Florida’s ‘Hog Trail Killer’, his suspected links to serial killings
As Daniel Conahan Jr. faces execution for the 1996 murder of a man, questions remain about his links to unsolved killings across Southwest Florida.
Florida has executed a suspected serial killer dubbed “the Hog Trail Killer” 30 years after the discovery of a naked man who had been strangled in the woods set off a complex investigation that’s ongoing to this day.
The state executed Daniel Conahan Jr., 72, by lethal injection on Thursday, Sept. 10, for the murder of 21-year-old Richard Allen Montgomery. Montgomery’s nude and brutalized body was found on April 17, 1996, in a remote, wooded area of Port Charlotte, an unincorporated community halfway between Naples and Sarasota on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Montgomery’s genitalia had been cut off.
Though Conahan was only tried for Montgomery’s murder, investigators suspect he’s responsible for at least 12 more killings, perhaps more.
Conahan, who was pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m. ET, has always denied killing Montgomery or anyone else. His attorneys have been arguing for a reprieve in recent weeks, saying that Conahan was convicted largely based on circumstantial evidence and that further DNA testing would prove Conahan’s innocence.
“Just because I have been found guilty in a court of law doesn’t mean I am guilty,” Conahan told the judge at his sentencing hearing in 1999, according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, part of the USA TODAY Network.
Conahan is the 25th person to be executed in the U.S. this year and the 15th in Florida, which has been putting more inmates to death than any other state since the beginning of last year. Conahan’s execution is among eight planned for September in what’s expected to be the busiest month for the death penalty since 2010.
Here’s what to know about Conahan’s execution, the Hog Trail Killings and who else is being executed this month.
At least 13 murders tied to the Hog Trail Killer
The Hog Trail Killer’s approach was devious.
He’d target young white men who needed some cash. He’d offer them a couple hundred bucks to pose nude in bondage photos. And once he got them where he wanted them − isolated and tied up in the woods − he would put them through living hell before killing them.
Prosecutors called it “a dark fantasy” come to life along Florida’s Gulf Coast in the 1990s.
On Feb. 1, 1994, two hunters following buzzards came upon a man’s naked, partially decomposed body in the woods of Port Charlotte. The body, which wasn’t identified until 2021, was that of a drifter from Lowell, Massachusetts, named Gerald “Jerry” Lombard.
Lombard’s body was the first discovery of many that would be connected to the Hog Trail Killer, named for the game trails in the area. The next development came two years later in January 1996, when a dog found a human skull in North Port, about 5 miles northwest of where Lombard was killed. Police responding to the scene found more human remains.
As detectives worked the case, utility workers came across a human skull in a remote, heavily wooded area of Port Charlotte on April 17, 1996. Police then found even more human remains, including one body that had been killed so recently, authorities checked for a pulse, according to archived news reports.
Montgomery’s body was among at least five victims. All of them were naked, mutilated and left in desolate spots.
“It was a death which occurred solely for the pleasure of the defendant,” prosecutor Bob Lee told jurors about Montgomery’s killing in 1999, according to an archived story in The News-Press, part of the USA TODAY Network.
In March 2007, long after Conahan’s dramatic trial for Montgomery’s murder, an ecologist surveyor came across some remains in a wooded area of Fort Myers, about 30 miles southeast of where the earlier bodies were discovered.
The find turned into what Florida authorities say is among the state’s largest ever excavations of human remains. Crime scene units from across the state came together to eventually uncover the bodies of eight men, all within a 200-yard radius, according to reporting at the time by the News-Press.
Police struggled to identify the remains, which were all skeletal, and they still don’t know who they all are. No clothes were found at the site, indicating they had all been naked, and there was no evidence they had been stabbed or shot, indicating they could have been strangled. Several of those whose identities had been determined were known to have transient lifestyles.
Police later identified Conahan as a “person of interest” in the so-called “Fort Myers 8” killings, and have named no other suspects. Authorities have identified four of the eight bodies through DNA technology:
- Robert Ronald “Bobbie” Soden, who was 30 when his family last heard from him in 1996.
- Jonathan Tihay, 25 or 26, a drifter without a solid job.
- Johnathan Blevins, 26, lived a transient lifestyle before he went missing in 1995.
- Eric Kohler, 21, lived with his grandparents when he disappeared in 1995.
Attack survivor led police to Daniel Conahan
A man claiming to be an attack survivor led a police task force investigating the five earlier murders to Conahan, who at the time was a 42-year-old out-of-work nurse.
On Aug. 15, 1994, Stanley Burden told police that he had agreed to go to a wooded spot with Conahan after Conahan offered him up to $150 to pose for nude bondage photos.
Burden told investigators that Conahan took several photos of him before pulling out a rope and tying him to a tree. While Burden was tied up, he said Conahan tried to sexually assault him and then began strangling him with rope.
