Editor’s Note: This feature includes graphic details of violence that some may find disturbing. Discretion is advised.
Allen Lee Davis was the last person executed by electric chair in Florida.
Davis, 54, who weighed 344 pounds and was nicknamed “Tiny,” screamed in pain as blood spread across his shirt during the electrocution on July 8, 1999.
The governor’s office (Jeb Bush at the time) said the blood came from a nosebleed and wasn’t caused by the method of execution, but the gruesome photos that became public were enough to stir a cry for change in how Florida’s death sentences were carried out.
GRAPHIC WARNING: Click here to see the photos released after Davis' execution
The state has used lethal injection since. (Inmates can still request the electric chair.)
While Davis’ execution was historic for Florida, we want to tell the story of the Jacksonville case that landed him on Death Row in the first place.
(NOTE: The following narrative is compiled from previous news reports, court documents, archive footage, obituaries and online databases. Links to the source material are provided where possible.)
Weiler family
On a balmy Tuesday evening in May 1982, 37-year-old Nancy Weiler and her daughters, Kristina Leigh and Katherine Rene, were preparing for some big changes in their upscale Jacksonville home.
The girls’ father, John Weiler, was in Pittsburgh. The Westinghouse executive was being reassigned, which meant an upcoming move to Pennsylvania for the whole family.
A sold sign already marked the yard of their one-story, ranch-style home on a canal off the Intracoastal Waterway.
Nancy, who was the corresponding secretary of the PTA at her children’s school, was three months pregnant with the couple’s third child, likely wondering if she’d be raising a third girl or a little boy.
Her two girls shared her soft, dark eyes and wide smile. But fifth-grader Kristina (Kristy) had long, soft blonde hair, while 5-year-old Katherine (Kathy) sported a short, brown pixie haircut, closer to her mom’s dark feathered bob.
No doubt Kristy and her Kathy were buzzing that Tuesday evening over the next day’s big milestone. Kristy would be turning 10.
Perhaps there were plans for one last birthday party at their Shipwreck Drive home, or maybe with John out of town, the family planned to celebrate simply.
But that celebration never came.
By sunset, Nancy, Kristy and Kathy would be dead, brutally murdered by the son of their next-door neighbors.
Prelude to murder
John spoke with Nancy from Pittsburgh at 5 p.m. that night. It was the last conversation he would have with his wife.
Next door, the Weilers’ neighbors, Donald Davis and his wife, headed out for a night of bowling. The Davis’ son, Allen, had called earlier, asking if he could come over to their house while they were gone.
Donald said yes.
When the couple left, Donald’s .357 Ruger Black Hawk pistol was still sitting on top of the refrigerator. He’d bought the six-cylinder revolver in 1970 but had never fired it. The gun had been on top of the fridge for a week or two, waiting for Donald to return it because of a safety recall.
Instead, it would be fired for the first — and last — time that night.
Before he showed up at his father’s house in the fashionable Holiday Harbors neighborhood, Allen Davis told his friend Richard Padon that he was out of a job. Allen, then 37, was a welder who last worked at the Jacksonville Shipyards.
He told Padon he was thinking about breaking into a home in his father’s exclusive neighborhood. It wouldn’t be his first robbery. He’d already been convicted of holding up someone making a night deposit at a bank. And he was once caught with a gun and a stocking mask, staking out a home to rob.
But to get to his father’s neighborhood, Allen needed a ride.
Padon agreed to drop him off and pick him up later. They got to the Davis house around 7 p.m.
When John Weiler called his home again at 7:28 p.m., no one answered.
What happened between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Shipwreck Drive that night would later be revealed by police investigation, what Davis told his lawyer -- and by his victims’ autopsies.
The crime
Davis, who was on parole, came prepared. He’d brought a length of rope.
But he didn’t have a weapon.
He grabbed the gun sitting on top of his father’s refrigerator and then made his way next door to the Weiler house. He knew his father’s neighbors because he’d done handywork at their home. He knew John traveled for work and probably wouldn’t be there.
Not knowing what (or who) was coming, Nancy was getting dinner ready. The stove was on, and carrots and kitchen utensils were on the counter. The table was already set, and the TV was on in the family room.
Suddenly, her neighbor’s son was in her home.
Davis tried to talk to Nancy and the children after he surprised them.
She ordered him to get out of her house and told her children to run.
Nancy and her daughters ended up in the master bedroom. Whether they ran there for safety or were ordered there at gunpoint by Davis is unclear.
Davis later told his lawyer that “something snapped” after he was in the house.
In the bedroom, Davis attacked Nancy, hitting her more than 25 times in the face and head with his father’s gun. When he was finished brutalizing her, Nancy’s face was nearly unrecognizable.
Kristy and Kathy were crying and screaming.
Davis had hit Nancy so hard that the gun’s trigger guard, wooden grips and the metal frame of its handle broke. But the revolver still worked, Davis learned, when he turned it on Kristy.
Davis had used the rope he’d brought to tie the 9-year-old’s hands behind her back. He shot her twice in the face.
Her sister Kathy turned and ran.
She didn’t get far.
