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A postman's working days in middle-class Orlando, Florida, are normally as uneventful as a man could hope for. There is seldom any major deviation from routine. A snapping dog, perhaps, but nothing that a can of Mace won't cure. Except, that is, for murder. On the afternoon of July 15, 1982, the postman working Henry Balch Drive noted that deliveries of mail at Edward Wise's home had not been taken in for several days. The circumstance was curious, but not disturbing. Not until the carrier became aware of rancid odors emanating from the house itself. Police were summoned, and they forced the door. Inside, patrolmen found Ed Wise, age 47, and his live-in lover, 44-year-old John Stinson, shot and stabbed to death. The medical examiner declared they had been dead at least a week, perhaps ten days. Though gay, the men had not been known as "cruisers," and police did not initially suspect them of inviting home "rough trade." September 6. A young man riding his motorcycle through an Orlando citrus grove was startled to discover a corpse, partially covered by an orange blanket, Iying beside the dirt road. The victim , a male, had been shot twice -- in the head and back -- with a .25-caliber pistol. A gasoline receipt, recovered from his pocket, identified him as Zack Miller, of Boston, Georgia, reported missing by his family two days earlier. Discovery of Miller's car, September 7, gave detectives in Orlando hope the killer might still be within their jurisdiction. On October 10, three gunmen tried to rob a local fast food restaurant, and one of them was captured near the scene. The clumsy stick-up artist named the "brains" behind the job as Don Dufowr, a cocky thief who boasted of a recent murder in an orange grove, with the victim robbed of jewelry. In fact, the would-be robber told detectives, Don had bragged of killing something like a dozen people, altogether. Homicide investigators searching for Dufour were startled by the news of his arrest, in Jackson, Mississippi, four days after the attempted robbery. He had been charged with double murder in the stabbing deaths of Danny King, age 32, and 34-year-old Earl Peeples. Both men had been slain in the apartment occupied by Peeples and, again, there were persuasive indications that the victims might be gay. Forensic evidence proved more persuasive to a Jackson jury than the suspect's feeble plea of innocence. Convicted of the Peeples homicide on March 31, 1983, Dufour was sentenced to die in Mississippi's electric chair . Unmoved by published interviews suggesting that their prisoner was "scared to death of electricity," prosecutors expressed their intention to try him again, for Danny King's murder. Meanwhile, in Florida, first-degree murder indictments were returned against Dufour in January 1983, on Wise and Stinson, and in September, for the Miller homicide. |
