Summary of Offense:
In the spring of 1989, Franklin Floyd was living under an alias with his daughter Sharon and her son. Sharon and Cheryl Commesso worked as exotic dancers at a club. Shortly after St. Patrick’s Day of 1989, Floyd and Commesso were engaged in a heated argument outside the club, when a coworker of Commesso intervened. Floyd claimed that Commesso was responsible for Sharon’s loss of Medicaid coverage for her son (Floyd’s grandson). The coworker also knew that Floyd had recently struck Commesso and caused a bruise on her face. Commesso was last seen alive during the first week of April 1989. She left her house with a packed bag and told her relatives that she would see them the following week. Her car was located at the St. Petersburg/Clearwater airport, where it had been parked since April 7, 1989. In May of 1989, Floyd told a neighbor that he was going on vacation and asked the neighbor to mow the lawn and collect his mail. On June 15, 1989, Floyd and Sharon, using assumed names, married in New Orleans. On June 16, 1989, Floyd’s trailer burned down, and Floyd later called the neighbor and asked that his mail be burned.
In March of 1995, landscape workers found the skeletal remains of Commesso in an area off Interstate 275 in Pinellas County, Florida. Roots growing in the skeleton indicated her remains had been there for six or seven years. In March of 1995, the owner of a Kansas auto repair business found a large envelope stuck between the truck bed and the top of the gas tank of a truck he had recently purchased at an auction. In the envelope, he found 97 small and irregularly cropped photos, including many pictures of a woman, beaten and bound, later identified as Commesso. The truck was traced back to Floyd, who had stolen it in Oklahoma in September 1994, but had abandoned it in Texas the following month. The medical examiner determined that injuries to the cheek of Commesso’s skull were consistent with injuries sustained by Commesso in the pictures recovered from the truck. Also, similarities in clothing and jewelry were found between the pictures of Commesso and items found with her remains. One of the pictures of Commesso contained an image of someone else’s thumb, which was found by an FBI analyst to contain multiple similarities to Floyd’s thumb. Many of the pictures contained images of furniture, a boat, and areas of a trailer, all of which belonged to Floyd.
Floyd was sentenced to death in Pinellas County on November 22, 2002.
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