LAKE COUNTY, Fla. – A man convicted of raping and killing a woman in Lake County more than 30 years ago was put to death on Tuesday.
Anthony Wainwright received a lethal injection on Tuesday at Florida State Prison near Starke.
Recommended Videos
The Supreme Court on Monday denied Wainwright’s final appeals without comment.
Wainwright was convicted in the 1994 kidnapping and murder of 23-year-old Carmen Gayheart, a mother of two young children.
She was taken from a Winn-Dixie supermarket parking lot in Lake City after Wainwright and another man had escaped earlier from prison in North Carolina.
The two confronted Gayheart, a community college student, on April 27, 1994, as she loaded groceries into her blue Ford Bronco, according to court documents. They forced her into the vehicle at gunpoint and drove off. They raped her in the backseat and then took her out of the vehicle and tried to strangle her before shooting her twice in the back of the head, court filings say. They dragged her body several dozen yards from the road and drove off.
They were later captured in Mississippi after a shootout with police, according to court records.
Richard Hamilton, the other man convicted in Gayheart’s killing, was also sentenced to death. But he died on death row in January 2023 at the age of 59.
Wainwright would be the sixth person put to death in Florida this year.
Gayheart’s sister, who plans to attend the execution, said three decades is too long to wait for justice.
“It’s ridiculous how many appeals they get,” Maria David told The Associated Press, adding that each step of the appeals process reopened her family’s wounds. “You have to relive it again because they have to tell the whole story again.”
Wainwright’s lawyers have filed multiple unsuccessful appeals over the years based on what they said were problems with his trial and evidence that he suffered from brain damage and intellectual disability.
The state also executed six people in 2023, but only carried out one execution last year.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.