A Fort Myers man convicted of killing a Bonita Springs teen in 1976 and sentenced to death recently learned his execution date after 49 years on death row.
Harold Gene Lucas, then 24, shot and killed his 16-year-old girlfriend, Anthia Jill Piper in Bonita Springs on August 14, 1976. Lucas was 24 when he was charged in Piper’s shooting death at her parents’ home.
What other Southwest Floridians are awaiting possibly the same fate on the state’s death row?
There are six other inmates on death row from Lee County and one from Collier.
Anton Krawczuk
In the fall of 1990, Anton Krawczuk robbed and murdered David Staker in the man’s Lee County home with his accomplice Billy Poirier, according to court documents.
The pair choked Staker and then Krawczuk poured drain cleaner down the man’s throat.
The two then stole several items from Staker’s house including two TV sets, video recording equipment, five rifles, among other things, which they placed in Staker’s pickup truck, where they then put his body, the documents showed.
After selling some of the stolen items, the pair transferred the body to Poirier’s car and abandoned Staker’s truck, driving the body out to a rural location Krawczuk has scouted before and dumped it there where it was found by Charlotte County Sheriff’s deputies on Sept. 13, 1990.
When the man who bought the stolen goods identified Krawczuk and Poirier as the seller, the pair was arrested and Krawczuk confessed.
Poirier was sentenced to 35 years for second-degree murder and 15 years for robbery.
During his trial Krawczuk pleaded guilty and requested a death sentence for himself, refusing to let his lawyers present mitigating evidence to the court in an attempt to avoid the death penalty.
He told the court he would rather be sentenced to death than life in prison, and he was sentenced to death in 1992.
He later made appeals to the court saying he had ineffective counsel because his lawyer did not present mitigating evidence during his trial. These appeals were denied after the court found that Krawczuk had instructed his lawyer not to present the evidence.
All of his appeals since have been denied.
Joshua Nelson
Joshua Nelson, then 18, and Keith Brennan, then 16, lured Tommy Owens into a back street in Cape Coral on March 10, 1995, where they got him to get out of his car, according to the court documents.
They then hit him multiple times with a baseball bat then stabbing him multiple times with a box cutter while continuing to hit him with the bat, while his hands and feet were tied up.
Owens pleaded for his life and told them they could take his car, but the pair thought they needed to kill him to avoid being caught.
After continuing to stab and hit Owens, the two dragged his body into nearby bushes where he was left to die.
They then fled Cape Coral in the car, picking up two girls, Tina and Misty Porth, on the way to Daytona Beach where they stopped briefly before heading to New Jersey, where they were eventually arrested on April 2, 1995.
Nelson then confessed to the murder. He was found guilty of first-degree murder and robbery with a deadly weapon, and a jury unanimously recommended death to which he was sentenced.
Brennan was also sentenced to death, but that sentence was turned into a life sentence when the Florida Supreme Court prohibited anyone from being sentenced to death if they were under 18 at the time of the crime.
Kevin Foster
The alleged Lords Of Chaos group leader, a self-proclaimed militia group with the mission of creating chaos in Lee County, was convicted of murdering Riverdale High School band teacher Mark Schwebes in 1996, according to the court documents.
The other people involved in the crime, all members of the Lords of Chaos, pleaded guilty and testified against Foster.
Two of the co-defendants were sentenced to life in prison and one was sentenced to 32 years.
Schwebes caught the group planning to vandalize Riverdale High School and said he was going to report them the next day, so the group planned to kill him.
They found his address and showed up at his house that night, with Foster shooting him twice and killing him when he answered the door.
Foster was found guilty and sentenced to death.
Mark Sievers
Mark Sievers, a Bonita Springs man, was sentenced to death in 2020 for orchestrating the June 2015 murder of his wife, a well-known doctor, Teresa Sievers, according to the court documents.
Sievers hired a friend, Curtis Wayne Wright, to murder his wife, who he said was planning on divorcing him and taking the kids.
Sievers planned a family trip to the East Coast at the end of June to make sure the kids were out of the house when the murder happened.
Teresa returned home early, with Sievers and the kids planning to stay three extra days while the murder took place, and make it look like Teresa had walked in on a robbery.
Wright subcontracted Jimmy Rodgers to help with the murder and planned to share the $100,000 in life insurance proceeds with him in return.
They waited for Teresa to get home from the airport, but she arrived earlier than expected and the murder was not as clean as expected.
