Florida executes former cop James Duckett for 1987 murder of Teresa McAbee as second killing remains officially unsolved

Nearly four decades after Teresa McAbee, 11, was found sexually assaulted, strangled, and drowned in Mascotte, Florida, the state executed the man convicted of her murder. James Duckett, 68, a former Mascotte Police Department officer, died by lethal injection on July 28 at Florida State Prison in Raiford. The execution drew families of two girls authorities believe he killed.

The mechanism of the case was almost perversely simple. On the night McAbee disappeared in May 1987, Duckett was the only officer working the streets. She was last seen in his patrol car. When her body turned up, fingerprint and DNA evidence linked him directly, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said at a July 30 news conference. Duckett was fired a month after her disappearance and arrested shortly after.

What complicates the account is the second case. On September 19, 1987, about three months after McAbee's murder, 14-year-old Jeanifer Weldon disappeared in Polk County, roughly an hour south of Mascotte. She had spent the day in Tampa and bought a stuffed kitten she carried home in a green plastic bag. Around 9 p.m. she left friends to walk the roughly two miles to her house. She never arrived.

Thirteen days of searching turned up nothing. A phosphate miner eventually pulled over to look at a pair of shoes by the roadside and found Weldon's skeletonized remains behind tall grass and a berm in a wooded area. She had been strangled. Investigators believe she was raped. It was three days before her 15th birthday.

Why no conviction followed

Duckett became a suspect in Weldon's death. The circumstantial evidence Judd described was pointed: Duckett left for a new mining job five hours early that night, drove the highway past the stretch where Weldon would have been walking, and arrived two hours late claiming car trouble. His hands were clean. The next day he brought home a stuffed kitten in a green plastic bag for his children. There were scratch marks on his back. He told his wife he had crawled under a barbed wire fence at work.

Polk County investigators judged the evidence too circumstantial to prosecute safely alongside the McAbee conviction. After Duckett was sentenced to death for McAbee's murder, they stopped pushing for a second conviction. Judd was direct about the reasoning: building the Weldon case risked generating additional defense arguments, complicating the process, and delaying the execution. Investigators hoped Duckett would confess before his death. He declined to speak.

For Amy Weldon, Jeanifer's younger sister, the outcome bought what clarity it could. "I'm confident the right person was executed," she told reporters. "I don't like how long it took, but I am confident 100% that the right person died."

Judd was less measured. "The problem is we didn't put him to death soon enough," he said. Duckett had spent 38 years in appeals.