Billy Leon Kearse Execution + Last Meal + Last Words on Death Row

It was a Tuesday evening in Florida, 6:00. The sun had already begun pulling itself below the flat horizon line of the state’s northern interior, and inside Florida State Prison, a small white room with mirrors and brown curtains was about to become the last place a 53-year-old man would ever see. 35 years, that is how long this moment had been coming.

35 years of courtrooms, appeals, legal briefs, and waiting. Waiting for a family that had buried a husband, a son, a brother, a police officer who went to work on an ordinary January night and never came home. And waiting for a man who, at 18 years old, made a decision in the span of a few terrifying seconds that would define every single day of the rest of his life.

On March 3rd, 2026, the state of Florida executed Billy Leon Cursey by lethal injection for the murder of Fort Pierce Police Sergeant Danny Thomas Parrish, a crime committed on January 18th, 1991. Cursey was Florida’s third execution of the year in a state that had already shattered every modern execution record on the books. Welcome to Convicted Criminals.

Kindly subscribe. Turn on the notification bell so you won’t miss our deep dive drops, and stay with me because this story is not simple. It is not just a story about a crime, or a trial, or an execution. It is a story about a traffic stop that lasted less than 10 minutes and left a wound that took more than three decades to close, and for some, may never fully close at all.

To understand the weight of January 18th, 1991, you have to understand the man who put on his badge that night. Danny Thomas Parrish was born on October 4th, 1961, in Fort Pierce, Florida. A working-class coastal city on the state’s Treasure Coast, where the Indian River meets the Atlantic, and where nearly everyone knows everyone else’s name.

Danny grew up there. He graduated from Fort Pierce Central High School in 1980, and from a young age, he carried himself with the quiet discipline of someone who had already decided what kind of man he wanted to be. After high school, he enlisted in the United States Navy, serving 3 years before transitioning to the Florida National Guard.

When he returned to civilian life, Fort Pierce pulled him back, and so did the idea of service. He joined the Fort Pierce Police Department, first as a reserve officer for 2 years before becoming a full-time road patrol officer in 1988. His half-brother was a Fellsmere police officer at the same time. Law enforcement was not just a job in the Parrish family, it was a calling.

His fellow officers described him with the same words over and over across the years. He was reliable. He was present. He showed up for his colleagues when they needed him. He could make friends easily. One co-worker would recall decades later, “He loved law enforcement. He was just always there for his fellow officers.

” Danny Parrish was 29 years old. He was married to a woman named Murtha. They had no children. And on the night of January 18th, 1991, he was working a routine patrol shift in St. Lucie County, the same streets he had grown up on, the same community he had chosen to protect. He did not know that the night was about to end.

It was close to 11:00 at night when Sergeant Parrish spotted a dark blue 1979 Monte Carlo moving in the wrong direction on a one-way street. It was the kind of minor traffic infraction that officers handle dozens of times a week, an easy stop, a quick interaction, a warning or a ticket, and then back on patrol.

Parrish activated his lights and pulled the vehicle over. Before stepping out of his cruiser, he did what every trained officer does. He called in the license plate number over the radio. It was procedure. It was habit. It was, as it turned out, the detail that would eventually bring justice. Behind the wheel of that Monte Carlo sat an 18-year-old named Billy Leon Cursey.

He had been born on October 26th, 1972, which meant he had crossed into legal adulthood just 84 days earlier. He was driving that night, he would later say, to pick up a pizza. His car was smoking, and he had gone the wrong way down that one-way street. When Parrish approached the window and asked for identification, something shifted inside Curse.

He did not have a valid driver’s license. More critically, he was on probation for a prior offense, a burglary charge that had landed him a four-year sentence, from which he had been recently released. The thought of being caught violating that probation, of being sent back to prison, took hold of him. He began giving the officer false names, one after another, aliases that did not match anyone in the driver’s license database.

Parrish checked each one and found nothing. Something was wrong here, and the officer knew it. He ordered Curse out of the vehicle, placed his hands on the roof, and moved to place him under arrest. What happened next unfolded in seconds. As Parrish attempted to handcuff him, Curse resisted.

The two men struggled, grappling, fighting, neither one gaining full control. During that violent exchange, Curse managed to reach Parrish’s service weapon and wrench it from his belt. The balance of power shifted in an instant. Parrish was now unarmed. He raised his hands. He was not fighting back, and according to witnesses and court records, he spoke.

He appealed to the young man holding the gun. He asked him not to do it. Billy Curse fired anyway. He fired 14 times. Nine of those bullets tore into Danny Parrish’s body. Four more struck his bulletproof vest. Sergeant Parrish collapsed onto the asphalt. Curse got back into his car. He drove away into the Florida night, taking the service weapon with him, a weapon he would later hide.

A taxi driver working nearby heard the gunshots and saw the Monte Carlo pulling away at speed. He grabbed Parrish’s radio and called for emergency assistance. Paramedics responded and rushed Sergeant Parrish to the hospital, but there was nothing that could be done. Danny Thomas Parrish was pronounced dead that night.

