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TALLAHASSEE - Four death row inmates lost appeals Wednesday, including a North Carolina prison escapee who killed a north Florida woman abducted from a grocery store parking lot and a former mental patient who killed and mutilated a high school senior in the Panhandle.
The Florida Supreme Court also rejected the appeal of a death row inmate who claimed he was high on LSD when he raped and killed a Panama City, Fla., woman in her home, and it refused to order DNA testing for a death row inmate condemned for the murder of a student who was camping in Ocala National Forest with his sister.
But in a fifth capital case Thursday, the high court agreed with a trial judge that a man who fatally stabbed his fiancee in Central Florida deserved a new sentencing hearing.
Donn Duncan, 59, was condemned for the 1990 murder of Deborah Bauer in the Orange County home they shared. A trial judge ruled Duncan deserved a new penalty hearing because mental health issues that might have resulted in a life sentence were not presented at the first penalty hearing.
The four who lost appeals:
Anthony Wainwright, 34, killed a Fort White woman after escaping from a North Carolina prison in 1994. Carmen Tortora Gayheart, 23, was abducted at gunpoint from a Winn-Dixie parking lot as she loaded groceries into her vehicle in April 1994.
Wainwright and Richard Hamilton drove Mrs. Gayheart, the mother of children ages 3 and 5, to a deserted area in Hamilton County where she was repeatedly sexually assaulted, possibly strangled and then shot twice in the head.
Mrs. Gayheart, a student at Lake City Community College, disappeared two days after Wainwright and Hamilton walked away from a minimum-custody prison in Carteret County, N.C.
Jeremiah Rodgers, 27, pleaded guilty in the mutilation death of Jennifer Robinson, an 18-year-old senior at Pace High School. Her body was found in May 1998 in a shallow grave in Santa Rosa.
Robinson was shot in the head while on a date with Rodgers. He and co-defendant Jonathan Lawrence cut off part of her leg and stored it in a freezer.
Paul Everett, 25, was condemned for the murder of Kelli Bailey, 31, who was suffocated after her neck was broken in November 2001.
Loran Cole, 38, was convicted of killing an 18-year-old college student and raping his sister after befriending the siblings in the Ocala National Forest. John Edwards, a Florida State University student, died from a slashed throat and three blows to the head in February 1994.