Florida executed James Dennis Ford on Thursday for the savage murders of 2 young parents in front of their toddler daughter in 1997.
Ford, 64, was executed by lethal injection at the Florida State Prison in Raiford and pronounced dead at 6:19 p.m. ET, becoming the 1st inmate to be put to death by the state in 2025 and the 4th in the United States this year.
In the leadup to the execution, his lawyers argued that the death penalty should not have been applied to Ford because he has a mental developmental age 20 years younger than his actual age.
Kimberly Malnory's mother, Linda Griffin, was devastated by her daughter's death.
“She was my life, my laughter and my tears,” she said during Ford's 1999 trial, according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Griffin died in a car accident in 2016.
What happened to Greg and Kimberly Malnory?
On April 6, 1997, court records say that Ford invited his co-worker Gregory Malnory and Malnory's wife Kimberly on a fishing trip to the South Florida Sod Farm in Punta Gorda, a southwestern Florida city just north of Fort Myers. The Malnorys brought along their 23-month-old daughter Maranda.
Police believe Ford first attacked Gregory, shooting him in the back of the head, bludgeoning him and slitting his throat. Kimberly, who was injured during the initial attack, managed to save Maranda by strapping her in the backseat of the couple's truck. But court records say Ford returned, then raped and beat her before shooting her dead.
About 18 hours later, an employee of the sod farm found the Malnorys' bodies. Maranda survived but the 23-month-old was dehydrated, full of insect bites and covered in her mother's blood.
Ford told police that he went fishing with the family and that they were alive when he left them to go hunting, records show.
Witnesses told investigators that they had seen Ford with blood on his face, hands, and clothes and that he had large scratches on his body. Prosecutors say Ford's DNA and gun connected him to the crime scene.
Maranda Joellin Malnory spoke to the local news station, Gulf Coast News, about the impact the murder of her parents left on her life.
“I told one of my grandmas the other day you grieve the people you knew,” she told the outlet. “But I grieve what could have been.”
She told the news station that she was 13 years old when she finally learned how her parents died. For her, that was a hard thing to stomach and has been hard to relive.
“Technically, my worst enemy is the person who did this,” she said. “But I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”
Maranda dedicated a Facebook post to her parents' lives on Thursday, ending it by saying: "I love you forever mommy and daddy!"
Who were the Malnorys?
Greg’s co-workers at the South Florida Sod Farm remembered the couple fondly.
“He was an all-American good ol’ boy. He loved to hunt and fish,” Wiley McCall, Greg’s supervisor told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. “He was a model employee, always on time.”
Joseph Shackleford, Greg's childhood friend, said he knew the Malnorys well and described Kimberly as a selfless person. “She was the kind of person that would give you the shirt off her back. Everybody loved her,” he said.
During the trial against Ford in 1999, Connie Ankney described her son Greg as a loving husband a loyal friend and a dedicated father. “Greg will never get to walk his daughter down the aisle when she gets married,” she said.
Dee Parkinson, Kimberly’s stepmother since the age of 6, described her stepdaughter as having "a vivacious, bubbly, talkative personality."
"I liked to make her laugh," Parkinson said. "It was so easy and fun. She'd laugh until she could hardly breathe."
She added that their friends and family would never get over their deaths. "Words cannot express how much we miss them both."
Who was James Dennis Ford?
Ford had no significant criminal record before the murders, and friends and family said he never showed signs of violence. Ford had a troubled childhood with an alcoholic father and a mother who left when he was 14, court records say.
Rodney McCray, a close friend of the family, said that the last few years of his life, Ford's father was "drinking just about around the clock,” according to court records.
Still, Ford was close with his dad. He dropped out of school because he preferred to spend time with his dad at his job as a cemetery caretaker in Arcadia. Ford and his father shared a "very close" bond, Ford's first wife said, remarking that they were "closer than any 2 people she had ever known in her entire life.”
Ford was in his early 20s when his dad died at the age of 52.
“He was devastated that he had lost his best friend,” Ford's defense attorneys wrote in court records. “There were times when Paige Ford [his first wife] would find him missing at night, and she would find him at the cemetery lying on his father’s grave.”
The loss compounded Ford's decline. He had begun drinking in his late teens and eventually worked his way up to 24 beers in a day, records say.
Ford becomes the 1st condemned inmate to be put to death this year in Florida and the 107th overall since the state resumed capital punishment on May 25, 2979. Only Texas (592), Oklahoma (127), and Virginia (113) have carried out more executions since the US Supreme Court allowed executions to resume after a 4-year hiatus in its July 2, 1976 Gregg v Georgia decision.
Ford becomes the 4th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1,611th overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977.
Source: USA Today, Staffa, Rick Halperin, Staff, February 14, 2025
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
