The Murder of Teresa Mae McAbee & the Conviction of James Aren Duckett

Teresa walks to the convenience store

Eleven-year-old Teresa Mae McAbee walked a short distance from her home to a nearby Circle K convenience store to buy a pencil. There she encountered a 16-year-old boy who was doing laundry at an adjoining laundromat. The two left the store together and walked to the store's dumpster area, where they talked for roughly twenty minutes.

Duckett approaches the pair

By his own trial testimony, Duckett was running stationary radar on Highway 50 across from the store when he noticed the two. Mascotte had a curfew, and he crossed the street to check on them. He first asked the store clerk about Teresa's age before approaching the two directly and asking them to walk to his car; there, Teresa said she was 11 and the boy — identified in postconviction filings as Salvador Calisto — said he was 16.

She is placed in the patrol car — what happened next is the whole case

The boy went to wait for his uncle, Maximo Rubio, at the adjoining laundromat. When Rubio arrived, Duckett asked him his nephew's age, then suggested Rubio speak with the boy while Duckett spoke with Teresa. According to both the boy and Rubio — and this part is not disputed by Duckett himself — Duckett placed Teresa in the passenger seat of his patrol car and shut the door before walking to the driver's side. Rubio specifically testified he never saw Teresa touch the hood of the car. Rubio and the boy then gathered their laundry and left; their sworn account does not describe what happened after that.

Duckett's own version, consistent from his June 15, 1987 statement through his trial testimony, picks up from there: he says he asked Teresa to sit in the car only so he could finish speaking with her privately, told her she needed to go home, made a note in his patrol notebook of her age and clothing, and that she then got out of the car and walked off toward her home, in front of the store — a walk of less than 400 feet. (In earlier statements, per the State's Answer Brief, he had separately said he “took her from behind the dumpster” — describing where she was before being placed in the car, not after leaving it; the two locations should not be conflated.) He says he never saw her again. Whether that is true, or whether he instead drove off with her still in the car, is the entire question this case turns on.

Three different accounts of what happened next

The state's theory, resting on the trial testimony of Grace Gwendolyn “Gwen” Gurley, was that Duckett drove off alone, circled the block, and returned to pick Teresa up a second time by the store's dumpster — the version the prosecution argued at trial. Gurley testified she watched from hiding and saw the patrol car back up and drive away with “the big man” and “a small person” inside.

Independently, Shirley Williams, the Circle K clerk, testified Duckett was driving off alone when she arrived at the store between 10:30 and 10:40 p.m. — consistent with Duckett's account, not Gurley's. Two further witnesses, raised in Duckett's 2002 postconviction filings, went further still: Kim Vargas, a customer, gave sworn statements that she saw Teresa exit Duckett's car and walk alone toward the dumpster; and Richard Reynolds, a patron at the laundromat, told investigators he then watched Teresa get into a different car — a blue hatchback driven by a man with black hair — and drive off down Sunset Avenue. Both were known to the state before trial; neither testified. Vargas was subpoenaed by the prosecution, drove from California, and was never called. Reynolds's name was given to the defense five days before trial and he reportedly changed his account when he reached the courthouse.

The radio-log gap

Every Florida Supreme Court opinion to recite the facts of this case, from 1990 forward, notes the same detail from Duckett's own patrol radio tape: “A tape of Duckett's radio calls indicated none between 10:50 p.m. and 12:10 a.m.” A convenience-store clerk on his usual patrol route separately testified he normally passed by every forty-five minutes to an hour, but that after passing at 9:30 p.m. he did not return until much later that night. This roughly ninety-minute silence — encompassing the window in which Teresa disappeared — is one of the six facts the Florida Supreme Court has repeatedly cited as supporting the conviction.

