On September 7, 1976, the life of Alfred Sturgis, a 23-year-old man, came to a violent end within the walls of Florida State Prison in Raiford. Sturgis, who was serving a life sentence for second-degree murder and escape, was targeted by fellow inmates who believed he was an informant. The attack was brutal and decisive, silencing a man who his assailants had judged and condemned according to their own prison code.
On that Tuesday afternoon, prison personnel discovered Sturgis in his
cell on "W" wing, bleeding profusely from multiple stab wounds. A homemade knife, about 10 inches long, had been plunged into his chest. A desperate race to save his life began. He was first rushed to the infirmary at the adjacent Union Correctional Institute and then to a prison hospital at Lake Butler. With facilities at both institutions proving inadequate to treat his severe injuries, he was finally transported to Shands Teaching Hospital in Gainesville. He died shortly after his arrival.
Even as his life slipped away, Alfred Sturgis was able to identify the men who attacked him. While en route to the hospital, he made a dying declaration to a correctional officer, A.V. Rhoden, naming inmates Bennie Eddie Demps, James Jackson, and Harry Mungin as his assailants. This crucial statement became the cornerstone of the investigation into his murder. Another inmate, Larry Hathaway, would later testify to the specifics of the attack, stating that Mungin stood lookout at the cell door while Demps held Sturgis down and Jackson stabbed him repeatedly with the makeshift knife.
The investigation revealed that the three men were part of a prison gang that called itself "Perjury Incorporated," which focused on rooting out and punishing inmates suspected of being informants, or "snitches." A grand jury was convened and subsequently indicted Demps, Jackson, and Mungin for the first-degree murder of Alfred Sturgis. The motive was clear: Sturgis had been killed for his perceived cooperation with authorities.
The man who held Sturgis down, Bennie Eddie Demps, was no stranger to violence or the legal system. At the time of the attack, Demps was already a convicted serial killer, serving two consecutive life sentences for a 1971 double murder in a Lake County orange grove. He and an accomplice had locked three people in the trunk of a car and fired shots into it, killing two. Demps was initially sentenced to death for those crimes, but the sentence was commuted to life in 1972 when the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the death penalty as it was then applied.
The murder of Alfred Sturgis occurred just two months after Florida had reinstated capital punishment, giving prosecutors the opportunity to once again seek the ultimate penalty for Demps. In 1978, a jury found all three men guilty of first-degree murder. Following the jury's recommendations, James Jackson and Harry Mungin were sentenced to life in prison for their roles. For Bennie Eddie Demps, however, the outcome was different. Citing his prior murder convictions as an aggravating factor, the court sentenced him to death for a second time.
Over the next two decades, Demps filed numerous appeals, staving off execution several times. He maintained his innocence in the Sturgis murder, claiming he was framed and that evidence had been fabricated against him. Despite his protestations and years of legal battles, his appeals eventually ran out. On June 7, 2000, Bennie Eddie Demps was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison, the same institution where he had murdered Alfred Sturgis nearly 24 years earlier.