The two men ended up beating her to death with a hammer, making it an unlikely robbery gone wrong scene due to the brutality.
Rodgers was sentenced to life in prison in 2019, and Wright is serving 25 years for their roles in the murder.
Sievers was found guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder, and was subsequently sentenced to death after a unanimous jury recommendation.
Joseph Zieler
Joseph Zieler was sentenced to death in 2023 for the murders of an 11-year-old girl and her babysitter in a Cape Coral apartment in 1990.
Robin Cornell and her mother, Jan Cornell lived in a Cape Coral condominium, and shortly before the murders a friend, Lisa Story moved into the spare bedroom to share living expenses.
On May 9, 1990, Jan Cornell went to her now-husband’s house to watch a basketball game while the other two stayed home.
Jan Cornell accidentally fell asleep at her boyfriend’s house, waking up at 4 a.m., and rushing home to get ready for work.
When she arrived home, she found the bodies of Story and her daughter, who had been sexually battered and suffocated.
Law enforcement was unable to find the killer for decades until Zieler’s DNA was collected as part of another case, and matched the DNA found at the crime scene of the 1990 killings.
Zieler was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in 2023.
Wade Wilson
Maybe one of the most notorious killers in Southwest Florida, Wade Wilson was the subject of a recent Netflix true-crime series, “Worst Ex Ever” that featured Wilson.
Wilson was convicted of murdering two women in Cape Coral on the night of Oct. 7, 2019. Wilson met his first victim, 35-year-old Kristine Melton, at Buddah Live, a bar in Fort Myers.
Melton, her friend and Wilson headed back to another person’s apartment after the bar closed, staying for several hours before heading back to Melton’s Cape Coral apartment, where Wilson later strangled her to death after the friend left.
Wilson then stole Melton’s car and headed to his girlfriend’s Fort Myers business, and tried to force her into the stolen car, attacking her, but she got away and called the police.
Shortly after, Wilson saw 43-year-old Diane Ruiz walking along a street in Cape Coral, on her way to her 10 a.m. shift at the Moose Lodge in Cape Coral, where she worked as a bartender.
Wilson asked her for directions, luring her into the car.
When she tried to get out, Wilson beat and strangled her before pushing her out of the car and running over her ten to 20 times.
Her body was found in a field several days later. And, after the murders, Wilson called his father confessing to the crimes. He was arrested on Oct. 8, 2019, in an unoccupied house he had broken into.
He was charged with two counts of first-degree murder, battery, grand theft auto, burglary and petty theft.
A jury found him guilty on all six counts in a June 2024 trial, and he was sentenced to death for both murder charges.
Mesac Damas
Damas is the only inmate on Florida’s death row from Collier County. He was convicted of slitting the throats of his wife and five children in September 2009 in their North Naples townhouse before fleeing to Haiti.
He was sentenced to death for all six first-degree murder charges in 2017, an outcome he said he wanted.
Damas’ guilt was never in question as he had confessed to multiple people and told the court the possibility of divorce and losing custody of his children turned him insane, prompting him to murder them while in the throes of mental illness.
The family of Guerline Dieu Damas and her five children, the killer’s victims, Michzach, 9, Marven, 6, Maven, 5, Megan, 3, and Morgan, 1, hugged each other when the death sentences were read.
When will these Southwest Florida killers be executed?
The execution dates of each of these killers is unknown, with the death penalty process usually spanning decades as inmates file appeal after appeal, but with the record pace of executions in Florida over the past year, they could meet their end more quickly than expected in the past.
In 2025, Florida executed 19 people, more than any other state that year, and a record for Florida.
And, this year, the state is on course to break that record, executing 12 people so far in 2026, and scheduled to execute two more in the coming month, William Frances Silvia on Aug. 18 and Lucas on Sept. 1, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
You can reach Naples Daily News reporter Alexa Ryan at Alexa.Ryan@naplesnews.com. Follow her on X @AlexaRyan_ or on Instagram @alexaryanreports.
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This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: How many SWFL killers are on death row? Crimes, execution dates
Reporting by Alexa Ryan, Stacey Henson and Tayeba Hussein, Fort Myers News-Press & Naples Daily News / Fort Myers News-Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Alexa Ryan, Stacey Henson and Tayeba Hussein, Fort Myers News-Press & Naples Daily News | USA TODAY Network
