Florida moves toward 15th execution as Conahan's final appeal remains pending

Case arose from the Hog Trail Murders investigation

Daniel Owen Conahan Jr, 72, was scheduled for execution by lethal injection in Florida on Thursday for the 1996 kidnapping and strangling of Richard Allen Montgomery. Conahan waived his right to a jury trial and was convicted by a judge of murder and kidnapping in August 1999.

A final appeal remained pending before the US Supreme Court. The Florida Supreme Court last week denied Conahan’s final appeals, including one requesting additional testing on DNA collected from Montgomery.

The petition said Conahan had requested DNA testing since March 2025 on evidence collected at the scene and from Montgomery’s body to “conclusively establish that he is not responsible for the death”.

Within 24 hours, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that proof of DNA from someone other than Conahan on Montgomery’s body would not exonerate him.

Conahan has maintained his innocence and argued that the evidence against him was circumstantial. Authorities previously identified him as a person of interest in the other deaths associated with the Hog Trail Murders, but he was never charged in those cases.

Florida had already carried out more than half of the 24 executions in the US this year under Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor who leaves office in January. Conahan’s execution, if carried out, would be the state’s 15th of the year.

Florida carried out 19 executions in 2025 under DeSantis, setting a state record for the period since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

Authorities found Montgomery’s mutilated body in a wooded area of southwest Florida where the remains of at least six people were found over a three-year span. 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.

Hunters found the first body 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 men who were unhoused. The deaths became known as the Hog Trail Murders because the bodies were found in swampy, wooded locations. The case has appeared many times in true-crime media content over the past three decades.

Detectives began looking into Conahan in 1996 after a man imprisoned for stealing Conahan’s car said Conahan had lured him to a remote area and offered to pay him to pose for nude photographs. The man said he drove away in the car after seeing a knife.

A photograph dated 28 July 2026 showed the wing at Florida State Prison that houses the execution chamber.