USA - Florida. Daniel Conahan, 72, White, was executed on September 10

September 10, 2026 - Florida. Daniel Conahan, 72, White, was executed on September 10.

A suspected serial killer.

Conahan, dubbed the Hog Trail Killer, was convicted of one murder, but has been linked to a dozen murders, mostly of transients seeking employment and gay men in the Charlotte County, Florida, between 1993 and 1996. Conahan has also been named the prime suspect in the additional murders of eight men, collectively referred to as the Fort Myers Eight, who were discovered in a mass grave site in 2007.

Daniel Owen Conahan Jr, 72, was sentenced to death for the 1996 kidnapping and strangling of 21-year-old Richard Allen Montgomery. Authorities found Montgomery’s mutilated body in a wooded south-west Florida area where the remains of at least six people have been found over a three-year span.

Conahan died at 6.12pm ET, state officials said.

Conahan was arrested in July 1996 after local and state law enforcement officials spent more than two years investigating a series of homicides in which mutilated and decomposing bodies were discovered in a wooded area of Charlotte county, north of Fort Myers.

The deaths eventually were categorized as the Hog Trail Murders because of the swampy, wooded locations where the bodies were found. The case has been featured many times over the past three decades on true-crime media content.

Conahan, who maintained his innocence, was previously identified by authorities as a person of interest in the other deaths, but he was never charged. He argued that the evidence against him was circumstantial.

The first body was found by hunters in February 1994, followed by at least five more bodies over the next three years. Most of the remains were severely decomposed, but investigators believed Montgomery had been dead for less than a day when he was found.

Investigators eventually determined that the killer was targeting men who were unhoused.

Detectives started looking into Conahan in 1996 after a man in prison for stealing Conahan’s car, Stanley Burden, claimed that Conahan had lured him to a remote area and offered to pay him to pose for nude photos. The man said he drove off in the car after seeing a knife.

Conahan waived his right to a jury trial and was convicted by a judge of murder and kidnapping in August 1999.

Conahan's defense attorneys have been arguing in recent weeks for a stay of execution, saying that no DNA has ever tied their client to Montgomery's crime scene and that further testing on hair, cigarette butts and fingernail clippings would prove his innocence.

"Law enforcement wanted Mr. Conahan to be the true killer, and made him so," Conahan's attorneys argued in a recent filing in the Florida Supreme Court. "A reasonable probability exists that DNA testing using current technology, which can detect minute traces of DNA, would reveal the true perpetrator."

They also said that Burden has since admitted to testifying against Conahan in order to get a chance at parole on his own prison sentence for raping a 12-year-old boy in Ohio. (Burden pleaded guilty to the rape.) They also say that Burden lied on the stand about his motivations to testify.

The Florida supreme court last week denied Conahan’s final appeals, including one requesting additional testing on DNA collected from the victim.

The petition said he has been requesting DNA testing since March 2025 of evidence collected at the scene and from Montgomery’s body to “conclusively establish that he is not responsible for the death”.

Within 24 hours, the court ruled that proving Montgomery had DNA on his body from someone other than Conahan would not exonerate him.

The US supreme court on Thursday denied his final appeal.

Conahan Jr is the 15th person executed in Florida this year, the 139th in total since 1979, when the state resumed imposing the death penalty, the 25th person to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1,679th overall since the nation resumed executions in 1977.

Florida has carried out more than half of the 25 total executions in the US this year, under Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor who leaves office in January. Under DeSantis, Florida carried out 19 executions in 2025, setting a state record since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

In 2025, 11 states executed 47 inmates, the most in any single year since 2009. So far this year, 25 inmates have been executed, with another 13 on the calendar through December, though more are expected to be added.