Duane Eugene Owen has just days left to live, according to a death warrant signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Supreme Court.
On Thursday, Owen is scheduled to be escorted into the execution chamber at Florida State Prison in Raiford, strapped onto a gurney and injected with a lethal chemical concoction. He will have eaten his last meal and said his last words.
The covering over the window between the death chamber and the witness room will be lifted, and some whose lives were forever changed by Owen’s brutal murders in Palm Beach County decades ago will be sitting there to watch him die.
Owen, now 62, murdered and raped Karen Slattery, a 14-year-old girl who was babysitting in Delray Beach, on March 24, 1984. Only a few months later, Owen murdered and raped Georgianna Worden, a 38-year-old mother of two, as her daughters slept soundly in their Boca Raton home. They weren’t his first victims.
He attacked multiple other women in Palm Beach County in the 1980s, detailing seven rapes, five attempted murders, burglaries and misdemeanors to one psychiatrist after his arrest, court records said. One survivor said she has been haunted by memories of the night Owen attacked her ever since.
An original officer on the case said he could never forget the crime scene at the Delray Beach home where ninth-grader Slattery was found. The many hours of conversation he had with Owen remain fresh in his mind. And Slattery’s younger sister, just 10 years old when the big sister she idolized was murdered, has made a career in law enforcement, believing it was a calling.
Owen was sentenced to death in both cases, though the death warrant is tied to Worden’s murder. The execution is scheduled for 6 p.m. Thursday. It is the fourth execution scheduled in Florida this year and the sixth under DeSantis, according to the Associated Press.
‘Chaos and deprivation’
Owen, who grew up in Michigan, lived a troubled childhood and ended up living in a foster home for several years. His parents were alcoholics who neglected him, and his mother died when he was 11 years old. His father killed himself when he was 13, court records say.
He was sexually and physically abused at the children’s home, his attorneys said in a recent court filing, and began using drugs as a child. By 16 years old, Owen was in a juvenile offender program.
“Mr. Owen’s early life was one of chaos and deprivation,” his attorneys wrote.
Owen enlisted in the Army, “maintains a fetish for the military,” and at one point aspired to be a police officer, court records say. He later said if he couldn’t become someone who enforces the law, he would become the antithesis.
Owen’s crimes started out as prowling, stalking, voyeurism. He admitted to multiple burglaries and two indecent exposure incidents at Florida Atlantic University, court records say.
He relished the adrenaline of getting away with his crimes, court records say.
Hiding in closet
Virginia Sada was 28 years old in 1982 and the resident manager at the Peter Pan Motel when Owen attacked her. Owen broke into the motel through a window in the afternoon and hid in a closet for hours.
Newspaper reports from 1982 say the attack happened on Monday, Nov. 1, and offered few other details aside from the fact that Sada was beaten in the head by a suspect who broke in. At the time, she didn’t want to speak publicly about what happened.
“I couldn’t handle the publicity at that time,” Sada said.
Sada, now 68, suffered brain damage from Owen’s attack and can’t remember many of the details of what happened. But Sada still recalled some things clearly — like the feeling of being watched on Halloween afternoon when she headed for the motel’s laundry room.
“I remember having my hand on the door knob on the outside of the room. I remember standing there and holding that door knob for maybe 20 seconds, feeling like I was being watched from the inside out,” Sada said. “And after maybe 20-30 seconds of deliberation about that, I just shrugged my shoulders. And come to find out, he was in my bedroom closet.”
Sada fell asleep on the couch. Her young son slept nearby through the attack, unharmed — a harbinger of Owen’s future attacks. The girls Slattery was babysitting and Worden’s children were home when they were murdered and were not harmed.
The next moments Sada can recall are of her waking up, feeling sick, soaked in sweat and vomiting blood. She didn’t yet realize she was severely hurt and had no recollection of the attack, she said. Owen had beaten her in the head with a pipe wrench.
Her husband came home and found her. Sada had finger-print shaped bruises on her neck. The phone cords had all been cut and shoved under Sada’s mattress, she said. Her husband took her to the hospital, where she underwent brain surgery. She was expected to be paralyzed, but “God is good,” she said.
“I can’t imagine the horror of that happening as it’s going on, so I’m grateful that I don’t have any memory of that night. I don’t want that memory,” Sada said. “I’ve relived it almost every day.”
Owen wouldn’t be caught until two years later.
He was ultimately charged with Slattery and Worden’s murders, attempted murder in Sada’s attack, attempted murder in another attack of a 17-year-old girl and on another charge stemming from the beating of a 26-year-old woman, newspaper reports from 1984 said.
“He was brutally murdering people and apparently he wasn’t as brutal with me as it got over time,” Sada said. “It might have gotten worse with each person.”
‘Striking’ similarities
Rick Lincoln, a retired Delray Beach Police officer who investigated Slattery’s murder, said Owen came to their attention after Worden’s murder. The two homicides had over a dozen similarities, and Boca Raton Police and Delray Beach detectives compared their cases.
“When we got down there and started going through things, it was kind of striking in terms of the things that were very, very similar — if not exact,” Lincoln said.
Slattery and Worden were both smaller, weighing 100 pounds. The suspect forced his way into the homes and cut screens. The victims were found naked and sexually assaulted while they were dead or nearly dead, Lincoln wrote in a July 1984 police report he shared with the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
At Worden’s home, she was killed with a hammer and officers found a knife. At the home in Delray Beach, Slattery was killed with a knife and officers found a hammer nearby, the report said. The list went on.
Debbi Johnson was 10 years old when Owen murdered her sister Slattery. Now 49 years old, Johnson shared what she can remember of her — that she was a skilled gymnast, diver and hair braider, that she was a cheerleader and that she loved children and aspired to become a teacher. A lab school at FAU was named after her, the Karen Slattery Educational Research Center for Child Development.