While Teresa's mother searched, no one saw Duckett's patrol car

The state's own appellate brief laid out, in detail, what did not happen that night. Teresa's mother drove around searching for her for nearly an hour and never once saw a police car, and ultimately had to drive to the next town, Groveland, to report her missing — where police radioed Duckett and, per the state's own account, waited fourteen seconds for him to respond. A Groveland deputy who separately needed to reach him that night also had to wait for him to arrive back in Mascotte. Duckett failed to log his mileage at the end of his shift. Hours later, specifically asked by Teresa's aunt whether he had checked the lake near the pump house — a location he had been to before, close to the store where Teresa was last seen — he never drove back to look; the aunt eventually walked down and checked it herself. He never followed up with the mother again after 3:00 a.m. to see whether Teresa had turned up; instead, he ran stationary radar and wrote parking tickets.

A fisherman finds her body

Jim Clark, fishing in a small lake in the orange groves roughly 3,200 feet behind the Circle K, per the State's own Answer Brief (a 2003 news account instead puts it at roughly 2,000 feet — see the discrepancy noted in Section IX) — reached by a dirt road that curved past an abandoned pump house — noticed what he believed to be a body at the water's edge and found Mascotte Police Chief Michael Brady, who confirmed it was Teresa. A medical examiner testified she had been sexually assaulted while alive, then strangled and drowned, and that she had not been sexually active before that night.

Duckett's pre-arrest statement

On June 15, 1987, before his arrest, Duckett gave investigators a formal statement. He specifically denied driving his patrol car to the lake that evening, and specifically, flatly denied that Teresa had ever been on the hood of his patrol car at all — an unqualified denial, not a hedge. (The softer account — that she “must have” sat on it while he was talking to Rubio and the others, though he maintained he never saw it happen — first appears over a year later, in his 1988 trial testimony; see Section III and the Close Reading in Section X.) He said that after Teresa left, he stopped at a second convenience store, the “Jiffy Store,” for coffee. His own patrol notebook, entered into the postconviction record, appears to log that stop at 10:58 p.m. A separate entry logs his return, with a time of “11:00.” At a 1997 evidentiary hearing, Circle K clerk Shirley Williams testified — consistent with this — that Duckett came back into the Circle K between 11:05 and 11:15 p.m. to retrieve a coffee cup he'd left behind, a detail his trial attorney never presented to the jury because, he testified, he had never seen the notebook before trial.

Suspended, then fired

Duckett was named a suspect — he was the last person seen with Teresa and the only officer on duty that night. He was suspended June 16 and fired three days later, ending a seven-month career in law enforcement.

Four pieces of physical evidence emerge

Tire tracks: A sheriff's department technician examining tracks along the dirt road near the lake found them distinctive; he traced the pattern to the model of tire used on Mascotte's patrol cars, including Duckett's.

Fingerprints/palm prints: Duckett's and Teresa's prints were found commingled on the hood of his patrol car, in a pattern experts said was consistent with a person sitting on the hood facing backward and scooting toward the windshield — directly at odds with his denial that she was ever on the hood at all.

Pubic hair: A pubic hair recovered from the victim's underwear was examined by FBI hair-and-fiber analyst Michael Malone, who testified there was a “high degree of probability” it was Duckett's, and that it was inconsistent with everyone else known to have been near Teresa that night. (This piece of evidence would become the most contested in the entire case — see Section VIII.)

Bruising: the medical examiner found bruising on Teresa's arms consistent with her having been held down during the sexual battery. The state's brief cited this for a narrower point than it is sometimes given credit for: Duckett had argued only one of his own fingerprints was found on the hood, and the state's primary response was simply that more than one of his prints had in fact been lifted. The bruising point was offered separately, to explain why the victim — who in fact left more prints than Duckett (eighteen matched prints, against roughly six of his) — did not leave still more: her arms were restrained rather than free to move.

The hair evidence's disputed handling

Florida's own crime lab (FDLE), examiner Deborah Steger, tested the hair first and could not reach a match either way. The state then sent the sample to the FBI, where Malone did reach a match. Duckett's postconviction counsel called this “expert shopping” and argued it violated the FBI's own internal policy against re-testing evidence another agency had already examined without supervisory review — a claim the Florida Supreme Court held in 2005 was procedurally barred (it should have been raised on direct appeal in 1990) rather than evaluated on its merits.

