A Florida killer was finally put to death on Thursday, almost 30 years after he was found guilty of killing a married couple by shooting and hitting them in front of their toddler.
James D. Ford, 64, was put to death by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on Thursday for killing Greg Malnory, 25, and his wife Kimberly, 26. On January 10, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Ford’s death order.
“Never give up.” In an interview with Fox News Digital on the day of Greg Malnory’s execution, his mother, Connie Ankney, said, “Always fight for your children.” She had driven hours to be there. “I will always fight for my son and Kimberly.” She isn’t here today, so I wasn’t sure if I would be able to see this.
“They talk about… closure all the time,” she said. “No, it’s fair,” she said. “Justice for all.”
Ankney said that she was having a range of emotions this week, leading up to Ford’s execution.
“Remembering that day… what they must have went through, the terror, the horror, the fear,” she shared.
Greg and Kimberly Malnory, along with Ford, Greg’s coworker at the Charlotte County farm, planned to go fishing at South Florida Sod Farm on a Sunday morning in the spring of 1997.
The bodies of the couple were found the next day, April 7, 1997, in the middle of a field on the remote 7,000-acre farm, close to their pickup truck. Court records show that the parents found their 22-month-old daughter Maranda strapped into her car seat in the truck after the attack.
“They never got to be parents…””It was taken away so quickly,” Ankney said.
Greg’s mother said that the young pair met in high school but didn’t start dating until much later. They were together for a few years. They had only been married for six months before they died.
“We went to Tennessee.” Their wedding took place in the woods, and they stayed in one of those big cabins. Ankney remembered that Kimberly had her white boots on. “I can’t even put it into words because, you know, it was such a beautiful thing …and then six months… such a horrific ending to that beautiful, beautiful family.”
Ankney was called to the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office on the day their bodies were found and told the terrible news.
“I walked in there and Kimberly’s mother and stepdad were there… sobbing,” she shared. “I couldn’t believe it when she told me they were dead…They said they were dead, but the baby was still living.
At first, Ankney thought the couple had died in a boating accident because they had told her they were going fishing and she hadn’t heard from them since.
“They didn’t say murder right away…”I lost it when they did,” she said. That’s the crazy thing: it doesn’t hit you right away. No one was killed in Charlotte County because it was a small town where everyone knew each other.
Documents show that investigators found that Greg Malnory had been shot in the head and hit so hard that his throat had been cut. They also found that Kimberly Malnory had been sexually abused, severely beaten, and then shot dead.
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