Johnson said she was the “annoying little sister” who tried to follow in Slattery’s footsteps. Many of the personality traits Johnson remembers about her sister, she now sees in her daughter, she said.
“Whatever she did, I absolutely had to do,” said Johnson, who is now a Monroe County Sheriff’s deputy.
Slattery often babysat Carolyn and William Helm’s children, as she did the night Owen killed her, and was a “go-to” for families in the area, Johnson said.
Slattery was stabbed 18 times, court documents said. Owen dragged her to a bedroom in the home, where he assaulted her.
Then-Delray Beach Police Chief Charles Kilgore told the South Florida Sun Sentinel three days after Slattery was killed that it was “the most horrendous crime” the city had seen.
It was past Johnson’s bedtime when her sister was murdered. She woke up to a guttural, wailing cry. A neighbor her family was close with was in the living room and told Johnson to go back to bed. After getting up again later in the night, she saw her mother.
“She’s dead,” her mother told her. “Karen’s dead.”
A reward fund was set up to help catch the girl’s killer. The businessman who led the effort told reporters at the time he hoped it would “prevent it from happening again.”
Then Owen murdered Worden.
Worden, an executive secretary and mother of two, was reading a book in her bedroom when her 13-year-old and 9-year-old daughters went to bed. Her older daughter came into her room to say good night and left the door open. It was shut and locked the next morning, court records said.
In the morning, the older girl went into the kitchen to prepare lunch for school. The kitchen window had been broken, dirt covering the floor. Her mother wasn’t answering from behind the door. Like her mother had shown her, the girl used a Q-tip to unlock the bedroom door and found blood, court records said.
Owen bashed Worden in the head five times with a hammer, the doctor who performed her autopsy testified at Owen’s trial. She clung to life after the blows, surviving for at least three minutes or possibly as long as an hour after, according to a trial transcript.
The doctor testified that Worden would have experienced “the realization that she was going to die.” She was near death but still alive when Owen raped her, the transcript said.
‘Catch me if you can’
Boca Raton Police officers identified Owen as an early suspect. Retired officer Lincoln said Delray Beach Police questioned several people in Slattery’s murder, but Owen was an official suspect.
Boca officers were already looking for Owen before Worden’s murder. He was suspected of committing multiple burglaries in the city in the few days before, court records said. The burglary victims picked Owen out of photo lineups.
Owen was arrested on May 30, 1984, as he walked down a road in Boca Raton. When an officer stopped him, he gave the name Dana Brown — the name of someone he grew up with at the children’s home, court records said. But he matched the description they were looking for.
So began what Owen felt was a game of cat-and-mouse with detectives. A game he thought he was winning, Lincoln said.
The Boca Raton News reported years later that a “famous” line from Owen’s confession was, “Catch me if you can.”
One psychologist who recently evaluated Owen and reviewed the recorded police interrogations said it seemed Owen was the one “running the show,” court records said. He wrote a poem that read: “Roses are red. You pigs are blue. When you start counting victims, there will be quite a few.”
Lincoln recalled Owen initiating conversations with detectives from the moment he was placed in the Palm Beach County jail. He told detectives to come to the jail to talk to him. Before he was charged with Slattery and Worden’s murders, detectives recorded more than 16 hours of conversation with Owen, Lincoln said. He was “selective” at first with what he shared, Lincoln said, and admitted to other crimes but not the murders.
After confessing committing a burglary to a Boca Raton officer, Owen said, “What am I really here for? Not petty burglaries.” And when the officer explained they believed he murdered a woman, he replied, “Well, finally I know the real reason,” court records said.
Owen eventually confessed to the attack at the Peter Pan Motel and to both murders, court records said.
Insanity claim denied
Owen has unsuccessfully challenged his fate in state and federal court over the years. As of Friday, his recent efforts to stay his execution have also failed.
His attorneys have sought to prevent his execution, writing in a 75-page motion that a jury never heard his “compelling mitigation,” denying him due process, that a neuropsychologist’s recent evaluation “determined he is not competent to proceed in postconviction proceedings” and is legally insane. The neuropsychologist called by the defense to evaluate Owen last month determined he met the criteria for schizophrenia.
DeSantis on May 22 temporarily stayed the execution date and appointed a commission of experts to evaluate Owen and determine whether he is sane. The three psychiatrists refuted the defense expert’s findings, writing in a report to the governor the next day that Owen is not mentally ill and is faking it to avoid the death penalty, according to a recent brief filed by the Attorney General’s Office.
The Florida Supreme Court issued an opinion Friday finding Owen sane to be executed.
Sada hadn’t kept track of Owen’s case over the decades. She said she figured he would never walk out of prison and she didn’t much care what happened to him.
What would she say to Owen?
“I would want to know why? Why would you do this? How could you do that to people?” Sada said.
In many ways, Johnson’s childhood was taken from her. Fear persisted. Still, she will check a house she enters for window coverings. In college, she couldn’t live on a first-floor apartment, knowing Owen broke in through windows.
As a mom now of a young woman herself, Johnson has a newfound appreciation for her parents who tried diligently to give Johnson a “life as normal as possible,” she said.
“Now that I’m an adult, I have no idea how they did that. The strength that it must have taken for them to do that must have been huge. Huge,” she said.
Johnson said she’s relieved the end of decades of legal wrangling has nearly arrived.
“I don’t think there’s anything that I could say or he could say that would make a difference,” she said. “I don’t forgive him. At all.”
Angie DiMichele can be reached at , 754-971-0194 and on Twitter @angdimi.
