When 11-year-old Teresa Mae McAbee was kidnapped, raped, strangled and drowned in the small Florida city of Mascotte nearly 40 years ago, a surprising suspect emerged: a rookie cop namedJames Duckett.
The one undisputed fact of the case is that Duckett was on duty on May 11, 1987, when he encountered Teresa at a convenience store. The little girl had walked there to buy a pencil.
Duckett maintainsthat he told Teresa that she needed to go home, and that's the last time he saw her. Prosecutors argue that Duckett was a monster in disguise who abused the badge and brutally raped and killed Teresa before dumping her body in a lake.
Jurors accepted the state's narrative, convicting Duckett of murder largely based on circumstantial evidence and recommending the death penalty.
Now nearly 40 years later, DNA in the case stands to either save Duckett's life or seal his fate.
Duckett, 68, had been set to die by lethal injection at a Florida state prison on Tuesday, March 31. But with less than a week to go, the Florida Supreme Court issued a rare stay of execution pending the results of the DNA testing. And on Monday, March 30, the court upheld the stay, effectively stopping any chance that the execution would happen as scheduled.
Though the execution is on hold for now, it's not on hold for good.
As Duckett awaits his fate, USA TODAY is looking deeper at the case, the recent court actions and why the DNA hasn't been tested until now.
What happened to Teresa Mae McAbee?
On May 11, 1987, the fates of 29-year-old rookie cop James "Jimmy" Duckett and 11-year-old Teresa Mae McAbee became intertwined.
Teresa had walked to her local Circle K convenience store to buy a pencil around 10 p.m. in Mascotte, Florida, a rural city just west of Orlando that had fewer than 2,000 residents at the time.
Duckett was on patrol for the Mascotte Police Department. The married father of two sons, who had been on the force for seven months, was making his regular rounds and stopped at Circle K, spotting Teresa talking with a 16-year-old boy outside the store, according to court records.
Duckett has always maintained that he talked to Teresa and the teen, telling each to go home. But the boy and his uncle later said that Duckett put Teresa in his patrol car and drove off.
Teresa's mother arrived at the Circle K around 11 p.m. looking for her daughter. The store clerk told her that Teresa may have gone with Duckett, and the mother began searching the area. When she couldn't find Teresa, she contacted police and later filed a missing persons report with Duckett, the only officer on patrol at the time.
The next morning, less than a mile from the Circle K, a fisherman found Teresa's body in Knight Lake. A medical examiner later found that she had been raped, strangled and was still alive when her attacker drowned her. Bodily fluid, presumably from the killer, was found on her underwear − DNA that was saved.
Duckett became a suspect when a sheriff's investigator, Sgt. Chuck Johnson, thought the officer was acting nervous at the scene of the body recovery, "was not curious about the death," and told a "rehearsed-sounding story" about his interaction with Teresa and the events of the night before. Duckett was charged with murder five months later.
What happened at James Duckett's trial?
At trial, prosecutors called James Duckett a "cold-blooded killer" and said that unlike him, Teresa didn't have a judge or jury.
"She had a police officer named Duckett pick her up and put her in the car and take her down to Knight Lake, and he sentenced her to be raped, and he sentenced her for threatening to tell on him and taking away his power, his almighty power of the badge," they told jurors, according to court records. "She threatened to tell when she was hurt … so he sentenced her to die. He served as executioner."
Among the state's evidence: a pubic hair found on Teresa that an FBI analyst said was consistent with Duckett's, Teresa's fingerprints on the hood of Duckett's car, tire tracks at the scene of the murder that police say matched Duckett's patrol car, and a key witness who testified that she saw Duckett drive off with a small person in his patrol car shortly after he spoke with Teresa.
Prosecutors also put three young women on the stand who testified that they were underage when Duckett sexually harassed or abused them.
Duckett's attorneys have been working to poke holes in the trial evidence, saying that Teresa's fingerprints were on the car hood because she sat on it at the Circle K, that a second hair found on the girl's body was inconsistent with Duckett's, and that Duckett's tire tracks were at the scene because drove there after the body was found.
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They also argue that the state's key witness agreed to give bogus testimony in exchange for getting out of jail early and that there was no evidence to corroborate the stories of the three young women who testified that Duckett had been inappropriate with them.
Duckett's attorneys also argue that there were far likelier suspects in the case, including the teen Teresa was talking to before she vanished and various men who were boyfriends or friends of her mother's.
"For reasons beyond his control, James Duckett was chosen as the suspect, and other more likely suspects were allowed to walk away," his attorneys argue in court records. "Rather than find the real perpetrator, the state chose to proceed with a circumstantial evidence case against Mr. Duckett."
Just before he was sentenced to death, Duckett pleaded with the judge in the case to spare his life.
"I did not do this," he said, according to court records. "When the person who did this repeats it, I want to see the face of the person telling the victim's mother, father, sister or brother, 'I am sorry. We thought we had the right one before.'"
An execution scheduled, then stopped
After spending nearly 40 years on death row, James Duckett's execution was scheduled for March 31 after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed his death warrant last month.
Duckett's attorneys fought to stop the execution so that DNA testing could be conducted on the semen collected from the crime scene. On March 26, the Florida Supreme Court agreed to issue a stay of execution pending results from the testing.
The results, which came in on March 27, were inconclusive, possibly because so little of the DNA collected was left to be analyzed. But Duckett's attorneys had argued that a different lab would be more likely to extract useable results.
The Florida Supreme Court could have lifted its stay because the initial results were inconclusive. Instead,the court decided to uphold it on March 30in a 6-1 ruling, stopping Duckett's execution for now.
Duckett's attorney, Mary Wells, told USA TODAY that the stay was "a significant step toward preventing the irreversible harm that will result if the State of Florida executes an innocent man."
"DNA testing ... has the potential to conclusively establish Mr. Duckett's innocence," she said. "When the outcome of the results is whether a man lives or dies, there is no valid scientific basis for prohibiting a second examiner to analyze the results."
The state's Attorney General's Officehad argued in court thatthe stay should be lifted because the DNA results were inconclusive and that Duckett sought DNA testing far too late.
"Duckett waited until after a warrant was signed to seek DNA testing for a murder he committed over 38 years ago where he knew about the (DNA) slide at least since the relinquishment in 2003," they wrote. "But he did not seek DNA testing as soon as the science was sufficiently advanced. A truly innocent man would have sought ... DNA testing as soon as it was available."
More:Tennessee plans rare execution of a woman. She's fighting back.
What happens now?
In its orderupholding the execution stay, the Florida Supreme Court ordered Lake County Circuit Judge Brian Welke to provide the higher court with a status report by the end of day on April 2
Welke is expected to decide whether there should be further testing of the DNA. Welke is the judge who initially granted Duckett's request to test the DNA.
In his dissenting opinion to uphold the stay, Florida Supreme Court Justice Adam Tanenbaum wrote that Duckett's DNA fight amounts to "a Hail Mary pass" and that given the inconclusive test results, there is "nothing further for (Welke) to do at this point."
"Indeed, as has been the case for decades, there is no exonerating evidence at all to justify any further delay in the defendant's execution, which has been a long time coming," Tanenbaum wrote. "Justice for the victim and her family has been delayed far too long. The defendant's time is up."
Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime reporter who covers cold case investigations and the death penalty for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Killer cop or the wrong man? DNA halts James Duckett's execution
