Marlys Mae Sather came home for lunch and found her neighbor ransacking her house.
She didn't survive the encounter.
Now, 36 years later, DeSantis just signed the warrant that ends it.
A Crime That Defies Explanation
Chadwick Willacy didn't just kill Marlys Sather. He took his time doing it.
On September 5, 1990, the 56-year-old Palm Bay woman returned home unexpectedly from work to find her next-door neighbor helping himself to her belongings.
Willacy beat her in the head with a blunt object.
He tied her hands and ankles.
He wrapped a telephone cord around her neck and tried to strangle her.
Then he got creative.
He doused her in gasoline.
He disabled the smoke detectors in her home.
He placed a fan at her feet to feed oxygen to the fire he was about to start.
The medical examiner's report says Marlys Sather died of smoke inhalation.
She was alive when Chadwick Willacy set her on fire.
Her son-in-law found her body after her employer called – she hadn't come back from her lunch break.
Willacy was photographed at an ATM with her stolen car in the background, trying to use her stolen card.
https://twitter.com/OcalaStarBanner/status/2033581583861473663?s=20
Her checkbook was found at his house.
The jury convicted him of first-degree murder, burglary, robbery, and arson in December 1991. They recommended death, 9-3.
Thirty-Six Years of Waiting
Here's what the left doesn't want you thinking about when they cry about Florida's execution pace.
Marlys Sather's family has been waiting since 1990.
Willacy's first death sentence was thrown out on appeal in 1994.
A new penalty phase – same result. The second jury recommended death 11-1 in 1995.
Then came the decades of motions, petitions, habeas corpus filings, and federal appeals.
The Florida Supreme Court denied postconviction relief in 2007.
The federal district court denied his habeas petition in 2014. The Eleventh Circuit denied it in 2017.
Chadwick Willacy has been fighting the punishment he earned for 35 years.
DeSantis signed his warrant last Friday.
His execution is set for April 21 at Florida State Prison.
It is the sixth death warrant DeSantis has signed in 2026.
DeSantis Is Delivering What Other Governors Won't
Florida executed 19 people in 2025 – more than any state in a single year since Texas carried out 24 executions in 2009.
DeSantis shattered the old Florida record of eight, set in 1984 and matched in 2014.
At the current 2026 pace, Florida may execute 20 people this year – more than were put to death nationally in 2020, 2021, and 2022 combined.
Democrats are furious. Left-wing activists are calling it political.
Florida House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell went in front of cameras and suggested DeSantis is just doing this to impress Republican primary voters.
DeSantis has a different explanation.
"Some of these crimes were committed in the '80s," he said. "Justice delayed is justice denied. I felt I owed it to them to make sure this ran very smoothly."
That's not a political calculation.
That's a governor operating inside the Trump mandate.
When Trump returned to office in January 2025, federal death row was nearly empty – Biden had commuted most of the sentences waiting there.
Trump turned to the states. Over the next 11 months, DeSantis signed more than twice as many death warrants as he had in the previous six years.
This is what America First law and order looks like when it has a governor willing to use it.
His communications director put it even more directly: "My advice to those who are seeking to avoid the death penalty in Florida would be to not murder people."
Florida also has two more executions on the immediate schedule this month – Michael King for the 2008 abduction, rape, and murder of 21-year-old Denise Amber Lee, and former Mascotte police officer James Duckett, convicted of raping and murdering an 11-year-old girl in 1987, scheduled for March 31.
Chadwick Willacy set a woman on fire in her own home and spent the next three decades filing paperwork to avoid the consequences.
Marlys Sather's son-in-law got the call when she didn't come back from lunch.
On April 21, her family finally gets the call they've been waiting 36 years to receive.
Sources:
- CBS Miami Team, "Gov. Ron DeSantis approves the execution for man convicted of killing, setting on fire his Palm Bay neighbor," CBS Miami, March 13, 2026.
- Associated Press, "Florida sets up a third execution in 2026 as state leads US death penalty surge," NBC Miami, January 30, 2026.
- Adam Liptak, "Ron DeSantis Wants Speedy Executions, and Lots of Them," GV Wire/The New York Times, March 12, 2026.
- NBC Miami Staff, "DeSantis says string of executions in Florida about justice for victims' families," NBC Miami, November 3, 2025.
