Florida man scheduled for execution in connection to Hog Trail Murders

A Florida man was scheduled for execution on Thursday after being convicted of one of a series of suspected killings that became known as the Hog Trail Murders in the 1990s.Daniel Owen Conahan Jr, 72, was sentenced to die by lethal injection for the 1996 kidnapping and strangling of 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.Florida has carried out more than half of the 24 total executions in the US this year, under Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor who leaves office in January. Conahan Jr’s sentence will make him the state’s 15th person executed this year.Under DeSantis, Florida carried out 19 executions in 2025, setting a state record since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.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 has 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 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.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 wouldn’t exonerate him.A final appeal remains pending before the US supreme court.