JUST EXECUTED: He Stabbed A Mother And Her 4-Year-Old Daughter, Florida Executed Him 26 Years Later
The man who killed a Coral Springs woman and her 4-year-old child 26 years ago was set to be executed by lethal injection at any moment now.
May 21st, 2026, 6:00 in the evening. Florida State Prison, Raiford, Florida.
The room is cold and quiet. A single gurney sits in the center of the death chamber. Straps hang from its sides, waiting. Behind a thick pane of glass, witnesses take their seats: victims’ family members, state officials, journalists, and defense attorneys. Nobody speaks. Nobody moves. All eyes are fixed on one man.
His name is Richard Knight. He is 47 years old. He is Florida’s seventh execution of 2026, a number that has already drawn outrage from human rights organizations around the world. But here is what makes tonight different from any other execution: somewhere in Washington D.C., at this very moment, a final appeal is sitting before the United States Supreme Court. His attorneys are fighting for his life. The clock is ticking, and the state is not waiting.
Twenty-six years ago, in a quiet home in Coral Springs, Florida, a 21-year-old woman was stabbed 21 times. Her 4-year-old daughter woke up that night and never saw morning. But here is the detail that will stop you cold: the knife broke mid-attack. Most people would have stopped. Richard Knight did not. He walked away, found a second knife, and came back. What kind of rage does that take?
Before we get to that death chamber tonight, what happened inside that Coral Springs home in June 2000 is almost impossible to believe. This is the story of Odessia Stephens, her daughter Hanacia, and the night one man’s rage destroyed an entire family.
The Victims: A Family Destroyed
You really need to know who was lost, because this story is not just about a crime. It is about a life. Two lives, and a third that never even got the chance to begin.
Her name was Odessia Stephens. She was 21 years old. She lived in Coral Springs, Broward County, Florida—a quiet suburban community just northwest of Fort Lauderdale. By all accounts, Odessia was the kind of person who made a room feel warmer just by being in it. Relatives who took the stand during court proceedings described her in simple, powerful words: loving, hardworking, devoted.
She was in a relationship with a man named Hans Mullings, and together they were building something real: a home, a family, a future. Their daughter was 4-year-old Hanacia Mullings, nicknamed “Nessie” by the people who loved her. Family members said Odessia absolutely doted on that little girl. Hanacia was her world. Anyone who saw them together could see it.
The three of them—Odessia, Hans, and little Hanacia—shared a home in Coral Springs. It was not a perfect life, but it was theirs, and they were working to make it better every single day. Hans worked the night shift. That meant most evenings, Odessia was home alone with Hanacia. She was the one who tucked her daughter in, the one who kept the house running while Hans was away.
What the family did not know, what none of them could have predicted, was that Odessia was also 6 weeks pregnant at the time of her death. That detail came from the autopsy and is confirmed in court records. Three lives were taken that night in Coral Springs. Not two—three.
At Knight’s sentencing, Hans Mullings stood before the court and said what every grieving person in that room was feeling. His words were raw and unfiltered:
“He deserves to die for what he’s done. I just wish he died in a graphic way. They suffered a lot and he won’t. He’s just going to be put to sleep and he’s gone.”
Odessia Stephens was not just a victim. She was a mother, a partner, a daughter—a woman who fought to protect her home and her child with everything she had. And she paid for it with her life.
The Perpetrator: The Enemy Within
Now, let’s talk about Richard Knight. Because before he was the man strapped to that gurney in Raiford, he was something else entirely. He was family.
Richard Knight was born around 1978 or 1979 in the Broward County area of Florida. He was 47 years old at the time of his scheduled execution. And here is the first thing you need to understand about him: he was not a stranger who broke into that Coral Springs home. He was Hans Mullings’ cousin.
That means Odessia Stephens opened her home to him. She and Hans took him in. They gave him a roof over his head, food on the table, and a place to sleep. By June 2000, Knight had no stable home of his own, no independent household, and no steady foundation to stand on. He was entirely dependent on the generosity of his cousin’s family.
According to advocacy organizations, including the Florida Association for the Death Penalty and the Catholic Mobilizing Network, Richard Knight’s childhood was marked by severe and prolonged sexual abuse. They also allege he developed serious mental health conditions and possible neurological impairment as a result of that trauma.
Here is what makes that significant: those claims were never presented to the jury that sentenced him to death. They were raised only in post-conviction proceedings, years after the verdict. Advocates call that a fundamental failure of the system. Whether you agree or not, the jury made a life-or-death decision without ever hearing that side of his story.
