Aspiring serial killer awaits sentence for fourth murder
BY DAN HILDEBRAN
Monitor Editor
STARKE— A man who said he aspired to be a serial killer is awaiting sentencing after a Bradford County jury convicted him of his fourth murder last month.
The jury convicted Leo Boatman of first-degree murder in the 2019 stabbing death of Florida State Prison inmate Billy Chapman.
Prosecutors said Boatman and his co-defendant William Wells repeatedly stabbed the victim in the abdomen and chest.
Wells pleaded guilty to the killing in 2021, saying he hoped to reach death row. However, he later expressed regret over the murder and asked for a lesser sentence.
Circuit Judge Mark W. Mosely sentenced him to death, nonetheless.
Blaming the victims
Boatman was first arrested in 2006 for killing two Santa Fe College students in the Ocala National Forest.
According to media reports, the Hooters dishwasher stole an AK-47, caught a bus from Largo to Ocala, and then a taxi from the city to the forest.
Law enforcement officials described the trip as a hunting expedition for humans.
Boatman told investigators that after briefly encountering Amber M. Peck and John M. Parker, both 26, on a hiking trail, he pulled out the weapon, chased the victims through the woods, and shot both.
Boatman blamed the shootings on Peck, claiming that after he pointed the weapon at the couple, the 26-year-old woman started screaming.
“You know I wasn’t gonna pull the trigger,” he told investigators. “The last thing I remember is just trying to make the screaming stop.”
Boatman avoided the death penalty by pleading guilty and received two life sentences.
Three years later, while an inmate at Dixie Correctional Institution, Boatman admitted to stuffing blood pressure medication down the throat of his cellmate and hanging the man with a bed sheet.
A correctional officer discovered Mark “Apple Sauce” Apicella, 34, dangling from a top bunk, struggling to free himself from Boatman’s bed-sheet noose.
The victim, who survived the attack, told prison officials that Boatman was upset that Apicella received more mail than he did. Boatman told investigators he wasn’t trying to kill his cellmate and that Apicella started the altercation. The ex-dishwasher was sentenced to seven years for attempted second-degree murder.
In August 2010, while at Charlotte Correctional Institution, Boatman critically injured his cellmate: Ricky Morris, by choking the victim and banging his head against a concrete floor. Morris died from his injuries the following month. Boatman told correctional officers he attacked his cellmate because Morris had assaulted an elderly inmate earlier in the day.
Morris was serving two life terms for killing his parents in 2008.
For murdering Morris, a judge tacked on an additional 15 years, eight months, and eight days, adding to Boatman’s two life sentences for the forest murders and seven-year term for trying to kill Apicella.
Neglected, abused and orphaned
In court documents filed during Boatman’s first murder case, the Florida Department of Children and Families reported that he was abused, neglected and abandoned by his mother until she drowned in a ditch when her son was eight.
The mother became pregnant with Leo while hospitalized in a psychiatric facility.
DFC records reveal complaints of the boy being found roaming in traffic wearing nothing but his underwear.
Boatman was passed along to a series of foster care homes until he was judged “impossible to handle.”
He spent seven years in the custody of the Department of Juvenile Justice after he stole from his grandmother, vandalized City of St. Petersburg property, damaged church school buses and other infractions.
DCF records also report that while at a youth facility, he tried to punch a pregnant case manager in the stomach, head-butted a teacher, and was caught having sex with another boy.
In August 2005, he was released from Omega Juvenile Prison, a maximum-security facility in Manatee County.
From there, he moved in with his 40-year-old uncle, a convicted sex offender who owned an AK-47. The uncle, Victor Boatman, got Leo his dishwashing job at Hooters.
Chief Assistant Public Defender Bill Miller, whose office defended Boatman in the forest murders, said he had never seen anyone who had been forced to fend for himself more than Boatman.
“His life started off bad and only got worse,” he said.
Assistant State Attorney Rock Hooker, who prosecuted Boatman, called the defendant’s childhood “uniquely awful” among the killers he has prosecuted in over two decades.
Five months after moving in with Uncle Victor, Leo caught a bus to Ocala.
Exceedingly brutal
Former Gainesville State Attorney Bill Cervone, who secured the murder indictments against Wells and Boatman, called the 2019 killing of Chapman “exceedingly brutal.”
He said the pair trapped their victim in a prison day room, strangled him, pinned him up against a wall, and stabbed him “multiple, multiple times.”
At the time of Chapman’s murder, he had three months left on his nine-year sentence for theft-related crimes in the Ormond Beach area.
In one case, he broke into a woman’s home and stole a laptop, jewelry, a handgun and other property valued at $6,000. In a second incident, he and a co-defendant broke into a woman’s car while she was working out at a fitness center.
Wells waits on death row as a result of Chapman’s death, and Boatman could follow.
More hearings are scheduled before Boatman’s sentencing.
Boatman’s co-defendant also has a notorious background.
Wells pleaded guilty in 2004 to the 2003 murders of his wife, father-in-law, brother-in-law and two other men.
Prosecutors said he then lived in his Mayport mobile home for a week along with the decomposing corpses and his 4-year-old son.
Wells telephoned a Jacksonville television station and described how he shot his wife and then shot the other men as they came to his trailer over the next several days to ask about the previous victims.
In phone calls and letters to Jacksonville media, Wells described himself as “the monster of Mayport.”
Wells received a sixth life sentence for the attempted murder of a fellow inmate in a South Florida Prison.
He was then convicted of the May 17, 2011, stabbing death of Florida State Prison inmate Xavier Rodriguez and was sentenced to life for the seventh time.
