bodies the next morning.
Charlotte County residents heard details of her parents’ 1997 death.
“It was no secret that my parents died, because it was always talked about,” she said.
“It was shocking,” she said, “For a 13-year-old, you google your name and google it and say, “Ah, here’s an entire five-page article about how your parents were killed in front of you.
After her parents died, Marnolly’s maternal grandmother, Linda Griffin, took her there.
“She was a bit overcompensated because my parents weren’t around,” Marnolly said. “She felt that as my mom’s mother, she should have protected me as she protected me, but I had a happy childhood.”
Marnolly said she has only a handful of second-hand stories about her parents’ inheritance from friends and family, but she has no memories of herself.
“There are some missing pieces,” she said. “We couldn’t experience the traditional family of having a mother and dad. We’re celebrating Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.”
Despite growing up without parents, Marnolly said that he would learn more about them over time from those around him.
“The way my mother and father knows is to talk about them,” she said. “I still went to school with my detective kids, so I get Facebook messages from people who went to school with my parents and detectives. …For me, it’s because by talking to people who know them, they get to know not just this idea of them, but who they are as people.”
Some of the stories Malnory has heard about her parents coming from a colleague at East Elementary at Punta Gorda.
“For a long time I wanted to be a lawyer. In my parents, I kept in contact with most lawyers. I think my heart is too invested,” she said. “In education at least, I can return that way. I call it a job of the mind. You don’t just do it because you want to. It comes from the heart.”
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The first person Marnolly spoke when the death warrant was signed was a school employee who knew his mother in high school. Marnolly said the Friday morning call from the governor’s office “was completely out of the blue.”
“I had mixed feelings because it was something I was talking about in December… And in a way, it felt like I spoke to it as if it existed,” she said. “It was very stressful for me, too. It was almost invalidated. …Everyone seemed to focus on Ford instead of my parents, so every time I saw his picture, it felt like it had remodeled me in a way.”
Less than two weeks after his execution, Marnolly visited his parents’ grave for the first time in six years.
“They’re out there, my aunt, my mother’s sister, my maternal grandmother have passed away, and my parents. For me, it’s just a realm of heartache, because it’s the four people who line up the world for me,” she said. “It wasn’t as uncertain as I thought. …I wasn’t there alone, so we were there to clean. “Hey, we’re trying to do this good for them, so when people take pictures of their graves, it’s actually pretty.”
“At the same time, I was a bit sad,” she said. “This is not the way you want to spend Saturdays. I want to spend Saturdays with them.”
As the execution approached, Marnolly had to decide whether she would be present — or she had to witness Ford die from the injection.
She said she wanted an answer from Ford when she was younger.
“He’s a coronavirus,” Marnolly said. “He was still like, ‘I hope they find out who killed Kim and Greg’ until his final breath.’ Well, you did. We were all there. When I was younger, I wanted to talk to him, but the older I became, the more I realized, he never said. ”
Marnolly ultimately decided not to attend the February 13 execution with her family.
“I actually went back and forth, and no one in my family knew this, but I even thought about what would happen until it happened,” she said. “I wanted to go, but at the same time, it could be caused for me. I personally look at his face and close after all those years, and it can raise some sort of thing that has been locked up for 27 years.”
Marnolly said he called the family members who attended the execution the moment the press conference was over.
“It was justice. Peace was not a closure, but for them, the final closure of that chapter,” she said. “I feel peace from it, but I saddened what I could have and they actually saddened their losses as people.”
Marnolly said initially there was a mix of feelings about Ford’s execution, but now he feels a sense of closure.
“We’re not in our 28th year. “Yeah, he’s been living 28 years longer than they had.
The end of Ford’s life does not mark the end of his crime’s impact on Murnoriz.
“It had a huge impact on (my life),” she said. “When it comes to relationships, I’m looking for a man older than me because I seem to be trying to fill that void my dad would have. I don’t want to say there’s a problem with Dad, but I do. …I’m also afraid of having a child because I don’t want my child to have to grow up without me.”
Marnolly said that those around her, especially those who knew her parents, would take her through her most difficult days.
“In 27 years, no one has forgotten us,” she said. “No one in Charlotte County has forgotten us. It’s my home.”
The story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. Reporters can be contacted at blunardini@ufl.edu. You can donate here to support our students.
