Florida suspected serial killer faces execution for 1996 strangling connected to Hog Trail Murders
A Florida man convicted in one of a series of suspected killings that became known as the “Hog Trail Murders” in the 1990s was scheduled Thursday to become the state’s 15th person executed this year.Daniel Owen Conahan Jr., 72, was sentenced to die for the 1996 kidnapping and strangling of Richard Allen Montgomery, whose mutilated body was found in a wooded southwest Florida area where authorities found the remains of at least six people over a three-year span.Conahan, who has maintained his innocence, has previously been identified by authorities as a person of interest in the other deaths, but he was never charged.He has argued the evidence against him was circumstantial.Conahan was scheduled to die by lethal injection in the nation’s busiest death chamber.
Florida has carried out more than half of the 24 total executions in the US so far this year under Republican Gov.Ron DeSantis, who leaves office in January.Conahan was arrested in July 1996 after local and state law enforcement officials spent more than two years investigating a series of homicides in which mutilated and decomposing bodies were discovered in a wooded area of Charlotte County, north of Fort Myers.As the number of bodies increased, so did media coverage.
The deaths eventually were dubbed the “Hog Trail Murders” because of the swampy, wooded locations where the bodies were found.The case has been featured many times over the past three decades on true-crime television shows, YouTube channels and podcasts.The first body was found by hunters in February 1994, followed by at least five more bodies over the next three years.
Most of the remains were severely decomposed, but investigators believed Montgomery had been dead for less than a day when he was found.Investigators eventually determined that the killer was targeting homeless men.Detectives started looking into Conahan in 1996 after a man in prison for stealing Conahan’s car claimed that Conahan had lured him to a remote a...