America's courts have spent decades keeping killers alive while their victims' families wait by the phone.
DeSantis just ran out of patience with a man the FBI calls one of the most prolific serial murderers in American history.
What this killer did to his victims in the Florida woods – and how long taxpayers have been paying for his appeals – will make your blood boil.
The Monster Who Hid in Plain Sight
Daniel Owen Conahan Jr. spent years in Charlotte County, Florida, operating in plain sight as a nurse.
His method was always the same.
He would approach men – often transients, often men struggling financially – and offer them easy money to pose for nude photographs in a wooded area.
Once he had them bound to a tree, he ra*ed them.
Then he strangled them.
Then he mutilated their bodies.
The first body turned up in 1994, found by hog hunters in remote woods in northern Charlotte County.
Then another.
Then another.
By 1996, investigators feared what they already suspected – that a serial predator was working a patch of Southwest Florida wilderness that locals called the hog trails.
Richard Montgomery was 21 years old when he told his mother someone had offered him $200 to pose for photographs.
He didn't come home.
Utility workers found his body the next morning wrapped in carpet padding near Highway 41, strangled, mutilated, left in the same wooded kill zone Conahan had used before.
The fiber evidence linking Conahan to Montgomery was damning.
So was the testimony of Stanley Burden, a man Conahan had attacked two years earlier using the exact same approach – same offer, same woods, same method.
Burden survived.
Montgomery didn't.
The Scope of What Florida Is Really Dealing With
Conahan was convicted in 1999 of Montgomery's murder.
The jury was unanimous on the death penalty.
The Florida Supreme Court upheld everything in 2003.
But the one conviction has always been the tip of something much darker.
Retired Special Agent Jim Myers of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement put it directly: Conahan is "one of the most prolific serial murderers in the history of the United States."
Authorities investigated him in connection with the deaths of at least a dozen men across Lee, Charlotte, and Sarasota Counties.
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Bodies kept turning up for years after his conviction – skeletal remains discovered in 2007 in Fort Myers that investigators immediately linked to the same dumping pattern.
Some victims still haven't been identified.
Conahan spent 27 years filing appeals, all of them rejected.
Now he's 72 years old.
And his time is up.
DeSantis Is Finishing What Florida's Courts Started Decades Ago
This death warrant – Conahan's execution scheduled for September 10 at Florida State Prison – is DeSantis's 15th of 2026.
Florida executed 12 people already this year.
Last year the state carried out 19 executions, shattering the previous modern-era record of eight.
DeSantis isn't just leading the nation on executions – he's running laps around it.
Forty-seven people were executed across all of America in 2025.
Florida alone accounted for 19 of them.
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DeSantis made the mission clear at the Florida Sheriffs Association conference in July.
"Some of the victims' families have been waiting a long time," he said.
"I don't know if closure is the right word, because you'll probably never get full closure. But at least knowing justice was served is something that was very important to a lot of people."
Richard Montgomery's family has been waiting 30 years.
That wait ends September 10.
The left will call this cruel.
They always do.
What's actually cruel is a man who spent decades strangling young men in the Florida woods still breathing state air 27 years after a unanimous jury said he shouldn't be.
DeSantis made a promise to victims' families when he started clearing Florida's death row.
He's keeping it.
Sources:
- Rob Garguilo, "DeSantis Signs Death Warrant for Florida 'Hog Trail Killer,'" iHeart Radio, August 12, 2026.
- Jim Turner, "DeSantis signs death warrant for 'Hog Trail Killer,'" WTVT/News Service of Florida, August 12, 2026.
- Sophia Fanning, "DeSantis signs death warrant for 'Hog Trail Killer' Daniel Conahan," WFLA, August 12, 2026.
- "What to Know About Hog Trail Killer Daniel Conahan," Oxygen, June 1, 2025.
- "Florida sets up third execution in 2026 as state leads U.S. death penalty surge," NBC Miami, January 30, 2026.
- "Florida set a record for executions in 2025. What to know," Yahoo News/USA Today, December 2025.