He was 29 years old. The license plate number Parrish had called in before the stop, that one act of professional discipline, led investigators directly to the address where the car was registered. A man named Derek Dickerson lived there and Cursed was staying with him temporarily. Police arrived that same night. They found Cursed.

They placed him under arrest. He waived his right to remain silent and confessed. He told investigators he fired because he panicked. He did not want to go back to prison. The confession was immediate. The guilt was not disputed, but as the legal machinery began to turn, a more complicated picture emerged. Not one that excused what Cursed had done, but one that demanded the court examine who he was and how he had arrived at that moment.

Billy Leon Cursed was born into a life that offered him almost nothing. His mother was a young teenager when she became pregnant and court testimony would later reveal she drank heavily throughout the pregnancy. The damage to Cursed’s developing brain was documented. He suffered a head injury as a toddler. By the time he entered school, teachers described him as frequently hungry, poorly clothed, and emotionally disturbed.

He was placed in special education programs for severely disabled and emotionally handicapped children. He ran away repeatedly. When authorities asked him why, he told them he felt safer in juvenile detention than at home. His father abandoned the family when Cursed was 2 years old. His first encounter with police was at age 8, not for violence, but for being, in the official language of the report, beyond control.

His record from that point forward was a long list of property offenses, petty theft, burglary, trespassing, auto theft, little violence. Repeated contact with a system that, by his own account, never gave him a stable foundation. He dropped out of school after completing the 8th grade. He was 15 years old.

By the time Parrish pulled him over, Kerrs had an IQ later measured at 79, academic functioning at a third-grade level, and a history of trauma that experts would later describe as having measurably impaired his ability to regulate emotion, assess risk, and think through consequences.

None of that brought Danny Parrish back, but it was, from the beginning, the heart of the legal battle that would last more than three decades. The trial of Billy Leon Kerrs began in October 1991 in Vero Beach. Jury selection, testimony, and deliberation moved quickly, and on October 22nd, 1991, the jury returned a verdict of guilty on the charge of first-degree murder.

Two days later, by a vote of 11 to 1, the jury recommended the death penalty. The sentencing hearing brought the full weight of both sides into the courtroom. The prosecution presented the brutality of the attack, a uniformed officer, unarmed, pleading for his life, shot nine times.

The defense called teachers, family members, psychologists, and school officials who painted the portrait of a child who had been failed at every turn. A child whose mother drank through her pregnancy, a child who slept more soundly in detention than in his own home. The judge weighed it all, and on November 8th, 1991, Circuit Judge Mark Sciarrino formally sentenced Billy Leon Kerrs to death by electric chair, finding that the crime was both premeditated and especially heinous, and that Kerrs had demonstrated total indifference to his victim’s life.

Martha Parrish, 25 years old, newly widowed, agreed with the sentence. But in the courtroom, during the proceeding, something happened that she would carry with her for the next 35 years. When Kerrs was given an opportunity to address the court, he turned and looked directly at her, and he smiled, and he winked.

That was the moment, she would say decades later, that I decided I would see this through to the end. In 1995, the Florida Supreme Court vacated Kursch’s death sentence. The trial court, justices ruled, had improperly instructed jurors on how to evaluate aggravating factors, duplicating certain charges in a way that rendered the original sentencing legally flawed.

A new sentencing hearing was ordered. In December 1996, a second jury delivered its verdict, death, this time unanimously. On March 24th, 1997, senior circuit judge C. Fifer Trowbridge formally resentenced Kursch to death for the murder of Sergeant Danny Parrish. The appeals that followed stretched across two decades.

In 2000, the Florida Supreme Court dismissed one appeal. In 2007, another was rejected. In 2018, a third. By 2024, Kursch was one of seven death row inmates in Florida convicted of crimes on the Treasure Coast, one name on a list that grew shorter each year. It is worth noting that the second appeal reached the Florida Supreme Court by the narrowest of margins.

Three of the seven justices dissented from the decision to uphold the death sentence, finding that the killing had been the impulsive act of a barely adult young man of low intellectual functioning, someone who had set out that night with no intention of committing any crime at all, let alone murder.

But the majority held, the sentence stood. The appeals continued, six successive post-conviction motions in total, the last of which was denied by the Florida Supreme Court on February 25th, 2026. Kursch had argued, among other things, that newly discovered evidence supported a finding of intellectual disability, which under the law would render his execution unconstitutional.

The court was not persuaded. On January 29th, 2026, Governor Ron DeSantis signed Billie Leon Kursch’s death warrant. The execution was scheduled for March 3rd, 2026, giving Kursch’s legal team exactly 33 days to mount a final defense. His lead attorney, Paul Callil, fought the case while simultaneously managing his own father’s care and hospice.

Advocacy groups called the compressed timeline a machinery of death, a process so deliberately accelerated that meaningful review became nearly impossible. Florida had already executed 19 people in 2025 alone, shattering the previous state record of eight in a single year. Kursch’s execution would make him the 22nd person executed by Florida in just over 13 months.

