ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — A Florida man convicted of killing two women whose bodies were found in a rural pond in 1996 is scheduled to be put to death in October under a death warrant signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who continues to set a record pace for executions.
Samuel Lee Smithers, 72, is scheduled to die by lethal injection Oct. 14 at Florida State Prison. Smithers would be the 14th person set for execution in Florida in 2025, with DeSantis overseeing more executions in a single year than any other Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.
DeSantis signed the death warrant Friday night, just a few days before the scheduled execution Wednesday of David Joseph Pittman. Another convicted killer, Victor Tony Jones, is set to die on Sept. 30.
In the Smithers case, court records show he met his two victims — Christy Cowan and Denise Roach — on different dates at a Tampa motel to pay them for sex. At the time, he was doing landscape maintenance on a 27-acre property that included three ponds in rural Plant City, Florida.
On May 28, 1996, property owner Marion Whitehurst — who had met Smithers in church where he was a Baptist deacon — stopped by to find Smithers cleaning an axe in the carport, which he claimed to be using to trim tree limbs.
“Whitehurst noticed a pool of blood in the carport,” the records state. “Smithers told her someone must have come by and killed a small animal.”
Whitehurst contacted law enforcement and a sheriff’s deputy met her later that day at the property. The blood had been cleaned up, court records say, but the deputy noticed drag marks leading to one of the ponds. That’s where they found the bodies of Cowan and Roach.
Both Cowan and Roach were severely beaten, strangled and left in the pond to die. Smithers confessed to the murders and was handed two death sentences after his trial in 1999. His convictions and sentences have been upheld by the Florida Supreme Court.
So far 30 people have been executed in the U.S. in 2025, with Florida leading the way behind a flurry of death warrants signed by DeSantis. The last execution in Florida was the Aug. 28 lethal injection of 59-year-old Curtis Windom, convicted in the 1992 murders of his girlfriend, her mother and another man.
The previous record for executions in one year in Florida was eight, most recently in 2014.
