Former police officer James Aaron Duckett had almost 38 years on death row to prove his innocence. He had the chance to test DNA evidence in 2004. He said no. For the next 22 years, he did nothing. But the moment Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed his death warrant in February 2026, suddenly James wanted that DNA test.

And it worked. On March 26th, 2026, 5 days before his scheduled execution, the Florida Supreme Court stopped everything. The DNA results came back inconclusive. The state asked the court to let the execution proceed, but the court said no. As of today, the man convicted of strangling and drowning an 11-year-old girl is still alive on death row.

From his cell on death watch, he wrote that he missed music, that being alone was draining. He wrote that Florida’s clemency system has become a joke. Here’s what he didn’t write about, though. On May 11th, 1987, he asked a store clerk the name and age of an 11-year-old girl, put her in his patrol car, and drove into the night.

 She was found the next morning in a lake less than a mile away, strangled and drowned. And that girl may not have been his only victim. Investigators later linked James to two other unsolved murders. This is what happened. Teresa McAbee was an 11-year-old fifth grader at Mascot Elementary. On the evening of May 11th, 1987, at around 10:00 p.m.

, she told her mother she needed a pencil to finish her homework. Her mother said no. She didn’t want her to leave the house that late, but Teresa said, “Mom, I won’t take but 5 minutes.” So, her mother let her go. She walked to a convenience store near her home. Minutes later, she left the store with a 16-year-old boy who had been doing laundry next door.

 The two walked over to the store’s dumpster and talked for about 20 minutes. That’s when James Duckett pulled up in his patrol car. James was 29 years old and just 7 months into his career as a police officer. He was the only cop on duty that night working a 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. shift. The entire town of Mascotte was his responsibility and his alone.

James went inside the store first and asked the clerk about the girl. “What’s her name? How old is she?” The clerk told him Teresa was between 10 and 13 years old. James said he was going to check on her, then walked outside toward the dumpster. According to James’ own testimony, he questioned the children and told Teresa to go home.

I said, “Listen, I said it’s getting close to 10:30. I said, “I want you to go straight home.” He said he reminded Teresa about the 10:30 p.m. curfew for minors. But when the boy’s uncle arrived at the scene, James and Teresa were still standing near the patrol car. James sent the uncle and the boy away, and once they were gone, he placed Teresa in the passenger seat of his patrol car, shut the door, walked around to the driver’s side, and drove away with her.

The uncle also testified that he never saw Teresa touch the hood of the patrol car. We’ll come back to that later. At around 11:00 p.m., Teresa’s mother walked to the convenience store looking for her daughter. The clerk told her that Officer James may have taken Teresa to the police station. Teresa’s mother and her sister spent the next hour driving around Mascotte.

 They didn’t see a single police car. So they drove to the Mascotte Police Station, but nobody was there. An 11-year-old girl was somewhere in the dark, and the only officer on duty was nowhere to be found. So they drove to the nearby Groveland Police Station and reported Teresa missing. Teresa’s mother then returned to the Mascot Station and waited.

15 to 20 minutes passed before James finally showed up. And when he did, he told her he had spoken with Teresa at the store, that she had been in his patrol car, and that he had told her to go home. Teresa’s mother filed a missing person report with James himself. After taking the report, James drove to Teresa’s home to get a photo.

At first, it seemed like he was taking initiative, trying to help move the search forward. He even called the police chief saying he had already made a flyer and didn’t need any assistance. But then, things started to feel off. He brought the flyer to the convenience store, only to tell the clerk not to post it, claiming it wasn’t a good picture.

 He said he would return with a better one, but he never came back. A recording of James’s radio traffic that night revealed something troubling. Between 10:50 p.m. and 12:10 a.m., there were no transmissions at all. Over an hour of complete silence during the exact window Teresa disappeared. But it gets worse. A clerk at another store later testified that while police usually drove by every 45 minutes to an hour, James had come by at 9:30 p.m.

 and didn’t return until he brought the flyer later that evening. He was supposed to be out on patrol. Where was he? The next morning, a fisherman made a grim discovery at Knight Lake, less than a mile from the convenience store. At first, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but when he alerted authorities, the police chief quickly confirmed it.

It was Teresa. The search was over. The medical examiner testified that Teresa had been sexually assaulted while she was still alive, then strangled and drowned. Teresa MacCabe was just 11 years old. She had never engaged in any sexual activity before that night. The investigation zeroed in on James immediately.

