Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday signed a death warrant for Anthony Wainwright, who was convicted of kidnapping a woman from a Winn-Dixie supermarket parking lot in Lake City in 1994, then raping and murdering her in rural Hamilton County, west of Jacksonville.
Wainwright, who had escaped from a North Carolina prison just days before the killing, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on June 10 at Florida State Prison. His victim, 23-year-old Carmen Gayheart, was abducted while loading groceries into her vehicle on her way to pick up her two young children from daycare.
Florida Judge: Crime was “extremely wicked, evil and vile”
A 1995 sentencing order by Circuit Judge E. Vernon Douglas described the murder as “extremely wicked, evil and vile,” noting that Gayheart was forced to contemplate her fate for over an hour as she was driven to a remote location, where she was raped, 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 following day after a shootout with police in Mississippi, according to a document filed last year with the U.S. Supreme Court by the Florida Attorney General’s Office in an unsuccessful appeal. Wainwright, now 54, is set to become the sixth inmate executed in Florida this year. Four men have already been executed, and Glen Rogers is scheduled to be put to death Thursday for a 1995 murder at a Tampa motel. Wainwright’s death warrant came just one day after the Florida Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Rogers.
Although Wainwright has exhausted multiple appeals, the Florida Supreme Court on Friday laid out a timeline for what could be a final attempt by his attorneys to delay or prevent his execution.
The details of the 1994 crime
According to court records, Wainwright and Hamilton escaped from a prison in Newport, North Carolina, before stealing a Cadillac and burglarizing a home, where they stole two rifles. After arriving in Florida, the two men decided on April 27, 1994, to steal another vehicle because the Cadillac was overheating. They pulled into the Winn-Dixie parking lot in Lake City and spotted Gayheart loading groceries into a Ford Bronco.
Hamilton forced her into the Bronco at gunpoint and drove off, with Wainwright following in the Cadillac. They later abandoned the Cadillac and continued north on Interstate 75 before turning into a wooded area, where Gayheart was raped and murdered, the documents state.
