On September 10th, 2026, after spending 27 years on death row, Daniel Owen Conahan Jr. was executed by lethal injection in Florida. He was 72 years old, and the state put him to death for murdering one man. But nobody who worked this case ever believed it was just one. For years, bodies had been turning up in the woods between Northport and Fort Meyers.

 young men, most of them stripped, left in the same kind of spot, killed in the same kind of way. And the detectives who kept finding them were sure they were all looking at the work of a single man. The press would end up calling him the hog trail killer, but they only ever managed to prove it once. His name was Richard Montgomery.

 He was 21 years old, and what happened to him in those woods is exactly why they were so sure about all the rest. So, let me take you back to how it happened. Richard lived with his sister. He was easygoing, well-liked, and always a little short on money. And on the afternoon of April 16th, 1996, he was with a few friends when he mentioned, kind of offhand, that he was about to go make a couple hundred bucks.

 One of them asked him if it was legal, but Richard just smiled and didn’t answer. Here’s the thing his friends didn’t know. A few days earlier, Richard had told his mother that a man offered to pay him $200 to pose for some nude pictures. He wouldn’t say who, but in that same conversation, he mentioned a name.

 A new friend he had made, a nurse lived over in Puntaorta Isles. Daniel Conahan. A nice guy, Richard thought. That evening, sometime between 4:00 and 7, Richard got into a car and drove off to make his couple hundred bucks. And that was the last time anybody saw him alive. Now, here’s where Daniel was that same evening. At 7 minutes past 6, Daniel was standing at the checkout of a Walmart in Punta Gorda, paying with his credit card, and it’s worth slowing down on what he’s buying.

 Clothes line, Polaroid film, a pair of pliers, and a utility knife. Four things. No hesitation, nothing. 5 minutes later, an ATM camera around the corner picks him up, pulling out cash, calm as anything. Rope, a camera, something to cut with. All of it bought inside the same hour that Richard climbed into that car and disappeared. The next afternoon, two county workers were walking a thick patch of woods off Highway 41 when one of them looked down and saw a human skull lying in the dirt.

They called it in and deputies started searching. It didn’t take long. Under a sheet of carpet padding, they found the body of a young man stripped naked. There were marks around his neck, marks dug into his wrists, marks around his waist, and whoever did this had removed his j. The man was Richard. When the medical examiner worked out how he had died, one detail stopped everyone cold.

 The rope grooves were worn deep into the front of his throat and around his wrists, but they didn’t wrap all the way around to his back. They just stopped. And that told the examiner something specific. Richard hadn’t been lying down when this happened to him. He had been standing up, tied to a tree from the front, alive, while someone stood behind that tree and pulled.

A police dog worked the scene and went straight to a sabal palm a few feet from the body. One side of the trunk was scraped raw and flattened. That was the tree. And here’s the moment the case cracked open. Because when detectives saw how this had been done, a naked man tied to a tree and strangled in the middle of nowhere, one of them remembered a report.

 Something almost identical had come across a desk two years earlier, except that time the victim had lived. His name was Stanley Burton. Back in 1994, Stanley was in almost exactly the same spot Richard would later be in. Young, out of steady work, needing money, and Daniel found him, too. Same offer, right down to the dollar range.

 100, maybe 150, just to pose for some photos. Stanley said yes, and Daniel drove him out to a quiet dirt road, pulled a duffel bag out of the car, and walked him into the trees with a tarp and a Polaroid. Now, watch how slowly this man worked. For a while, it was just what he had promised. Daniel laid the tarp down and took his pictures.

 Then, he said he wanted some bondage shots and asked Stanley to step up close to a tree. He tore open a brand new package of clothesline, cut it into lengths, and started arranging it over Stanley’s body to make it look like a pose. And then he stepped around behind the tree. That’s when it stopped being a photo shoot. He yanked the rope tight.

He pulled Stanley’s hands back behind the trunk, wrapped the line around his legs, his chest, and then twice around his throat. And he started to pull. He kept pulling for 30 minutes. 30 minutes. Stanley kept wrenching his neck to one side just to keep his airway open. Daniel hit him in the head to make him stop fighting, but he didn’t stop fighting.