Outside Florida State Prison on the afternoon of March 3rd, protesters and death penalty opponents gathered in quiet vigil. Inside, more than a dozen family members and law enforcement officers who had known Danny Parish took their seats in the witness room. Martha Busbin, now 60 years old, working as a victim advocate at the St.

Lucie County Sheriff’s Office, was among them. She had spent 35 years making sure this day happened, writing letters, making phone calls, showing up. There are so many cases on death row that, “To me, Danny was just another file in the filing cabinet,” she said. “Everyone that helped me write a letter, I owe them all my life.

” On the morning of March 3rd, 2026, Billy Leon Kursch woke up inside Florida State Prison knowing it would be his last day. He received one visitor. Officials did not publicly disclose who he met with a spiritual advisor. When he was offered the opportunity to choose a special last meal, he declined it. He was served a standard prison dinner instead.

Jordan Kirkland, the Florida Department of Corrections Communications Director, spoke to press before the execution. “He had one visitor. He met with a spiritual advisor, and he is calm and in good spirits,” Kirkland said. The US Supreme Court denied a final emergency stay that afternoon. At 6:00 p.m.

, execution proceedings began. Kursch was covered in a white sheet with tubing in his arms and brought into the execution chamber on a gurney, a small white room with mirrors and brown curtains before the lethal injection protocol commenced. The warden asked him if he had any final words. Billy Cruse spoke to his family.

He said, “I sincerely apologize for what I have done. There is no way I can ever repay that.” He paused, “Give me peace. Thank you.” Part of what he said was inaudible to witnesses. The three-drug lethal injection cocktail was administered. Cruse twitched briefly after the drugs entered his system, then grew still.

Several minutes passed. A medic entered the chamber and checked for vital signs. At 6:24 p.m., Billy Leon Cruse was pronounced dead. The procedure had taken 22 minutes. In the witness room, Myrtha Busbin watched it happen. The woman who had waited 35 years, the woman who had sat through trial after sentencing after appeal after appeal, the woman who was 25 when her husband was killed and 60 when his killer was executed.

She watched until the end. When she emerged and stood before the cameras, her voice broke. “I sincerely apologize for what I have done.” Cruse’s final words had been unexpected. “I do find peace in that,” Busbin said. “That made me feel at peace. I can forgive him and move on. And then, it’s been a long, long 35 years. I knew I had to do this.

This was a mission that had to be done. It’s not about winning, and it’s not about me. It’s about justice for Danny, and Danny deserved it.” Alongside her stood Greg Kirk, a retired officer who had served with Danny Parrish in Fort Pierce. “Terrible,” Kirk said simply, “to have your buddy shot down like that.

” Jim Tedder, 75, the lead homicide investigator who had taken the call on the night of January 18th, 1991, was also there. “I still relive it, or portions of it, every single day,” he said. “There are competing truths in this story, and they do not erase each other.” Danny Parrish was a good officer, a devoted husband, a man who chose service and paid for it with his life on an ordinary Tuesday night.

He was 29 years old. His parents did not live to see this day. His father, Marion Parrish, died in October 2013. His mother, Faye Parrish, followed in October 2018. The widow he left behind spent 35 years carrying the weight of both her grief and her determination alone. Billy Corsey was a product of circumstances that no child should inherit, fetal alcohol damage, abandonment, poverty, neglect, and a system that repeatedly failed to intervene when the warning signs were visible.

He was 18 years old and functioning at a level far below his age. He made a decision in a moment of panic that no amount of understanding can excuse, and then he spent 35 years in a cell, growing older until the morning that he didn’t. Three of the seven Florida Supreme Court justices who reviewed his case believed he should not have been put to death.

Advocacy groups called his execution one chapter in what they described as the darkest period in Florida’s modern history of capital punishment. None of those arguments changed what happened in that execution chamber on March 3rd, 2026. Billy Leon Corsey was 53 years old when he died. He had spent more than half of his entire life on death row.

In the hours before his execution, he sent a message to the people who cared about him. He asked them to choose love, not anger, even toward those who would celebrate his death. Whether that was the statement of a man who had genuinely changed in 35 years, or simply the final words of someone who had run out of time, that is something only the people who knew him can answer.

What is not in dispute is this. On January 18th, 1991, a police officer named Danny Parrish pulled over a car for going the wrong way down a one-way street. He called in the plate. He did his job. He died before midnight. His widow finally came home from Florida State Prison on a Tuesday night in in 2026, and for the first time in 35 years, she said she felt something that resembled peace.

If you made it this far, I appreciate every single one of you. Cases like this one, where justice takes decades, where the legal system moves at a pace that outlives the people waiting for it, these are the stories that deserve to be told with accuracy and care. That is what this channel is built on.

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Was justice served? Or did 35 years make the word justice mean something different altogether? Thanks for watching. I will see you in the next one.