There is no public record of Knight ever having a spouse or children of his own. What court records do show is this: the arguments between Knight and Odessia were not occasional. They were frequent. They were escalating, and others in the household were aware of them. Those who knew the household said the tension between Richard and Odessia had been building for weeks. What no one knew was just how far he was willing to go.
The Night of the Murders: June 2000
By the time June 2000 arrived, the tension inside that Coral Springs home had become impossible to ignore. Richard Knight had been living with Odessia, Hans, and little Hanacia for an extended period in the early months of that year. From the beginning, it was not easy.
Court records confirm that Knight and Odessia argued frequently, specifically about his presence in the home. This was not a one-time disagreement that got out of hand. It was a pattern, a chronic, recurring conflict that kept coming back like a wound that would not heal. And it was getting worse.
Hans worked the night shift. That meant evening after evening, Odessia was alone in that house with her 4-year-old daughter and with Richard Knight. No buffer, no backup—just a young mother trying to hold her household together while managing a situation that had long since worn out its welcome.
Odessia had reached her limit. She made a decision: Knight had to go. Not eventually, not soon. The next morning.
That night, Hans left for work as usual. The house settled into its nighttime quiet. Hanacia was home. Knight was home. And Odessia delivered her ultimatum clearly and directly: he needed to move out in the morning. That was it. No threats. No cruelty. Just a woman drawing a firm and reasonable line in her own home.
Court records describe what happened next in one word: rage.
Not an argument. Not pushback. Not a slammed door or a raised voice. Immediate, explosive rage. Think about that for a moment. A young mother. Her own home. A simple, reasonable request. That was the trigger. Something so ordinary. Something so human. And it became the last conversation Odessia Stephens would ever have. She simply told him it was time to go.
What Richard Knight did next would shock an entire community and send him to death row for the next 26 years.
The Attack
In many capital murder cases, there is a web of people to untangle: accomplices, planners, someone who drove the car or made the call. A conspiracy that investigators have to piece together one thread at a time. This is not one of those cases.
Richard Knight acted alone. There were no co-conspirators. No hired hands. No elaborate plan mapped out in advance. But that does not mean there was no premeditation. And this is where the story gets even more disturbing.
Knight begins stabbing Odessia repeatedly, violently. But Odessia does not simply fall. She fights back. The autopsy confirms it: defensive wounds on both hands. She raised her hands to protect herself. She struggled. She refused to give up without a fight.
Then, the knife breaks.
Most people, even in the grip of anger, would stop at that point. The weapon is gone. The moment has passed. Knight does not stop. He steps away from Odessia—who is bleeding, wounded, crawling across the floor toward the living room—and he goes to find a second knife. He finds one. He comes back.
Court records show he returns to Odessia in the living room and continues the attack. When it is finally over, the autopsy tells the full story: 21 stab wounds, and signs of strangulation on her body as well. Twenty-one stab wounds, a broken knife, and then he went back for another one. Prosecutors pointed to that moment as proof of deliberate, continued intent. This was not a man who lost control for a few seconds. This was a man who made a choice, twice. The jury also convicted Knight of sexual battery, a finding that added yet another dimension to the violence of that night.
But the night is not over.
Somewhere in that house, a little girl wakes up. Four-year-old Hanacia Mullings. Nessie. She is barely old enough to understand what is happening around her. She is old enough only to be frightened. Court records state that Knight then turns on the child. He stabs her five times. She also shows signs of strangulation. A 4-year-old girl in her own home, stabbed five times. There are no words adequate enough for that.
The Aftermath and Investigation
Hans Mullings finishes his night shift and comes home. What he walks into is beyond description. His girlfriend, his daughter—gone. The home they were building together destroyed in a single night of violence. He calls the authorities.
Investigators arrive at the scene. They begin to process what they are looking at: the blood, the wounds, the broken knife, the evidence of a struggle that was fierce and desperate and ultimately one-sided. The investigation into the murders of Odessia Stephens and Hanacia Mullings has begun.
And Richard Knight is still out there.
The quiet neighborhood of Coral Springs woke up to a horror it had not seen coming. Neighbors who had gone to sleep on an ordinary summer night opened their doors to police tape and flashing lights. A community was shaken to its core.
This is one of the most troubling facts of this entire case: Knight was not arrested that night. He was not arrested the next week. He was not arrested that month. Richard Knight walked free for more than 14 months after the murders. He was not apprehended until August 2001, over a year after Odessia and Hanacia were killed. For Hans Mullings and the rest of the family, that meant living every single day with the weight of what happened while the man responsible was still out there.