Davis shot the 5-year-old in the back, and she fell in the hallway. https://www.chicagotribune.com/1999/07/14/who-weeps-for-the-blood-of-the-weiler-family/
Davis left the murdered mother and her children where they lay and looked around the house for anything he could easily take.
He left with some jewelry and a 35-millimeter Nikon camera. The price of three lives.
It was about 8 p.m. Only 90 minutes had passed since he’d first asked his friend for a ride.
An hour later, Davis called Padon to pick him up.
When Davis got in Padon’s car, he had three paper bags. In one was a Nikon camera. Davis told his friend that he’d stolen the items from a house.
It’s possible Padon didn’t notice the blood on Davis’ shirt and boots. That blood would later be identified (by 1980s scientific standards) as Nancy Weiler’s.
The aftermath
The next morning -- what would have been Kristy’s 10th birthday -- a neighbor whose children carpooled with the Weilers was surprised when he didn’t get an answer at the house.
He was worried enough that he called police.
Officers found Nancy, Kristy and Kathy where Davis had left them.
The stove and TV were still on. The table was still set for dinner.
Police said nothing looked out of place — until they went toward the master bedroom in the back of the house.
They called John in Pittsburgh to break the horrific news.
Westinghouse sent him back to Jacksonville on a corporate jet.
NOTE: John Weiler did not respond to requests from News4JAX to participate in this story.
He buried his wife and their daughters together on a plot in West Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana. A poem Kristy wrote shortly before her death is inscribed in her own handwriting on a stone marker under the name Weiler.
“Life is Wonderful”
By Kristy Weiler
Life is such a wonderful thing
It is full of spirit and joy
When you start to understand life, you know it’s not a toy.
Justice
It took police only two days to charge Davis in the murders.
Channel 4 footage from the crime scene captured Davis speaking with investigators outside the home the next day — as Nancy, Kristy and Kathy were wheeled out of the home on stretchers covered in red blankets.
Archive footage also shows Davis in the back of a police car that morning.
Investigators learned Davis had been spotted near the Weiler home around 8 p.m. the night of the killings by three people, one of whom thought he was carrying a gun.
Davis failed a lie detector test.
His father told police about his missing gun, which he’d realized was gone the day after the murders.
Donald Davis gave police a box of ammunition that had been used to load five shots into the revolver. Donald said he kept the chamber empty for safety.
Five shots were fired in the Weiler home, and Donald’s box of bullets was later matched to the bullet fragments found in the house.
Police found rope in Allen Davis’ truck that was matched to the cord used to tie Kristy’s hands.
Sixteen days after the killings, a grand jury indicted Allen Davis on three counts of first-degree murder.
Davis requested a change of venue because of pre-trial publicity, but the court decided to wait to see if a Jacksonville jury could be seated. Jury selection began Jan. 31, 1983, and the trial lasted four days, from Feb. 1 to Feb. 4, 1983.
The jury convicted Davis of all three counts and recommended the death penalty for each.
The court agreed, handing Davis three death sentences.
Execution
It would take more than 16 years for Davis’ sentence to be carried out. His numerous appeals failed, and he was strapped into the electric chair on July 8, 1999.
He was just shy of his 55th birthday.
While Nancy, Kristy and Kathy’s last meal remained uneaten, Davis was served a lobster tail, fried potatoes, a half-pound of fried shrimp, six ounces of fried clam strips, half a loaf of garlic bread and 32 ounces of A&W root beer.
Davis was brought into the death chamber in a wheelchair and helped into the electric chair shortly after 7 a.m. He offered no last words.
John Weiler, who was 55 at the time, watched the execution. He told reporters that he made eye contact with Davis before they put the hood over the killer’s head.
“He didn’t show an ounce of remorse,” Weiler said in a news conference after the execution. “He knew who I was. He didn’t care. Not a bit.”
After a strap was wrapped tightly across Davis’ mouth, he let out two muffled screams.
The chair being used for Davis’ execution was new, replacing “Old Sparky.” It would be used for the first — and last — time that day.
According to witnesses, after the chair was activated, sending thousands of volts through Davis, he clinched his fists and jerked back, then blood appeared on his white shirt, spreading to about the size of a dinner plate.
A spokesperson for the governor’s office said despite the way it looked, the blood came only from Davis’ nose, not from his mouth or chest. He had been taking blood thinners for a medical condition.
The gruesome, bloody photos of Davis in the electric chair were the final straw for those who had long called for the execution method to be ended. It hasn’t been used again in Florida.
But on the day of Davis’ execution, John Weiler urged the public to remember the true victims in the case.
He called his family’s murders barbaric and pointed to a possible motive besides robbery for Davis, who had a history of child molestation.
Weiler told reporters that Davis admitted that a prime motive that day was “to rape and kill my daughter Kristina, 9, then to murder my wife and younger daughter [Katherine, 5]. A secondary motive was to rob my residence.”
Knowing Davis was out of prison on parole when his family was killed, Weiler said Davis should “have been permanently caged” before May 1982.
“The execution today was a legal, moral and righteous one,” Weiler said. “I can assure you, God approves.”
