A judge says Jeffrey Muehleman's original sentence is still valid almost 20 years after his murder conviction.
By CANDACE RONDEAUX
Published October 11, 2003
LARGO - Jeffrey Muehleman's luck hasn't changed.
More than 20 years after he was sentenced to death for the brutal murder of an elderly St. Petersburg man, a Pinellas County judge Friday reaffirmed an earlier death penalty ruling in Muehleman's case.
Now 38, Muehleman was 18 when he bludgeoned his elderly employer Earl C. Baughman with a frying pan and stuffed a plastic bag down his throat in May 1983.
On Friday, Pinellas-Pasco County Circuit Judge Brandt C. Downey III agreed with a jury's recommendation that Muehleman be executed for his crime. Downey said Muehleman had acted in a "cold and calculated manner" when he plotted to rob and kill Baughman, 97.
"I cannot imagine the horror this man must have been going through after being hit, then strangled then asphyxiated," Downey said.
Muehleman, who acted as his own attorney at Friday's proceedings, seemed unsurprised by the ruling. He said little in response and declined to say whether he would appeal the sentence.
Muehleman worked as Baughman's live-in caretaker for two days before relatives reported the elderly man missing on May 5, 1983. Nine days later, Baughman's bloody corpse was found in the trunk of his 1961 Cadillac, which was parked in downtown St. Petersburg.
A month after the murder, Muehleman, who was then being held in the Pinellas County Jail on an unrelated drug charge, shared details of the killing with a fellow inmate, who taped the confession. He later admitted to Pinellas County sheriff's deputies and a St. Petersburg Times reporter that he killed Baughman to get money to return to his home in Des Plaines, Ill.
Muehleman pleaded guilty to murder in 1984, after Pinellas County Judge Crockett Farnell denied his motion to suppress his confession. He was sentenced to death later that year, but filed an appeal that was heard three years later in the Florida Supreme Court.
Muehleman's attorneys appealed on several grounds. They questioned whether Muehleman's confession was admissible in court and whether the search of a garage where Muehleman had been living was legal. But the Florida Supreme Court upheld Muehleman's conviction and death sentence in January 1987, ruling that the search was proper. The court said Muehleman's right against self-incrimination was not violated because he voluntarily talked to deputies.
After a series of appeals and motions spanning more than a decade, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a new sentencing hearing in Muehleman's case in September 2002.
A jury voted 10 to 2 in favor of the death penalty for Muehleman for a second time in June of this year.
