Florida man faces execution for 1996 killing connected to ‘Hog Trail Murders’

A Florida man convicted in one of a series of suspected killings that became known as the “Hog Trail Murders” in the 1990s was scheduled Thursday to become the state’s 15th person executed this year.

A Florida man convicted in one of a series of suspected killings that became known as the “Hog Trail Murders” in the 1990s was scheduled Thursday to become the state’s 15th person executed this year.

Daniel Owen Conahan Jr., 72, was sentenced to die for the 1996 kidnapping and strangling of Richard Allen Montgomery, whose mutilated body was found in a wooded southwest Florida area where authorities found the remains of at least six people over a three-year span.

Conahan, who has maintained his innocence, has previously been identified by authorities as a person of interest in the other deaths, but he was never charged. He has argued the evidence against him was circumstantial.

Conahan was scheduled to die by lethal injection in the nation’s busiest death chamber. Florida has carried out more than half of the 24 total executions in the U.S. so far this year under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who leaves office in January.

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.