TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Ron DeSantis signed his 10th death warrant of 2026 on Tuesday, this time for Dusty Ray Spencer, who has spent more than three decades on death row for murdering his wife in Orange County.
Spencer, 74, is scheduled to die by lethal injection on June 25 at Florida State Prison in Stark, according to the warrant. The window to carry out the sentence runs from noon June 25 through noon July 2.
According to court records, Spencer had a violent history with his wife, Karen, before stabbing her to death in the backyard of their home on Jan. 18, 1992.
A little more than a month earlier, records state Spencer choked, hit and threatened to kill his wife after questioning her about withdrawing money from a bank for their painting business. Spencer was jailed, but his wife later requested he spend the holidays at home.
On Jan. 4, her teenage son intervened when he awoke to find Dusty Spencer hitting Karen Spencer with a clothes iron.
Dusty Spencer fled, only to return less than two weeks later, when her son found his mother being hit by a brick in their backyard. The son grabbed a rifle from his mother’s bedroom, but it misfired. As Karen Spencer begged for the attack to stop, her head was slammed against a concrete wall, and Dusty Spencer threatened the teenager with a knife.
When police arrived, Karen Spencer was dead.
“She had been stabbed several times in the chest, had cuts on her face and arms, and suffered blunt force trauma to the back of her head,” records state.
Spencer was charged with first-degree murder, along with aggravated assault, attempt to commit murder in the first degree and aggravated battery. Spencer was sentenced to death on Dec. 21, 1992, and resentenced to death on Jan. 18, 1995.
In the resentencing order, Circuit Judge Belvin Perry noted that Karen Spencer was “alive and conscious” throughout the beating.
“The stark terror she must have felt (knowing the prior threats by the Defendant to take her life) as her life slipped away from her; the humiliation as the Defendant lifted her clothing exposing her private parts to her son, while she was laying there bleeding, in pain, pleading for the Defendant to stop as he bashed her head against a concrete wall, is beyond comprehension,” Perry wrote. “The victim’s acute awareness of the Defendant’s continued assault in the face of her pleas makes this an especially cruel murder.”
The latest death warrant follows the execution of Richard Knight, 47, last Thursday for the 2000 murder of his cousin’s girlfriend, Odessia Stephens, and her 4-year-old daughter, Hanessia Mullings.
Knight was the seventh execution of the year for Florida, which set a modern era record with 19 executions in 2025. Florida accounted for 40% of the executions conducted in the U.S. last year, according to Amnesty International.
The next execution scheduled is for Andrew Lukehart, 53, on June 2.
Lukehart was convicted of first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse for the February 1996 death of 5-month-old Gabrielle Hanshaw, his girlfriend’s daughter, in Duval County.
By Jim Turner, News Service of Florida