Separately, a second, unidentified hair recovered from the victim was examined by both the FBI and FDLE and found to be inconsistent with Duckett's known hair — and was never mentioned to the jury. That hair later went missing from evidence entirely; no explanation for its disappearance appears in the chain-of-custody paperwork. An independent DNA lab, Lifecodes, separately misplaced known hair standards for two years before finding them during an evidence-room cleanup, and its own written report initially misidentified which exhibit numbers had and had not been tested. When Duckett raised the missing second hair as a Brady violation in 2002, the Florida Supreme Court denied the claim as “insufficiently pled” — again a pleading ruling, not a finding that the hair's disappearance was adequately explained.

Duckett is fingerprinted as a suspect

Once physical evidence pointed to his own patrol car, Duckett was formally questioned and processed. He denied, in that questioning, that Teresa had ever sat on the hood of his cruiser — the same denial the fingerprint evidence would later contradict. He was charged with sexual battery of a minor and first-degree murder.

Grand jury indictment

Five months after Teresa's death, a Lake County grand jury formally indicted Duckett for her murder.

Trial opens; state seeks death

Duckett stood trial before a Lake County jury on charges of first-degree murder and sexual battery. Prosecutor Steve Hurm presented the tire-track, fingerprint, and hair evidence described above, along with eyewitness testimony that Teresa got into Duckett's patrol car.

Three teenage girls testify to prior conduct

Under Florida's “Williams rule” allowing evidence of similar prior acts, three teenage girls testified that in the months before McAbee's murder, Duckett — while on duty, in his patrol car — had offered them rides and made sexual advances. A 19-year-old and an 18-year-old separately said he'd put a hand on their shoulder or breast and tried to kiss them, desisting when refused; a 17-year-old said they had had oral sex multiple times in his patrol car. On direct appeal, the Florida Supreme Court held the first two incidents were properly admitted as evidence of a common pattern of using his badge and patrol car to isolate underage girls, but that the third witness's account — describing what the court treated as consensual conduct with an older teenager — was not sufficiently similar and should have been excluded. The court found the error harmless given the weight of the remaining evidence.

The precise testimony, and one witness's alibi problem

The court's own opinion is specific: a “petite nineteen-year-old” — Shelby Ann Dow, per the state's own appellate brief, 5'1″ and 92 pounds — testified Duckett, in January or February 1987, drove her around while helping search for her boyfriend and put his hand on her shoulder and tried to kiss her; a “petite eighteen-year-old” per the 1990 opinion — identified in postconviction filings as Linda Upshaw — testified that on May 1, 1987 he picked her up on the highway, drove her to an orange grove, and put his hand on her breast; and a “petite seventeen-year-old” — Kimberly Ruetz, sixteen when the encounters began in December 1986, per the same brief — testified to two occasions of oral sex at a location called “the clay pits,” which she said she initiated voluntarily. Ruetz testified Duckett told her shortly before the murder that the police chief had “gotten on him” for talking to too many girls, and that he had “worked too hard to get where he was” and asked her not to say anything. All three denied any force was used; Duckett denied all three encounters happened at all.

Postconviction counsel argued Upshaw's specific date — Friday, May 1, 1987 — was directly contradicted by Duckett's own timesheet, which the defense says shows he did not work that night; trial counsel testified he had “no tactical nor strategical reason” for never introducing it. A second witness, Peggy Locke, was never called; she would reportedly have testified Upshaw was intoxicated that night, never mentioned any advance from Duckett, and that Duckett had separately told Locke only that Upshaw “was upset and needed a ride home.” This claim does not appear to have been separately and substantively resolved in the opinions reviewed for this document.

Gwen Gurley testifies

Grace Gwendolyn “Gwen” Gurley — who came forward roughly five months after the murder while incarcerated on unrelated charges — testified that she saw Teresa outside the Circle K that night and watched Duckett drive off with, in her words, “a small person” in his patrol car. She would become the single most litigated witness in the entire 38-year case (Section V).