Meanwhile, investigators were quietly and methodically building their case. They were gathering evidence, interviewing witnesses, and following every thread they could find. The crime scene told a brutal story. Broward County investigators began the painstaking work of processing every inch of that home. DNA evidence was collected. It would become one of the most critical pieces of the prosecution’s eventual case—a direct forensic link between Richard Knight and the crime scene.
There was a complication, however. An unidentified fingerprint was found on one of the knives at the scene. Knight’s defense team would later seize on that detail, arguing in post-conviction appeals that it pointed to the possibility of another perpetrator. The Florida Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the fingerprint had been known about and properly addressed during Knight’s original trial; it was not new evidence and did not change the outcome.
The deeper challenge for investigators was this: there was no surviving adult witness from inside that home. The prosecution would have to reconstruct the entire night from physical evidence alone.
That is, until Knight made a critical mistake.
After his eventual arrest in August 2001, Knight was held at the Broward County Jail. While there, he confessed the killings to a fellow inmate. That inmate agreed to testify. Suddenly, investigators had something more powerful than forensics. They had Knight’s own words. He was charged with two counts of first-degree murder, sexual battery, and armed burglary. The charges reflected the full scope of what happened inside that home.
The Trial and Decades of Appeals
The case went to trial in Broward County, Florida. The prosecution came prepared. They laid out their evidence methodically and without hesitation: DNA forensics placing Knight at the crime scene. The broken knife and the second knife recovered from the home. The autopsy findings. The jailhouse confession.
In 2006, Richard Knight was convicted on all counts. The jury deliberated and came back unanimous. They recommended the death penalty for both murders. A judge imposed consecutive death sentences—one for Odessia, one for Hanacia. The court formally described the murders using the legal language reserved for Florida’s most extreme cases: the killings were labeled heinous, atrocious, and cruel.
But the legal fight was far from over. Post-conviction appeals began almost immediately and would stretch across nearly two decades. Knight’s attorneys argued ineffective assistance of counsel. They returned to the fingerprint argument. They challenged Florida’s lethal injection protocol, specifically a procedure that allows executioners to cut into an inmate’s body without anesthesia to place an IV line, known as a central venous cutdown. They also challenged Knight’s death sentence based on a 2016 United States Supreme Court ruling that struck down Florida’s judge sentencing system. Florida’s courts disagreed, citing a 2002 cutoff date that excluded Knight’s case.
Richard Knight would spend approximately 20 years on death row at Florida State Prison. Twenty years of appeals. Twenty years of filings in state courts, federal courts, and the United States Supreme Court. Every available legal avenue was pursued, and one by one, every door closed.
The Execution
On April 22nd, 2026, Governor Ron DeSantis signed Richard Knight’s death warrant. The execution was set for May 21st, 2026—just 29 days away.
Knight’s attorneys made one final push. They filed an application to the United States Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of his death sentence and the lethal injection protocol. Then, on the very morning of the execution, something happened in Tennessee that made Knight’s attorneys move even faster. Tennessee was attempting to execute an inmate named Tony Carruthers, but officials could not find a suitable vein for the required backup line. The execution was called off amid reports that Carruthers had been in agony.
Knight’s attorneys immediately filed an emergency stay with the Florida Supreme Court, arguing that Tennessee and Florida share similar execution protocols and that a similar botched attempt could happen in Florida that same evening.
The Florida Supreme Court denied the request. The United States Supreme Court rejected Knight’s final appeal without comment. On April 27th, 2026, the Florida Supreme Court denied both a pending petition and an emergency stay of execution. The machine was moving, and it was not stopping.
May 21st, 2026. 6:00 in the evening. Florida State Prison, Raiford.
The curtain of the death chamber went up at exactly 6:00. Richard Knight was already strapped to the gurney, arms extended, an IV line in place. Witnesses sat behind the glass. The warden asked Knight if he wished to make a final statement.
Knight’s last words were brief and composed: “I want to give thanks to Yahweh, who is the most high.”
He declined a last meal. The three-drug injection began immediately after his statement: a sedative, a paralytic, a drug to stop the heart. Knight closed his eyes. He barely moved.
After approximately 10 minutes, a medic entered the room. At 6:13 in the evening, Richard Knight was pronounced dead. Florida’s seventh execution of 2026 was complete.
Notably, as the execution was carried out, Governor DeSantis was not in Florida. He was in Washington, D.C., delivering a keynote address at a Federalist Society event. There was no open telephone line between his office and the execution chamber, as required by law. Richard Knight had prayed for grace. The governor who signed his death warrant was at a podium.