After a half hour, Burden said Conahan gave up on strangling him and left him tied to the tree. Burden said he then freed himself and reported the attack to police.
Police then found the crime scene, including a tree with markings that corroborated Burden’s injuries and story, according to court records.
Police then began an undercover investigation of Conahan and later arrested him on murder charges for Montgomery’s killing.
An arrest warrant affidavit reported on by the Tampa Bay Times in 1996 says that Conahan was discharged from the Navy under threat of a court-martial for several counts of sodomy and physical assault in 1978. Conahan was accused of trying to lure servicemen away from the Naval Training Center in Great Lakes, Illinois, to perform sex acts, and of hitting one sailor on the head with a rock when he rejected his advances, the newspaper reported, citing the affidavit.
Burden testified about what happened to him during Conahan’s murder trial. At one point, he pulled down his shirt collar to show jurors scars that he had on his neck that he said were from the attack.
Defense attorneys question Burden’s motives, push for DNA testing
Conahan’s defense attorneys have been arguing in recent weeks for a stay of execution, saying that no DNA has ever tied their client to Montgomery’s crime scene and that further testing on hair, cigarette butts and fingernail clippings would prove his innocence.
“Law enforcement wanted Mr. Conahan to be the true killer, and made him so,” Conahan’s attorneys argued in a recent filing in the Florida Supreme Court. “A reasonable probability exists that DNA testing using current technology, which can detect minute traces of DNA, would reveal the true perpetrator.”
They also said that Burden has since admitted to testifying against Conahan in order to get a chance at parole on his own prison sentence for raping a 12-year-old boy in Ohio. (Burden pleaded guilty to the rape.) They also say that Burden lied on the stand about his motivations to testify.
“Burden and Montgomery sustained different injuries and there is no credible evidence to suggest their cases are connected,” defense attorneys wrote.
The Florida Supreme Court denied Conahan’s stay of execution on Sept. 3, ruling that it was known at trial that Conahan’s DNA was not found on any evidence and that even if new testing turned up someone else’s DNA, it wouldn’t have much impact.
“This is true because the cigarette butts Conahan seeks to have tested again were found in an open field known for being a trash site and thus a repository for others’ DNA,” the court wrote.
Conahan’s attorneys took the fight to the Supreme Court and continued to press for DNA testing. The court declined to intervene.
The Florida Attorney General’s Office argued that Conahan failed to present “a compelling reason why a last-minute stay outweighs Florida’s interest in enforcing its laws.”
“Conahan’s conviction and sentence were based on evidence and testimony that conclusively connected him to Montgomery’s killing,” they wrote on Sept. 9.
Florida continues execution push amid busy September
Conahan’s execution is the second of eight scheduled in the U.S. in September, the most in a single month since 2010, according to a USA TODAY analysis of data tracked by the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center. That year, five states carried out nine executions in the month of May.
This month’s spate of executions comes amid an overall uptick in the death penalty in the U.S. in the last two years. In 2025, 11 states executed 47 inmates, the most in any single year since 2009. So far this year, 25 inmates have been executed, with another 13 on the calendar through December, though more are expected to be added.
Experts attribute the increase to a friendlier death penalty climate under President Donald Trump and Florida’s particularly aggressive execution push in the last two years.
Of the 72 executions carried out in the U.S. since 2025, Florida accounts for 34 of them. That’s 47%, and that figure is increasing. Of this year’s 25 executions, Florida has carried out 15. That’s 60%.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, who decides which inmates are executed and when, has been drawing increasing criticism from death penalty opponents and observers who say the Republican is being motivated by political ambition ahead of the 2028 presidential election and is “increasingly treating executions as routine instruments of political power,” according to a recent statement from Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
DeSantis has said he wants to give closure to families who have waited for justice, sometimes for over four decades.
It’s unclear whether Florida will continue its execution pace come January, when DeSantis’ second term as governor ends. DeSantis has endorsed Republican U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds to succeed him. Donalds will face off against Democrat David Jolly.
When is the next execution?
Three states are set to carry out executions next week. Texas and Georgia are planning to execute inmates within an hour of each other on Wednesday, Sept. 16. Alabama is set to carry out an execution the next day.
Stacey Humphreys, the 53-year-old inmate being executed in Georgia, was convicted of the 2003 murders of two real estate agents, 21-year-old Lori Baker and 33-year-old Cindy Williams. In Texas about an hour after Humphreys’ execution, the state is set to put LeJames Norman to death for the triple murder of his neighbors during a robbery gone wrong in 2005.
And on Thursday, Sept. 17, Alabama plans to execute Jeffery Lee for a double murder during a pawn shop robbery in 1998.
Also this month, Tennessee is planning to execute a woman for the first time in more than 200 years. Christa Pike is set to be executed on Sept. 30 for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
Contributing: Kim Luciani, USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida
Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime and courts reporter who covers the death penalty, cold case investigations, and breaking news for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat.