Death Row Cases

On September 29, 2026, Florida is scheduled to execute Curtis Beasley, a 77-year-old Army veteran who has spent more than 28 years on death row.

In August 1995, 62-year-old Carolyn Monfort was found beaten to death in the laundry room of her home in Dundee, Polk County, Florida. She had let Beasley stay in her guest room so she could drive him to work. Her car and $800 in cash were missing. So was Beasley.

There was no confession and no eyewitness. The case against him was built on circumstantial evidence: a bloodstained shirt found under the guest bed, a car he was seen driving that night, phone calls from her house, and a false name in Alabama. A jury voted 10 to 2 for death. Beasley has always maintained his innocence.

In this episode we cover the crime, the investigation, the trial, his background, and the final appeals over his age, his health and the non-unanimous jury, based on public court records and news reporting.

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On September 30, 2026, Tennessee plans to execute Christa Gail Pike at ten in the morning. She would be the first woman the state has put to death since 1819, and the only person executed there in the modern era for a crime committed at eighteen.

In 1995, Pike and two others killed her Job Corps classmate, nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer, in the woods near the University of Tennessee agricultural campus in Knoxville. Pike confessed within thirty-six hours and has never claimed she was innocent. Her boyfriend, seventeen at the time, was too young to face a death sentence and is now eligible for parole. The third teenager testified for the state and got probation.

This episode covers the killing, the 1996 trial, the childhood her jury never fully heard about, thirty years of failed appeals, the challenge to Tennessee's pentobarbital protocol after a failed execution in May, and the 226-page clemency petition now sitting on Governor Bill Lee's desk.

Research is based on public court records, appellate rulings, court filings from 2026, and published news reporting. We take no position on guilt or punishment beyond what the record shows.

New cases every Monday and Thursday.

#truecrime #deathrow #christapike #tennessee #deathpenalty #truecrimepodcast

Ker'Sean Olajuwa Ramey is scheduled to be executed by the state of Texas on September 23, 2026, for the 2005 murders of Sam Roberts, Tiffani Peacock and Celso Lopez in Edna, Jackson County. His trial attorney worked as a dentist during the day and had never handled a death penalty case.

There was no physical evidence linking Ramey to the crime scene. No fingerprints, no DNA, no blood, no hair. The state's firearms examiner could not conclusively match the bullets to the recovered revolvers. The case was built entirely on witness testimony, including that of his co-defendant LeJames Norman, who is scheduled to be executed one week earlier, on September 16, 2026, for the same crime.

Ramey's attorney called no witnesses during the guilt phase. The jury convicted him in just over an hour. At sentencing, jurors never heard about his childhood abuse or his IQ of 81, because no mitigation investigation was ever done. What they did hear was A.P. Merillat, a state witness whose testimony about Texas prison security has twice caused the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to throw out a death sentence. The jury took fifteen minutes to decide on death.

Not one Black juror served on the panel that sentenced him. The prosecution requested a jury shuffle after four Black members landed in the first ten seats. In 2021, the Fifth Circuit acknowledged that no state court had ever examined the full record of how that jury was selected, and denied relief anyway.

This episode covers the Edna triple murder, the trial in Victoria County, the Batson claim, the ineffective assistance of counsel claim, the Merillat testimony, the clemency petition before the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, and how Texas reached one of the highest execution rates in the country in 2026.

All research is based on public court records, appellate rulings and published news reporting. We take no position on guilt or innocence beyond what the courts have established.

New case every Monday and Thursday.

#KerSeanRamey #TexasExecution #DeathRow #TrueCrime #DeathPenalty #DeathRowCases

Eleven jurors voted to spare his life. Twice. The twelfth had lied under oath to get onto that jury — and on September 16, 2026, Georgia executed him anyway.

On November 3, 2003, Stacey Ian Humphreys walked into the sales office of a model home in Powder Springs, Cobb County, Georgia, and murdered two real estate agents: Cynthia "Cyndi" Williams, 33, and Lori Brown, 21. He was arrested five days later in Wisconsin. He confessed. The DNA and ballistics matched. None of that is in dispute.

What is in dispute is how he ended up on death row instead of serving life without parole. Georgia requires a unanimous jury for a death sentence. In the first two votes, his jury stood 11–1 for life. The one holdout was a woman who, during jury selection, had concealed the truth about a violent assault she had survived. Inside the jury room she screamed at the others, refused to consider life, altered the jurors' notes to the judge to hide the fact that they were deadlocked, and falsely told them Humphreys could one day walk free. One reporter called it Twelve Angry Men in reverse.

No court ever examined that evidence on its merits, because Georgia's no-impeachment rule bars juror testimony from being used to challenge a verdict. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson said that was a mistake. They were three votes short.

This episode covers the murders, the manhunt, the 2007 trial in Glynn County, the childhood abuse and psychiatric evidence raised at sentencing, twenty years of failed appeals, the juror misconduct claim, the conflict of interest that halted his December 2025 execution, and the four-member clemency board that decided his fate instead of five.

#StaceyHumphreys #DeathRow #TrueCrime #Georgia #DeathPenalty #JuryMisconduct #TrueCrimePodcast

On December 12, 1998, Jeffery Lee walked into a pawn shop in Orrville, Alabama with a sawed-off shotgun. Within seconds, two people were dead and a third was lying on the floor pretending to be dead so he wouldn't shoot her again. She survived. She called the police. The whole thing was on camera.

None of that is in dispute. What happened next is.

In April 2000, the jury that convicted him voted seven to five that he should spend the rest of his life in prison. The trial judge set that vote aside and sentenced him to death. Alabama abolished that practice in 2017 — and then refused to apply its own decision to the men already sentenced under it.

This episode covers the murders of Jimmy Ellis, the singer known as Orion whose voice sounded so much like Elvis Presley that people believed the King had faked his death, and Elaine Thompson, who worked in the shop with him. It covers the survivor, Helen King. And it covers twenty-six years of appeals, a blocked nitrogen gas execution, a broken promise from the state, and an execution date of September 17, 2026.

Recorded before that date. We don't know how it ends either.

Arizona has three women on death row — and hasn't executed a woman since 1930.

This episode covers all three cases in full: Wendi Andriano, Shawna Forde, and Sammantha Allen, the only three women on Arizona's death row, all held at Perryville Prison outside Phoenix.

Wendi Andriano poisoned, beat, and stabbed her husband Joseph in Ahwatukee in October 2000 while he was dying of cancer. She was sentenced to death in Maricopa County in 2004 by prosecutor Juan Martinez, who later tried Jodi Arias. Her case is still in post-conviction review twenty-two years later.

Shawna Forde founded the border militia Minutemen American Defense and organised the May 2009 home invasion in Arivaca, Arizona that killed Raul Flores Jr. and his nine-year-old daughter Brisenia Flores. Gina Gonzalez survived and shot back. Forde was sentenced to death in Pima County in 2011.

Sammantha Allen, now Sammantha Uriarte, was convicted in the 2011 death of her ten-year-old cousin Ame Deal, who was locked in a plastic footlocker in a Phoenix garage overnight as punishment for taking a popsicle. Allen and her husband John Allen became the first married couple in Arizona sentenced to death.

We also cover why Arizona has executed only one woman in its history, Eva Dugan's botched 1930 hanging, Debra Milke's exoneration after twenty-three years in solitary confinement, and what happened in June 2026 when all three women were moved into lockdown overnight after an argument on a prison yard.

How many women are on death row in the US? Forty-five, across fourteen states. Arizona has three, and none of them has an execution date.

Built entirely from Arizona Supreme Court opinions, Maricopa and Pima County court records, Arizona Department of Corrections records, the Death Penalty Information Center, and contemporaneous reporting from the Arizona Mirror, Arizona Republic, and Phoenix New Times.

New death penalty case every week. Subscribe.

#truecrime #deathrow #amedeal #arizona #briseniaflores #shawnaforde #wendiandriano #capitalpunishment #womenondeathrow #truecrimepodcast

LeJames Norman is scheduled to be executed in Texas on September 16, 2026, for a triple murder in Edna over cocaine that never existed.

On August 24, 2005, Norman and Ker'Sean Ramey put on masks and forced their way into a house in Jackson County, Texas, believing there were 100 kilos of cocaine inside. There was nothing. Samuel Roberts, 24, Tiffani Peacock, 18, and Celso Lopez, 38, were shot to death. Tiffani had gone to school with him. All three were his neighbors.

Norman ran to Mexico and was caught at the border with false ID. Then he did something almost no capital defendant does: he confessed three times, testified to a grand jury, and took the stand for the prosecution against his own co-defendant, without a deal and without immunity.

It didn't save him. What sank him happened in a county jail cell, where he built weapons out of hot pots and scrap metal, planned an escape, and held a shank to the throat of a jailer in her sixties.

And eight days after the murders, Texas changed its law to give capital juries the option of life without parole. Norman's jury never got that choice.

This episode covers the crime, the guilty plea, the punishment phase, the "tip of the iceberg" argument the Court of Criminal Appeals agreed was improper, the neuropsychologist his defense never hired, and why Texas has scheduled both co-defendants to die one week apart.

IN THIS EPISODE

- The Edna triple murder, August 24, 2005

- The manhunt and the border arrest

- Three confessions and testimony against Ker'Sean Ramey

- The jail escape attempt and the hostage-taking

- 21 defense witnesses and a childhood in violence

- The eight days that cost him life without parole

- The federal appeal and the $10,000 examination that came back wrong

- Execution date: September 16, 2026

#LeJamesNorman #DeathRow #TrueCrime #TexasDeathRow #Execution2026 #TrueCrimePodcast #DeathRowCases #KerSeanRamey

Six people are scheduled to die in six different states this September — one of them has waited nearly 50 years for this month to arrive, and one is about to become the first woman executed in her state in over 200 years.

From a Florida shooting in 1976 to a Texas robbery in 2005, this episode breaks down every execution scheduled for September 2026: who they are, what they did, and how long they've been waiting for this outcome. Two of the six were convicted of the exact same crime and are scheduled to die a week apart. One case involves a jury that voted for life — overruled by a judge who chose death instead.

Built entirely from public court records, appellate rulings, and published news coverage. No opinions on guilt or innocence beyond what the courts have already ruled.

Death Row Cases — real death row cases, told straight.

#TrueCrime #DeathRow #TruePodcast #CrimeDocumentary #Execution2026

Nearly forty years on death row for one murder — but investigators believe Daniel Conahan, the "Hog Trail Killer," is responsible for at least thirteen.

In 1996, Conahan, then working as a licensed practical nurse, lured 21-year-old Richard Montgomery into the woods of Charlotte County, Florida, under the pretense of paying him for bondage photographs. Montgomery was never seen alive again. Eleven years later, surveyors near Fort Myers uncovered the skeletal remains of eight men in that same stretch of woods — four of them remain unidentified to this day.

This episode covers the full case: the evidence that tied Conahan to Montgomery's murder, the jury-waived trial where a judge found him guilty in twenty-five minutes, the unanimous death sentence that followed, and the DNA testing request that was still pending in court when Governor DeSantis signed his death warrant. Conahan is scheduled to be executed on September 10, 2026.

Based on public court records, Florida Supreme Court rulings, and published news coverage.

Four men. Four states. One month.

In August 2026, the United States carried out its first same-day triple execution since 2010 — Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Alabama, all within hours of each other. Five days later, Florida added a fourth.

This episode covers all four cases back to back: Anthony Hines, on Tennessee's death row for 40 years before his execution. Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez, nearly two decades on death row in Oklahoma. Jeremy Williams, who waived his own appeals in Alabama and was executed within just over two years of his sentencing. And William Silvia Jr., executed in Florida seventeen years after his original death sentence.

Last words, final meals, and how long each man's case actually took to reach this point — built entirely from public court records, appellate rulings, and published news coverage.

Death Row Cases covers real American death row cases. No commentary beyond what the courts have established.