A man suspected of leaving bodies scattered through the Florida wilderness has been executed almost 30 years after he was convicted of murder.
Daniel Owen Conahan Jr, 72, was pronounced dead at 6.12pm on Thursday after receiving a lethal injection at Florida State Prison. He became the 15th person executed in the Sunshine State this year.
Conahan was strapped to a gurney with an IV in his arm when the curtain covering the death chamber was raised. A spiritual adviser stood at his feet and prayed throughout the procedure.
Asked whether he wanted to make a final statement, Conahan replied: ‘No sir.’
His last meal consisted of chicken, a baked potato, corn, soda and pumpkin pie.
Conahan had maintained his innocence throughout his time in prison. He was sentenced to death for kidnapping and strangling 21-year-old Richard Allen Montgomery, whose body was discovered in woodland in southwest Florida in 1996.
But it was the bodies found before and after Montgomery which turned the case into one of Florida’s most enduring and perplexing murder mysteries.
Over the course of three years, the remains of at least six men were discovered in remote parts of Charlotte County. The victims were found in swampy woodland, away from homes and main roads, with some having been outside for so long that investigators struggled to identify them.
The killings became known as the Hog Trail Murders, named after the rough paths running through the areas where the bodies were left.
Investigators believed that the killer was targeting homeless men and others who were living transient lifestyles. Conahan was linked to several of the cases, but Montgomery’s murder was the only one for which he was ever charged or convicted.
Bodies begin appearing in the woods
The first known victim was found by two hunters near Biscayne Boulevard in Port Charlotte, back in February 1994. The mutilated body had been in the open for around a month. As such, police couldn’t identify him and so he remained John Doe for the next 27 years.
DNA testing finally revealed in 2021 that the man was Gerald ‘Jerry’ Lombard, a 27-year-old originally from Lowell, Massachusetts. His family said that he’d lived something of a drifter lifestyle and had disappeared from Florida in 1991.
On New Year’s Day in 1996, a family’s dog returned to their North Port home carrying in its mouth a human skull. The family reportedly said the dog had been bringing bones back from the surrounding area for months.
A police search uncovered more skeletal remains in nearby woodland, although examiners were unable to establish exactly how the man had died. His identity is still unknown.
Another body was discovered in North Port that March after a driver pulled off the road. The victim had suffered four stab wounds and injuries which investigators believed suggested that he had tried to escape.
He was eventually identified as 35-year-old William John ‘Bill’ Melaragno.
The discovery which would lead police to Conahan, however, came on April 17, 1996. Another skull was found in woods, this time in Charlotte County. Officers searching the area recovered the rest of the victim’s body, along with the remains of another man.
The first victim was identified as 25-year-old Kenneth Lee Smith. His sister reportedly contacted police after recognising a faint tattoo visible in a photograph shown by the news.
The second was Richard Montgomery, who’d been killed shortly before he was found. A few weeks earlier, according to his mother, he’d talked about meeting a new friend named ‘Dan Conahan’.
Montgomery had told friends on April 16 that he was going out to make several hundred dollars and would return shortly. His body was discovered the following day.
By then, the bodies were no longer being treated as a collection of unrelated discoveries. Police were investigating the possibility that a serial killer was operating in southwest Florida, while the Hog Trail name had begun appearing in news reports.
Even after Conahan’s arrest, the remains of men continued to emerge from the woods.
In May 1997, a construction worker clearing a path in Port Charlotte found skeletal remains beneath a tree. DNA testing later identified them as William ‘Billy’ Charles Patten, 24, who had disappeared in 1993.
The man who survived
The investigation turned towards Conahan after detectives heard from various local men who described being offered money to pose for nude photographs in secluded places.
One was a prisoner jailed for stealing Conahan’s car. He claimed that Conahan had driven him to a remote area and offered to pay him for photographs, but he fled in the vehicle after seeing a knife.
Police also looked again at a remarkably similar attack reported in Fort Myers in 1994. Stanley Burden said that a man offering money for photographs had tied him to a tree and attempted to strangle him. Burden survived and later became the prosecution’s most important witness against Conahan.
Investigators said that Burden’s account very closely resembled the circumstances in which they believed that Richard Montgomery had been killed.
Conahan was a licensed practical nurse who had graduated at the top of his class and worked at a hospital in Punta Gorda.
Police arrested him in July 1996 over the attack on Burden. That charge was later dropped, but in February 1997 Conahan was charged with kidnapping and murdering Montgomery.
The prosecution’s case was highly circumstantial, relying as it did upon witness testimony, financial records and evidence recovered during searches rather than DNA directly connecting Conahan to the killing.
Conahan waived his right to have a jury decide his guilt. Judge William Blackwell convicted him of first-degree premeditated murder and kidnapping in August 1999. A separate jury unanimously recommended the death penalty.
The judge formally sentenced Conahan to death that December. He’d spend most of the next three decades on death row awaiting the execution that came this week.
Eight more men beneath the canopy
The questions surrounding Conahan grew still further in March 2007, more than a decade after his arrest.
A land surveyor working in Fort Myers found two human skulls in woodland. Police, forensic experts and teams using cadaver dogs searched the area and recovered eight sets of skeletal remains.
There was no clothing, no evidence of coffins or body bags and no indication that anyone had visited the site recently. The discovery became known as the case of the Fort Myers Eight.
The medical examiner ruled the Fort Myers deaths as homicides. Authorities said the identified victims had experienced homelessness or lived transiently and had suffered injuries bearing uncanny similarities to those seen in the Charlotte County cases.
There was another connection too. The site was less than a mile from the area where Burden said he had survived Conahan’s attack.
Investigators publicly named Conahan as a person of interest, but he was never charged with any of the eight murders.
Four of the men have since been identified as John Blevins, Erik David Kohler, Jonathan James Tihay and Robert Ronald ‘Bobbie’ Soden. The names of the other four remain unknown.
Other human remains discovered around southwest Florida have also been examined for possible connections to Conahan. No court determined that he was responsible for those deaths and the extent of any link remains unproven.
The final attempt to stop his execution
Conahan spent more than 26 years on death row while his conviction and sentence went through a number of unsuccessful state and federal appeals.
His last attempt to halt the execution concerned DNA recovered from Montgomery’s body. His lawyers argued that further testing could undermine the circumstantial case against him.
The Florida Supreme Court rejected the appeal, ruling that the presence of another person’s DNA would not necessarily exonerate Conahan. The prosecution had never argued that Conahan was the only person to have had contact with Montgomery.
The US Supreme Court denied his final request for a stay on Thursday, allowing the execution to proceed.
Florida has now carried out 15 of the 25 executions conducted in the United States this year. Another prisoner, Curtis Wilkie Beasley, is scheduled to be executed in the state on September 29.
Conahan’s death brings a legal conclusion to the murder of Richard Montgomery. It does not tell the families of Gerald Lombard, Bill Melaragno, Kenneth Smith or Billy Patten who killed them, nor does it establish who was responsible for the Fort Myers Eight.
Four of those victims remain unnamed.