Guilty verdict; death recommended 8–4

The jury convicted Duckett of first-degree murder and sexual battery, and on the same day recommended death by an 8–4 advisory vote. Florida's capital-sentencing statute at the time required only a jury majority recommendation, not any particular margin — a bare majority sufficed until Hurst v. Florida (2016) required unanimity (Section V).

Sentenced to death

At sentencing, Duckett took the stand, denied any involvement, and asked the jury — and then the court — to spare his life. Circuit Judge Jerry T. Lockett imposed a death sentence for the murder (then by electric chair) and 25 years to life for the sexual battery, citing two aggravating factors: that the murder occurred during a sexual battery, and that it was especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel.

Direct appeal denied

The Florida Supreme Court unanimously affirmed Duckett's conviction and death sentence, holding the circumstantial evidence — tire tracks, prints, hair, and eyewitness testimony taken together — met Florida's demanding standard that circumstantial evidence must be inconsistent with every reasonable hypothesis of innocence.

First postconviction round; DNA testing raised, then narrowed away

Duckett's initial Rule 3.850 motion, filed May 1, 1992, went through evidentiary hearings across 1995, 1997, and 1998 before Circuit Judge Jerry T. Lockett denied all relief on August 10, 2001 — in an order postconviction counsel would later show was copied almost verbatim, typos included, from the state's own proposed order. At oral argument on the appeal in March 2003, both sides told the Florida Supreme Court that clothing in evidence might be testable for DNA; the Court relinquished jurisdiction for that narrow purpose. On remand, the only biological item identified — the Q-6(3) slide, later central to the 2026 litigation — was found too degraded for 2003-era testing, and Duckett's own counsel asked that it not be consumed on a low-probability attempt, preserving it for the technology used in 2026.

Two more claims: a coerced juror, and a hysterical courtroom moment

The same 2002 brief alleged that during deliberations, a holdout juror — described as young, female, and visibly upset — left the jury room, was followed out by the foreman, and returned to change her vote to guilty; Florida's rule barring attorneys from interviewing jurors after trial meant this claim was never developed further. It also alleged the prosecutor carried an autopsy photograph past the victim's mother during closing argument, causing her to become hysterical and run toward a locked courtroom door in front of the jury. Both claims were raised in Duckett's 2002 postconviction appeal; the 2005 opinion held the juror claim barred by Florida's rule against impeaching verdicts with evidence of jury deliberations, and the prosecutorial-misconduct claim procedurally barred because it should have been raised on direct appeal in 1990. Neither was evaluated for whether the underlying events happened as described.

Ten claims, all denied

The Florida Supreme Court rejected Duckett's consolidated postconviction appeal and habeas petition. It addressed Gurley's recantation directly — she had given six separate statements recanting her trial testimony, alleging investigators coached her on exactly where to stand outside the store and what to say, then invoked her Fifth Amendment right rather than repeat the recantation under oath at a formal hearing. The court found recanted testimony “exceedingly unreliable” on its own, and — critically — held the conviction stood even discounting Gurley entirely, on the strength of the remaining tire-track, print, and hair evidence. The court also rejected an “expert shopping” claim regarding Michael Malone, found trial counsel's penalty-phase strategy adequate, and rejected a Brady claim tied to a 1997 Justice Department report on Malone's conduct in unrelated cases (holding the report post-dated the 1988 trial and was not suppressed).

Federal habeas denied

U.S. District Judge Wm. Terrell Hodges (M.D. Fla., Ocala Division) denied Duckett's federal habeas petition, which had raised sixteen constitutional claims, including that Gwen Gurley's post-trial recantation — given in two interviews with Duckett's counsel and a private investigator, in which she said she had not actually been at the convenience store that night and that police had told her what to say at trial — amounted to newly discovered evidence warranting a new trial. The court held that claims of actual innocence based on newly discovered evidence have never been held to state an independent ground for federal habeas relief absent an underlying constitutional violation, and found none here; it deferred to the state courts' own finding, after a lengthy evidentiary hearing, that Gurley's recantation was “inconsistent, incredible, and unreliable” and that Duckett would have been convicted even without her trial testimony. “Upon a review of the entire record and the Parties['] written submissions, the Court finds that all of Duckett's claims lack merit. The Petition will be denied in its entirety.” The Eleventh Circuit denied a certificate of appealability that August; the U.S. Supreme Court declined review in 2011.

