BY DAN HILDEBRAN
The Department of Corrections executed a man convicted of murdering a Florida State University student in 1994 and raping his sister while the siblings were camping in the Ocala National Forest.
Loran Cole died by lethal injection on Thursday, August 29, at Florida State Prison.
According to press accounts, John Edwards, 18, and his older sister set up camp in the National Forest on February 18, 1994, when Cole, then 27, and William Paul, then 20, walked up on the siblings.
The two men overpowered the brother when the siblings were walking to a pond to photograph alligators. Paul sexually assaulted the sister. John Edwards died from a slashed throat and head trauma.
The sister was found the following morning after chewing through ropes with which the two men had tied her. She had been sexually assaulted multiple times.
Paul pleaded to kidnapping, rape, and murder and was sentenced to life.
Cole denied killing the 18-year-old college student. His lawyers argued that the murder weapon had Paul’s fingerprints on it.
They also said while appealing Cole’s death sentence that the abuse he endured while living at the Dozier’s School for Boys, a reform school in the Florida panhandle, justified the vacating of his death sentence.
The Department of Corrections said that before the execution, Paul received two visitors: his son and a pen pal.
In a text to his mother, Ryan Cole, 36, called his father’s execution a nightmare. The mother shared the text with a Tallahassee Democrat reporter.
“Saying goodbye to my dad was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Ryan Cole wrote to his mother, according to the newspaper. “I am being punished for something that I believe now is something my dad didn’t even do…They want somebody to blame in order to give somebody else peace, but they are taking peace from somebody else.”
The victims’ parents, Timothy and Victoria Edwards, said in a statement that their son’s death was “the darkest times in our lives” and that they “are void of feelings and empathy for Mr. Cole.”