 And at one point, somewhere in the middle of it, Daniel actually paused and asked him a question. He asked Stanley why he wouldn’t just die. He never got an answer. Stanley would not stop struggling and eventually Daniel gave up, gathered his things, and walked back out of those woods like nothing had happened. Stanley got himself loose and made it to a hospital.

Hold on to that question, Daniel asked. Why won’t you die? Because two years later, on the same kind of tree in the same kind of woods, Richard Montgomery wouldn’t be able to make him ask it twice. Stanley had done everything right. He told the police exactly what happened, but his report sat in a drawer for 2 years while the bodies kept piling up.

 And what finally put Daniel’s name in front of the task force wasn’t the police work at all. It was another man who got away. His name was David Payton. One afternoon, a blue Mercury Capri pulled up next to him and the driver offered him a beer and a little money to come take some photos. The same pitch. And David got in. But out on a back road, the car slid into a mud hole and got stuck.

 And while the driver climbed out to push it free, David sat in that car and glanced into the back seat. There was a bag back there, and inside it, David could see rope, a tarp, and a knife. He did not wait to find out what they were for. The second the tires came loose from the mud, David slid over, threw the car into gear, and floored it, and left the driver standing alone in the dirt.

And then that driver did something almost too arrogant to believe. He walked to a phone, called the police, and reported his own car stolen. Think about that. He had just watched a victim escape with a back seat full of what he used on people. And his response was to call the cops. That call is what did it.

Because when officers ran the plate, the car came back to a nurse in Ponta Gorda named Daniel Conahan. David later picked him out of a photo lineup without hesitation and passed a polygraph doing it. They brought Daniel in and asked him point blank about the killings. He looked at them and denied all of it.

 But then he said something that would follow him all the way to the trial. I’ve had fantasies about the bondage and stuff, he told them, but I’ve not engaged in that. The fantasy he would admit to the bodies never. So they searched his house. And in the home of a mildmannered nurse, detectives found rope. They found cameras.

 And they found stained underwear. The pieces of a method sitting in his drawers. For the first time, the man in the woods had a name. Now with a name to work with, detectives could finally line up what they had. The attack on Stanley two years before and the murder of Richard. And once they put those two cases side by side, the whole thing stopped being a hunch and started becoming a wall Daniel couldn’t get around.

The fibers matched. A fleck of paint they had lifted off Richard’s body turned out to be a match for the paint on that Mercury Capri, the car that belonged to Daniel’s father, the one Daniel liked to borrow. The lab couldn’t tell the two samples apart. And then there was that Walmart run. The medical examiner said whoever removed Richard’s had done it cleanly with something extremely sharp close to a scalpel.

 The kind of blade it turns out you could pick up at a Walmart at 7 minutes past 6 on your way to meet him. While all this was coming together, they put Daniel under surveillance. An undercover deputy ended up sitting near him at a local park one afternoon and Daniel made him an offer.

 $7 to expose himself, 20 to let Daniel do more. The deputy brushed it off and left. But he came back the next day and this time Daniel raised the stakes. $150 he said to pose for some nude photographs. The same money, the same words, the exact pitch he had used to walk two other young men into the trees. They arrested him that summer.

 And when it finally came time to face what he had done in a courtroom, Daniel made a choice almost nobody expected. He waved off his right to a jury for the first part of the trial. He put his fate in the hands of one judge and let that judge decide whether he had murdered Richard Montgomery. On August 17th, 1999, Judge Donald Pelia said yes, guilty, firstdegree premeditated murder and kidnapping.

And here is the part that should make your blood boil. Daniel’s own lawyer stood up and argued this was not murder at all. that Richard’s death was just a game that had gone wrong. But the state did not blink. You do not buy a rope, a knife, and a pair of pliers and stop at an ATM on your way to a game.

 You buy those things because you already know how the night is going to end. Then came the part that decided whether he would live. And this time there was a jury in the room. And watch what they had to sit through. The medical examiner walked them through what strangling someone with a rope actually does to them.

 How you black out in a matter of seconds, but how making sure they’re dead takes so much longer than that because you have to keep the pressure on and hold it. She told them plainly that it is a terrifying way to go. Then they heard from a man who used to be Daniel’s partner, who got up on the stand and testified that Daniel had a fantasy he had carried for years.

tying men up in the woods. And Daniel, under oath, admitted it was true. His defense did what they could. His aunt called him kind and gentle, a man who nursed his dying mother. But none of that changed what the jury already knew he had done to Richard. They listened to all of it.

