James Duckett, a former Florida police officer, was put to death for the rape and murder of 11-year-old Teresa McAbee, and the Polk County sheriff says he is certain Duckett also killed a 14-year-old girl who was never given justice in court.
Duckett, 68, died by lethal injection on July 28 at Florida State Prison in Raiford, nearly four decades after McAbee vanished in the small town of Mascotte while Duckett was the only officer patrolling the streets. Two days later, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd held a news conference to lay out evidence he says ties Duckett to a second killing, the 1987 disappearance and death of Jeanifer Weldon, a 14-year-old girl found strangled in a wooded area about an hour south of Mascotte.
Duckett was never charged in Weldon's death. Judd said authorities made a deliberate decision to stop pursuing a conviction after Duckett received a death sentence for McAbee's murder. Pressing a second case, Judd explained, risked giving Duckett's defense team new ammunition to delay the execution that families of both girls had waited decades to see carried out.
McAbee went missing in May 1987. She was last seen riding in Duckett's patrol car on an evening when he was the sole officer working Mascotte's streets. Court records show her body bore evidence of sexual assault, strangulation, and drowning.
About a month after McAbee disappeared, Duckett was named a suspect and fired from the Mascotte Police Department. Fingerprint and DNA evidence linked him to the crime, Judd told reporters. But Duckett's arrest did not come until roughly a month after Weldon's death later that same year, a timeline that left a second family grieving a child they believe the same man took from them.
Duckett spent 38 years on death row, filing multiple appeals. He declined to speak in interviews conducted before his execution.
Judd's July 30 news conference painted a detailed circumstantial picture of Duckett's connection to Weldon's death. Weldon disappeared on September 19, 1987, three days before her 15th birthday. She had spent that Saturday with friends on a trip to Tampa, where she bought a stuffed kitten packaged in a green plastic bag. Around 9 p.m., she left her friends to walk roughly two miles home in Polk County.
She never arrived.
Judd said investigators believe Duckett, already fired from the Mascotte force but still in possession of his old law enforcement uniform, used that uniform to convince Weldon to accept a ride. That same night, Duckett left for his new mining job five hours early. His route, Judd said, took him "exactly past where Jeanifer Weldon would have been walking home."
Duckett arrived at work two hours late, claiming car trouble. But his hands were not "greasy or nasty or dirty," Judd said, an odd detail for a man who supposedly spent hours dealing with a broken-down vehicle. He also had what Judd described as "fingernail marks or scratches on his back." Duckett told his wife he got them "climbing under a barbed wire fence at work."
The day after Weldon vanished, Duckett brought home a stuffed kitten in a green plastic bag, matching the toy Weldon had purchased in Tampa hours before she disappeared.
Judd described the search that followed Weldon's disappearance in blunt terms.
"13 frantic days, we looked for Jeanifer to no avail."
About two weeks after she vanished, a phosphate miner pulled over near Fort Meade to investigate a pair of shoes on the side of the road. When he stepped out of his car, he encountered the smell of a decomposing body. Weldon's skeletonized remains were found in a wooded area behind tall grass and a berm, just off the road. She had been strangled. Investigators suspect she was raped before she died.
Polk County investigators spent tens of thousands of hours working to build a case against Duckett for Weldon's murder. But after Duckett received his death sentence for the McAbee killing, authorities faced a hard calculation. Pursuing a second prosecution could "create more defense, or more arguments, or more excuses why he shouldn't be executed," Judd said. They chose to let the existing sentence stand rather than risk giving Duckett's lawyers another avenue to delay.
Judd did not hold back about the wait.
"The problem is we didn't put him to death soon enough."
Both families, McAbee's and Weldon's, attended Duckett's execution. Amy Weldon, Jeanifer's younger sister, offered a statement afterward that carried the weight of nearly four decades of waiting.
"I'm confident the right person was executed. I don't like how long it took, but I am confident 100% that the right person died."
Judd echoed her frustration. He noted that modern surveillance technology, license plate readers and roadside cameras, could have cracked the case in hours rather than years. "Today, we may have found him before he ever got a chance to rape and murder her," Judd said. "We would have found him within hours."
He also took a shot at critics of surveillance tools, saying some opponents "don't think we should be able to look at a camera that's on a public right of way, only looking at a tag and the color of a car." Judd defended the technology plainly: "We're going to find lost children, lost Alzheimer's patients, warrant suspects, and we're never going to invade your privacy to do it."
Duckett's execution was not the only one Florida carried out that day. Hours later, the state executed 80-year-old Dominick Occhicone, making it the first time Florida put two inmates to death on the same day since 1964. AP News reported that Occhicone became the oldest inmate executed in Florida's modern history and the second-oldest in modern U.S. history. His final words were brief: "I know it don't mean much, but I'm sorry. I never meant to do what I did."
The dual executions reflect Governor Ron DeSantis's aggressive pace on capital punishment. Florida has carried out 12 executions in 2026 alone, more than all other states combined out of a nationwide total of 19, Breitbart reported. DeSantis oversaw a record 19 executions in 2025, more than any Florida governor since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976.
DeSantis addressed the pace directly. "Some of these crimes were committed in the '80s. Justice delayed is justice denied," he said. "I felt I owed it to them to make sure this ran very smoothly. If I honestly thought someone was innocent, I would not pull the trigger."
The New York Post noted that Florida has now carried out nearly half of all state executions in the country since the beginning of 2025. Duckett was pronounced dead at 1:19 p.m. Occhicone followed at 6:13 p.m.
Critics of the pace exist. Grace Hanna, executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, called July 28 "an unprecedented escalation of Florida's use of the death penalty." For the families of Teresa McAbee and Jeanifer Weldon, the escalation came about 38 years too late.
When a man sworn to protect a community uses his badge to prey on children, no timeline of justice is fast enough. Duckett paid the price. The only question worth asking is why it took so long.
