Sally Ivester called her mother from a payphone in 1976 and said "I'm going to be all right."
She wasn't – and the man who made sure of that has spent every year since on death row.
And Ron DeSantis signed a death warrant for the man who tortured a woman for $25.
The Crime That Has Been Waiting Five Decades for Justice
William Lee Thompson and an accomplice had Sally Ivester in a Miami motel room in March 1976.
They demanded she get $200 to $300 from her mother.
She could only get $25.
What followed was an act of sustained evil that the Florida Supreme Court has documented across multiple rulings over four decades.
They covered 80% of her body in deep bruises, cuts, and burns.
They tortured her with lit cigarettes and lighters.
They sodomized her with a chair leg and a nightstick, tearing her internal walls and causing the bleeding that would kill her.
They beat her with a chain-link belt.
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Then – in the detail that makes this case unforgettable – they took her to a phone booth and made her call her mother one more time to ask for more money.
That's when Ivester's mother heard something wrong in her daughter's voice – she later described it as a "death rattle."
"I'm all right. I'm all right. I'm going to be all right," Ivester told her.
She was returned to the motel room.
Thompson and his accomplice kept going.
Sally Ivester died of multiple injuries and internal bleeding.
Thompson was convicted in 1978 and sentenced to death in 1980.
He has been alive and filing appeals ever since.
He is scheduled to die on October 13.
DeSantis Is Doing What Every Governor Before Him Refused to Do
Florida has had a death penalty since 1976.
For most of those five decades, the state used it sparingly – a handful of executions per year, sometimes fewer, with long death rows full of men who had been waiting so long that some observers forgot why they were there in the first place.
DeSantis looked at that backlog and made a decision that no Florida governor had made before: these sentences are real, the families have waited long enough, and it is time to carry them out.
In 2025, Florida executed 19 people – the most in the state's modern history, nearly two and a half times the previous record of eight set in 2014.
Florida accounted for 40% of every execution carried out in the United States last year.
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In 2026, DeSantis has now signed 17 death warrants, and Florida is on pace to match or exceed that record again.
DeSantis has been direct about why.
"Some of these crimes were committed in the '80s," he told reporters. "Justice delayed is justice denied. I felt I owed it to them to make sure this ran very smoothly."
He added: "If I honestly thought someone was innocent, I would not pull the trigger."
That's not political theater.
That's a governor who read the case files, looked at the victims' families, and decided enough was enough.
Democrats Invented a Motive and Ignored the Case Files
Democrats and liberal critics have spent two years trying to reframe DeSantis' execution record as a political move – ambition dressed up as justice.
House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell said DeSantis is "trying to impress Republican primary voters."
Tell that to the families.
The woman who witnessed Sally Ivester's murder in that motel room feared for her own life the entire time and couldn't leave.
Ivester's mother heard something wrong in her daughter's voice through a payphone and couldn't do a thing about it.
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Those families have been living with the legal system's slow grind for half a century while Thompson filed his seventh postconviction appeal in 2022 – more than four decades after he was sentenced to die.
The Florida Supreme Court denied it.
Every court that has reviewed this case has reached the same conclusion: the crime happened, Thompson did it, and the sentence is lawful.
The only question was whether any governor would sign the warrant.
DeSantis answered that question 17 times in 2026 alone.
October 13 is not a political event.
It's the day Sally Ivester's mother – if she's still alive – finally gets the answer to the call her daughter made from a payphone 50 years ago.
Sources:
- "Florida death row: Gov. DeSantis signs 17th death warrant in 2026," FOX 13 News, September 13, 2026.
- "New Warrant: William Thompson's Execution Scheduled October 13," Florida Death Penalty Substack, September 11, 2026.
- "Florida extends record executions with date set for man who fatally stabbed couple during robbery," Fox News, September 2025.
- "DeSantis proposes making child rapists eligible for execution, allowing death penalty without unanimous jury," Fox News, January 26, 2023.
- "Florida set a record for executions in 2025. What to know," Yahoo News / Tampa Bay Times, December 2025.
- William Lee Thompson v. State of Florida, Florida Supreme Court, No. SC20-1847, March 31, 2022.
- "THOMPSON, William (W/M)," Florida Commission on Capital Cases, Florida Department of Corrections.