 Then they came back and voted 12 to nothing that Daniel Conahan should die. The judge agreed and that December the sentence was handed down. But like I said at the start, Richard was never the only name. All through the early 90s, from Northport down toward Fort Meyers, bodies kept coming out of those woods. Young men mostly, the kind of men who might say yes to easy cash from a stranger with a camera.

 The kind of men who could go missing for a good long while before anybody came looking. Hunters stumbled onto the first one in 1994. Then came another and another. Some had rope marks. Some were missing the same parts of themselves that Richard had been missing. And one of them had been left posed on his back in the shape of a cross with four stab wounds.

 The slashes on his feet told investigators he had tried to run first. Because the killer kept dumping them along these remote hunting trails, the newspapers gave him a name, the hog trail killer. Then years later in 2007, a surveyor walking a wooded lot in Fort Meyers looked down and saw two human skulls. They brought in cadaabver dogs.

 And by the time they were done, they had pulled eight sets of remains out of that one piece of ground. No clothes, no graves anyone had ever cared for. And Stanley Burton, the one who lived, had been attacked within a mile of that exact spot. Detectives were sure Daniel was behind it. All of it.

 They just never managed to build the kind of case on the others that they’d built on Richard. Some of those men took years just to get their names back through DNA. And four of the ones they found in Fort Meyers still don’t have names at all. So Daniel Conahan went to death row for one murder, dragging the shadow of a dozen more behind him.

 And for 27 years, he fought. He appealed. He filed motion after motion. He swore he was innocent in Richard’s case and in every other death anyone ever tried to put on him. And one court after another told him no, which makes what happened next land a certain way. When Governor Ron DeSantis finally signed his death warrant in August of 2026, Daniel still had a motion sitting in front of the court asking for more DNA testing along with a second claim the court later admitted it hadn’t even noticed was in the file.

 His was the 15th warrant to Santis signed that year in a state that had already shattered its own record the year before with 19 executions. The Florida Supreme Court turned down his request to slow it all down in a single line. It turned down his stay, too. Out of every justice on that court, exactly one would have stopped the clock. The rest of them let it run.

 And that is really where a case like this leaves you. For 27 years, Daniel Conahan asked the state of Florida for the things he never gave anyone else. Time testing the benefit of the doubt. Mercy. Stanley Burton asked him one question against a tree and got 30 minutes of rope for it. Richard Montgomery got a shopping trip for the tools and a scrap of carpet padding thrown over him in the woods.

 And the rest of those men in the woods never got a courtroom at all. Most of them never got justice. Four of them all these years later still don’t even have a name. Then on September 10th, 2026, Daniel’s final day came. That morning, he woke up at 5:30 a.m. And by every account, he gave them no trouble at all.

 No outburst, no struggle, no scene. For his last meal, he had chicken, a baked potato, corn, a soda, and a slice of pumpkin pie. And here is the part that tells you everything. On his last day on Earth, Daniel Conahan had no visitors, no family in the waiting room, no friends, nobody who knew him came to say goodbye. The man who had spent 27 years insisting he was innocent went to that chamber with no family there for him and no friend to sit with.

 And when the curtain to the death chamber at Florida State Prison rose that evening, there he was. Daniel was already strapped to the gurnie, the ivy line running into his arm, and a spiritual adviser knelt at his feet, quietly praying as the minutes ran down. The warden leaned in and asked him if he had any final statement.

 And this was the moment, wasn’t it? 27 years of swearing he was innocent, 27 years of appeals and motions and insisting they had the wrong man. All of it narrowing down to one last chance to say something. to the family still waiting, to the four men in the ground who never got their names back, to anyone. And what Daniel Conahan chose to say with the whole room listening was two words. No sir.

At 1 minute past 6, the drugs began to flow. For a little while, he panted, his body twitching against the straps until slowly he went quiet and stopped moving altogether. A few minutes later, the warden stepped up, took him by the shoulder, and shouted his name into the silence. Nothing came

 back. At 6:12 p.m., Daniel Conahan was pronounced dead. He was 72 years old. What do you think? Has justice been served? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.