 He was the last person seen with Teresa. He was the only officer on patrol that night, and the circumstantial evidence kept piling up. A technician from the Sheriff’s Department examined the tire tracks found at the murder scene near Night Lake and noticed they were very unusual. While leaving the crime scene, he saw that the tracks left by a Mascotte police car appeared similar.

And an expert at trial confirmed it. The tires were Goodyear Eagle Mud and Snow tires, designed for northern driving, rarely seen in Florida. The local tire center had only received two sets of those tires by mistake during its 9 years in business. And these sets had been placed on the two Mascotte police cars.

Then there were the fingerprints. Both James’ and Teresa’s prints were found on the hood of his patrol car. Her prints showed she had been sitting backwards on the hood and had scooted up the car. I identified with Teresa Macchabee. She was here, here, here, and then she was moving up, and then finally there’s one completely turned sideways in this position here.

But James kept denying it. Sir, she was not down on the hood of my car. Nobody was sitting down at any time on the hood of my car. Are you telling us it’s not her fingerprints? >> Like I said, she was not sitting on my vehicle. Meanwhile, blood was found on Teresa’s underwear, and semen was discovered on her jeans.

But none of it was found in or around James’ patrol car. And then the most controversial piece of evidence, a single pubic hair found inside Teresa’s underwear. FBI Special Agent Michael Malone concluded there was a high degree of probability that the hair belonged to James. We’ll come back to Agent Malone because years later what investigators discovered about him would call this entire piece of evidence into question.

Before his arrest, James gave a statement denying he drove to the lake that night. He said Teresa was never on the hood of his patrol car. He claimed he stopped for coffee after the girl went home. But the prosecution wasn’t done. James was supposed to protect the people of Mascotte, Florida. That was his job.

That was the oath. But three young women came forward to testify about what he actually did with that badge while he was on duty as a police officer. All three were petite, just like Teresa. One testified that in early 1987, James had picked her up while she was looking for her boyfriend and while in the patrol car, placed his hand on her shoulder and tried to kiss her.

Another described something that happened on May 1st, 1987, just 10 days before Teresa was murdered. She was walking alone along the highway when a patrol car pulled up beside her. James offered her a ride and she got in. She probably thought, well, he’s a police officer. He’ll take me home. But instead of taking her where she needed to go, he drove her to an orange grove miles from anyone who could hear her.

Out there, alone in the dark with a uniformed officer, he placed his hand on her breast and tried to kiss her. A third woman testified that she had met James at remote locations on multiple occasions while he was on patrol. Each time she performed oral on him. Each time he was on duty, in uniform, in the patrol car that was supposed to be protecting the streets of Mascotte.

The prosecution revealed that this wasn’t a one-time lapse. This was how James operated. He used the badge, he used the uniform, and and he used the patrol car, the same car Teresa was last seen getting into. He found women and girls who were alone, drove them somewhere isolated, and did whatever he wanted. The only difference with Teresa is that she didn’t come back.

James was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. He was suspended from the police force on June 16th, 1987, and fired 3 days later. His career as a police officer had lasted exactly 7 months. On May 10th, 1988, it took the jury less than 90 minutes to find James guilty of sexual battery and first-degree murder.

And by a vote of 8 to 4, they recommended the death penalty. Circuit Judge Jerry Lockett sentenced James to death by electric chair for the murder and to life in prison with no parole for 25 years for the sexual battery. Now, remember FBI agent Michael Malone? Years after the trial, the Department of Justice investigated Malone for providing false testimonies in multiple cases.

Government reports described him as one of the most problematic analysts in the FBI laboratory, and that was not it. A retired detective, a former police chief, and the mayor of Mascot all publicly said they believed James was innocent. But then, that retired detective kept digging. And what Marshall Frank found changed his mind entirely.

On May 7th, 1986, an unidentified woman was found dead in a water-filled pit near Lakeland, Florida. She was last seen getting into a dark blue car. At the time, James owned a royal blue Buick Regal. Then, on September 19th, 1987, 4 months after Teresa’s murder, 14-year-old Jennifer Weldon disappeared after leaving a carnival near Lakeland 3 days before her 15th birthday.

