RAIFORD, Fla. — Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday signed a death warrant for Anthony Wainwright, who was convicted of kidnapping a woman in 1994 from a Winn-Dixie supermarket parking lot in Lake City and raping and murdering her in rural Hamilton County.
Wainwright, who had escaped from a North Carolina prison days before killing 23-year-old Carmen Gayheart, is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection on June 10 at Florida State Prison.
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A 1995 sentencing order by Circuit Judge E. Vernon Douglas described the murder as “extremely wicked, evil and vile, in that the victim of this case was abducted at gunpoint while placing groceries in her vehicle, as she was en route to pick up her two small children at a day care center.”
It said Gayheart was “made to ponder her fate” for more than an hour as she was driven to where she was strangled and shot twice in the back of the head with a .22-caliber rifle.
Wainwright and a co-defendant, Richard Hamilton, were arrested the next day after a shootout with police in Mississippi, according to a document filed last year at the U.S. Supreme Court by the Florida Attorney General’s Office in an unsuccessful appeal by Wainwright.
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Wainwright, 54, is scheduled to be the sixth inmate executed this year in Florida. Four men have been executed, and Glen Rogers is slated to be put to death Thursday in the 1995 murder of a woman in a Tampa motel room. The Wainwright death warrant came a day after the Florida Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Rogers.
Past appeals by Wainwright have been unsuccessful, but the Florida Supreme Court on Friday issued a schedule for what could be a final attempt by his attorneys to spare him from execution.
The document filed last year at the U.S. Supreme Court by the Attorney General’s Office said Wainwright and Hamilton escaped from a prison in Newport, N.C., stole a Cadillac and burglarized a home, where they took two rifles.
After driving to Florida, they decided on April 27, 1994, to steal another car because the Cadillac was overheating, according to the court document. They drove into the Winn-Dixie parking lot in Lake City and saw Gayheart loading groceries into a Ford Bronco.
Hamilton forced her into the Bronco at gunpoint and drove away, with Wainwright following in the Cadillac. They subsequently ditched the Cadillac and headed north on Interstate 75 before pulling off into a wooded area, where Gayheart was raped and killed, the document said.
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