BARTOW, Fla. (AP) - In July, a Polk County jury unanimously agreed that Cheyanne Jessie should be executed for brutally killing her 6-year-old daughter, Meredith.
Should Circuit Judge Jalal Harb follow that recommendation, 29-year-old Jessie would become the first woman to be condemned to death for a Polk County murder, but she wouldn’t be the first Polk County woman on Florida’s death row.
That would be Virginia Larzelere.
Those who grew up with her in Lake Wales might not have recognized the name emblazoned across headlines nearly 30 years ago. To them, she was Gail Antley - one of William “PeeWee” Antley’s four daughters and a 1970 graduate of Lake Wales High School.
But that was then.
Since 1993, she’s been inmate #842556, the moniker assigned to her after a Volusia County jury found her guilty of masterminding the execution-style killing of her husband, Norman, 39, who was gunned down in the hallway of his Edgewater dental practice in March 1991. Prosecutors argued she wanted to cash in on his $2.1 million in life insurance. To this day, Larzelere maintains she’s innocent.
Larzelere, now 66, spent 15 years on death row before the Florida Supreme Court overturned her death sentence in 2008 on grounds that her lawyer, the late Jack Wilkins of Bartow, failed to adequately prepare her case during her trial’s sentencing phase. The state’s high court sent the case back to Volusia County, and lawyers there agreed to a life sentence without presenting any testimony.
But those 15 years, spent in part in #2201, Quad 2, T Dorm at Lowell Correctional Institution near Ocala, remain burned in her memory.
“During my death row stay at Lowell, the entire compound was locked down anytime that I exited the cell,” she said in a recent email to The Ledger, “and I was accompanied by six of the largest and meanest staff available. There were days without communication from anyone.
“The following people will peer into the cell window once a week: the warden, the chaplain, the colonel,” she wrote. “A mental health specialist would come once a week to ask if you are suicidal or homicidal, and then tells you to do the best you can.”
Larzelere said she’s survived by immersing herself in her education, receiving her college degree in education and working with other women - 183 to date - who’ve received their high school equivalency diplomas.
“The sterling record I have is because I choose to live life in a manner that allows me to atone for all the years of my greedy, narcissistic, promiscuous ways,” she wrote.
Through gain time and good behavior, she’s scheduled for release in August 2034. She’ll be 81 and have served half her life behind bars.
At her trial in 1992, prosecutors accused her of soliciting her 18-year-old son, Jason, to don black clothing and a ski mask and kill his stepfather for $200,000. The gunman fired through a closed door in the dental office, spraying buckshot through the wood and into the dentist’s chest. He died while being airlifted to the hospital.
The break in the case came in May 1991, two months after the shooting, when an 18-year-old acquaintance of the Larzeleres called police with the location of the gun. He told them he’d encased it in concrete, at Virginia Larzelere’s request, and dumped it in a creek about an hour north of Daytona, and that’s where authorities found it, according to published reports.
Prosecutors gave him immunity in exchange for his testimony. In the meantime, investigators were discovering details about a troubled marriage and Virginia Larzelere’s promiscuous past, including the suspicious circumstances of her first husband’s death.
Larzelere was convicted in August 1992. Seven months later, a different jury acquitted her son on murder charges. Two months after that, Larzelere was sentenced to die.
Like Larzelere, most of the women who once faced execution now are serving life sentences, according to state records.
Since 1926, judges across the state have sentenced 17 women to death. Juries found them guilty of killing their husbands, their employers, people they were trying to scam and officers trying to arrest them.
Two of them were executed in 1998 and 2002 - Judy Buenoano, 54, known as the Black Widow, for poisoning her husband, and serial killer Aileen Wuornos, 46, for killing a Clearwater businessman who had picked her up along Interstate 75. Buenoaono’s execution in 1998 marked the first time a woman had died in the state’s electric chair. So far, it’s been the last. Wuornos died by lethal injection.
Three condemned women remain there still, representing less than 1% of the 341 inmates on death row as of Sept. 26. Among the rest, five were released decades ago, two died in prison and five are serving life sentences, prison records show.
Of the 17 sentenced to death, seven were found guilty of killing their husbands and another two were convicted of killing law enforcement officers.
Cheyanne Jessie of Lakeland would be the first on death row for killing her own child, if that’s to be her fate. During her three-week trial in July, prosecutors alleged that she killed her daughter and her father because she saw them as impediments to her burgeoning relationship with Matthew Cody Munroe. She perceived that her father, Mark Weekly, was critical of Munroe, according to testimony, and Munroe had little patience with the bickering between Meredith and her mother.
According to trial testimony, Jessie shot each of them in the head, stuffed their bodies into separate plastic storage bins and hid them in a shed behind a neighbor’s house along Drane Field Road, where her father lived.
Their bodies were found two weeks later, in early August 2015, after friends of her father told Jessie to report him missing or they would. She eventually confessed to killing them and hiding their bodies, according to trial testimony. Authorities found a multicolored blanket, pink stuffed dolphin and a bag containing 10 pennies with Meredith, who was wearing a pink dress and pink and black shirt.
Jurors deliberated over two days before convicting Jessie of first-degree murder and tampering with evidence. The same jurors recommended life for her father’s murder, but death for Meredith’s.
“The vote was actually 10 for life and two for death on Mark,” juror Carol-Lee Gosline said after the trial. “We took into account that Mark had defensive wounds and, according to Cheyanne, they had an argument about Cheyanne wanting to give Meredith away - to him, to adoption - and he told her she was ’just like her mother.’ He pushed her buttons with such a hateful remark, considering how abusive her mother was and how she had let others abuse her mentally, physically and sexually.
“But Meredith was asleep - innocent and peaceful,” Gosline said, “in her pretty pink dress, and was stabbed in her neck four times and shot.”
She said all the jurors questioned how Jessie could have carried out the killings by herself. No one else has been charged in connection with the murders.
For juror Tami Babb, the decision to recommend the death penalty for Meredith’s murder came more easily than she expected.
“That little girl was so helpless and couldn’t defend herself,” she said. “I was always against the death penalty, but I’d never been in this position before. In this case, it fit the crime. I’m confident we made the right decision.”
Jessie will be back in court Oct. 10, when lawyers for both sides will present additional testimony regarding sentencing for Meredith’s murder. While Harb, the judge, must give great weight to the jury’s recommendation, the final decision on sentencing lies with him.
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Information from: The Ledger (Lakeland, Fla.), http://www.theledger.com
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