Her body was found 2 weeks later in a rural part of Polk County. By then, James had been fired from the police force and was working night shifts at a phosphate mine. He drove the same route to work around the area where Jennifer’s body was found. Gasoline receipts placed James near the scene, and he had arrived for work 2 hours late, disheveled.

And then there was this. Jennifer had been carrying a green shopping bag and a stuffed toy when she disappeared. Later, James’ wife told investigators that her husband brought home a lime green shopping bag with a stuffed toy inside for their children. In 2003, Polk County authorities announced they intended to charge James with Jennifer Weldon’s murder if his death sentence was ever overturned.

But those charges were never filed. Marshall Frank, the detective who had once fought to free James, reversed course completely. He concluded James was guilty of killing Teresa McCabe and Jennifer Weldon. Do you think the death penalty was the right call here? Let us know in the comments. Children disappeared around the Duckett name, Teresa McCabe, possibly Jennifer Weldon.

And then, years later, another child vanished. This time from inside the family itself. James had a son named Joshua, who was just 3 years old when his father was sent to death row. Joshua grew up, married, and had a little boy named Trenton. On August 27th, 2006, 2-year-old Trenton vanished from his bedroom in Leesburg, Florida.

His mother, Melinda, claimed someone cut through the window screen. But investigators found Trenton’s toys and sonogram photos in a dumpster at the apartment complex. Melinda refused a polygraph, and she failed a voice stress test. And nobody besides Melinda had seen Trenton alive since the day before she reported him missing.

Two weeks later, CNN’s Nancy Grace grilled Melinda on live television. The next day, before the interview even aired, 21-year-old Melinda took her own life. Trenton Duckett has never been found. He would be 21 years old today. From his cell on death row, James kept photos of his grandson pinned to the wall.

 Investigators questioned him about the disappearance, but they found no connection. During his 38 years on death row, James filed appeal after appeal, but every single one was denied. The courts consistently ruled that even if the hair evidence was questionable, the tire tracks, the fingerprints, the radio silence, and the eyewitness testimony all pointed to one person.

In 2003, a judge granted James the chance to test a sample found on Teresa’s jeans. DNA testing that could have proven his innocence once and for all. But in 2004, James declined to have it tested. He let the deadline pass without filing a single motion. And for the next 22 years, he did nothing. On February 27th, 2026, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed James’s death warrant.

 The fifth death warrant he signed that year. In a piece he wrote from death watch, James described the moment the warrant arrived. He told friends on his wing that if a transport van came through the back gate, it would be for him. And at approximately 5:10 p.m., he watched two vans pull through the gate from his cell. Footsteps came down the hallway.

 The warden with several officers stopped at his cell. “It’s time. The governor has signed your warrant. James was stripped, searched, handcuffed, shackled, and transported to Q wing, death watch. He was placed in the third cell. In the first cell was Billy Kemper, days from being executed. In the second was Michael King, set for March 17th.

 Both have since been put to death. His legal team called on a secure line as soon as he arrived. He was allowed to call his brother Donnie and tell his family he was okay. Then the waiting began. 30 days. An officer was stationed in front of his cell 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, logging everything he did. James wrote that he missed emailing.

Messages from family and friends came through the prison system, printed out, and brought to his cell. James wrote that he missed music, that the silence was constant, that being alone like this was draining. He wrote that Florida’s clemency system has become a joke. He said that no matter how a person changes through education, faith, or simply growing older, none of it seems to matter.

He wrote, “I am not now who I was then.” And that he waited, never knowing if or when my time would come. Until it did. Teresa McAbee’s mother didn’t get letters from her daughter. She got a body pulled from a lake. But James missed his music. James’ execution was scheduled for March 31st, 2026 at 6:00 p.m.

 at Florida State Prison. And suddenly, after 22 years of silence, James wanted that DNA test. He had refused it back in 2004, but now he wanted it anyway. He waited 38 years and then filed for it the moment the death warrant landed. The results came back inconclusive. They did not prove he was innocent. The attorney general asked the court to lift the stay and let the execution happen.

But six of the seven justices said no. The death warrant expires on April 7th, 2026. If the court does not act before then, the governor will have to sign a new one. As of right now, James Aaron Duckett is 68 years old. He has spent 37 years, 9 months, and 1 day on death row. And he is still alive. Do you think the court made the right call or should the execution have gone ahead? Let us know in the comments.

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