An Orange County man who brutally killed his wife decades ago, in a murder that shocked Central Florida and dramatically changed the way domestic violence is treated, is slated to become the oldest person ever executed in Florida next week.
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But advocates are calling on Gov. Ron DeSantis to stay his execution, arguing he is too elderly and sick to be put to death.
Dusty Ray Spencer, 74, was convicted in 1992 of the premeditated murder of his wife, Karen Spencer, just outside of her west Orange County home earlier that year. He smashed her face with a brick, slammed her head against a concrete wall and stabbed her twice in the chest in front of her 18-year-old son, who tried to intervene.
Spencer’s execution is scheduled for June 25 at Florida State Prison in Union County. If executed, he would surpass Samuel Lee Smithers to become the oldest person executed in Florida. Smithers, 72, was executed last year for killing two women in Hillsborough County, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C.
In an online news conference Thursday, Spencer’s spiritual advisor, the Rev. Jeff Hood, made a plea to DeSantis that Spencer be shown mercy due to his advanced age and health issues, including cognitive decline, heart problems and cirrhosis.
He said Spencer was no longer a threat to anyone and that it would be wrong to kill someone in his condition, calling it a “nursing-home execution.”
“This is another one of these executions where somebody is going to have to be lifted up and helped onto the gurney,” he said. “His old, frail skin…is going to have to be pulled tight so that they can even run the IV.”
Hood said Spencer had given him a message over the phone Wednesday to deliver to the public: “I want the people of Florida to know that I love God, I’m sorry for what I did, and no matter what happens, I’m going to be okay.”
The spiritual advisor also challenged DeSantis, saying that if he wanted to go through with the execution he should personally carry it out.
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“When you talk about being tough, more executions, macho, let’s kill as many as we can. It’s pretty crazy when you don’t have to put any skin in the game,” Hood said. “… A governor that talks a big game, but doesn’t have to be present.”
Of the 1,669 people executed in the United States since the death penalty was reinstituted in 1976, only 12 were aged 74 or older at the time of their execution. None of those were in Florida.
The oldest person to ever be executed in the U.S. was 83-year-old Walter Moody Jr., who was executed in Alabama in 2018, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Tommy Zeigler, 80, an Orange County man convicted of killing his wife, her parents and a customer at his furniture store in Winter Garden, is also slated to be executed in Florida. DeSantis has not yet signed his death warrant.
Before her 1992 murder, Spencer had repeatedly attacked his wife. He was arrested the first time, and was released on bail despite making a call to her from the jail where he threatened to kill her. On the second occasion, police sent paperwork to prosecutors instead of securing an arrest warrant, which was still sitting on a desk when she was killed.
Police and judges in Orange County soon began to enforce more vigorously new policies designed to protect victims of domestic abuse. By the time of Spencer’s conviction, arrests and prosecutions of such cases had nearly doubled and judges would no longer routinely grant bail to husbands or boyfriends who have been arrested.
Hood said while he understood that members of Karen Spencer’s family may prefer to see Dusty Spencer executed — and that he would feel the same way if his loved one had been killed — society should try to do what he considers is morally right instead of being driven by emotion, arguing that the way to honor her memory is to “quit killing people.”
“Who wants the memory of their loved one to be a 74-year-old man strapped to a gurney in the middle of nowhere?” he said. “I’ve encountered this over and over again with families who say, ‘I don’t want the last memory of someone that I love to be the murder of somebody else.’”
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