Tennessee plans execution of Christa Pike the following day
Curtis Wilkie Beasley, 77, was put to death by lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke on Tuesday and pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m., according to authorities. His execution brought to 16 the number of people Florida has put to death this year. Beasley was the seventh prisoner over the age of 70 to be executed in Florida this year.
Beasley was convicted in 1998 of first-degree murder, robbery and grand theft auto in the 1995 hammer attack on Carolyn Monfort at her home in Dundee, south of Orlando. Court records show that Beasley had been staying at Monfort’s home in August 1995 while pressure-washing and painting nearby apartments owned by her son-in-law. Monfort’s daughter went to the home after being unable to reach her mother for two days and found her body in a blood-splattered laundry room. Investigators said Monfort had suffered multiple blunt-force trauma injuries to the head, and a bloody hammer head was found wrapped in a towel nearby.
Authorities began searching for Beasley after a witness reported seeing him driving what turned out to be Monfort’s car. Investigators determined that Beasley had traveled to Miami and later relocated to Alabama, where he was arrested while working under a false name for an electrical company.
The Florida Supreme Court recently rejected arguments that executing a man of Beasley’s age who was suffering from cognitive decline would amount to cruel and unusual punishment. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene on Tuesday, clearing the way for the execution to proceed.
Beasley also was the 29th person, all men, executed in the United States this year. On Wednesday, Tennessee is scheduled to execute Christa Pike, 50, for the killing of a classmate in a jealous rage when both were teens — the first woman the state has executed in 200 years.
Florida is closing in on last year’s record of 19 executions, the highest annual total in the state since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. In July, Florida executed two prisoners in one day, becoming the first state to do so in nearly a decade.
Two more executions are scheduled for this year, though Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who leaves office in January, has temporarily paused the next one. William Lee Thompson, 74, is scheduled to be executed on October 13 for the rape and fatal beating of a woman at a Florida motel in 1976. After a doctor this month determined that Thompson might be suffering from dementia, DeSantis ordered a panel of three psychiatrists to examine whether he is competent to be executed. DeSantis issued similar stays in 2023 and 2025, but both executions proceeded after evaluations. William Reaves, 77, has an October 20 execution date for the fatal shooting of a deputy outside a convenience store in 1986.
All Florida executions are carried out by injection of a sedative, a paralytic and a drug that stops the heart, according to the state’s Department of Corrections.