Four more rounds of successive postconviction litigation, including a full Hurst challenge

Duckett's counsel returned to Florida courts four more times over the following decade. A first successive motion was denied by the circuit court on June 9, 2008 and not appealed. The 2013–14 round (Duckett III) and the 2016–17 round (Duckett IV, Section VIII.4) both pressed claims about the hair evidence; Duckett III additionally argued that Gwen Gurley's own adult children, Brandie and Brandon Campos, had come forward to say their mother told them privately that she lied at trial to get out of jail early, and that Florida's perjury statute had been used to intimidate her out of repeating her recantation under oath at the evidentiary hearing. Duckett III's own opinion is not independently readable for this document (Section XI) — the saved file fails to parse — so how the Florida Supreme Court resolved the Campos claim specifically could not be confirmed beyond the fact that relief was ultimately denied. The final round, in 2018, was built entirely around Hurst v. Florida (2016) — the U.S. Supreme Court decision requiring a jury, not a judge, to unanimously find the facts supporting a death sentence, and the Florida Supreme Court's own follow-on decisions extending that to require unanimous jury recommendations. Duckett raised five distinct theories for why Hurst should reach his case despite his 1990 finality date, including a fundamental-fairness argument and a due-process argument that Florida's revised capital-sentencing statute effectively created a new, uncharged crime of “capital first-degree murder.”

Affirmed, with two justices declining to fully join

The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the circuit court's order in a brief per curiam opinion, holding Hurst did not apply retroactively to a sentence final in 1990. Five justices concurred outright; Chief Justice Canady and Justice Pariente concurred in the result only, without explaining why. Duckett's team — Mary Elizabeth Wells and Brittney Lacy of the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel — then petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for certiorari in March 2019; it was denied.

The hair evidence is formally discounted — and the conviction still stands

This Court's full opinion was independently obtained and read for this document, not just summarized. Two rounds of federal scrutiny of Michael Malone's hair testimony are addressed: an August 2011 report by an independent FBI-retained analyst (Steve Robertson), and a further 2014 Department of Justice review, summarized in a letter from DOJ Special Counsel Norman Wong to Florida State Attorney Brad King, which found the hair testimony “included [some erroneous] statements that exceeded the limits of science and were, therefore, invalid.” The Court rejected the claim anyway, holding Duckett had not shown Malone's testimony was false “when considered in its full context,” and — independently — that the hair evidence was never the only evidence: “the victim was last seen at the convenience store in Duckett's patrol car, and the unusual tire tracks at the lake where the victim's body was found matched those of Duckett's patrol car… although Duckett had stated that the victim never sat on the hood of his car, ‘[b]oth Duckett's and Teresa's fingerprints were discovered on the hood of Duckett's patrol car’… Duckett's prints were commingled with the victim's, whose prints indicated that she had been sitting backwards on the hood and had scooted up the car.” The opinion also preserves, quoting the 1990 direct-appeal opinion directly, the observation that “no one saw Duckett, the only policeman on duty in Mascotte, from the time he was last seen with the victim until the time he met the victim's mother at the police station.” The Court also rejected companion Brady and Giglio claims and a cumulative-error claim.

Governor DeSantis signs the death warrant

Execution scheduled for the week of March 31, 2026. Duckett was the fifth Florida inmate to have his execution scheduled in 2026, one of three men slated for execution that March alone — an ordinal position in an unusually active warrant year for Florida, not a count of that year's total.

DNA testing ordered; execution stayed

Lake County Circuit Judge Brian Welke granted defense counsel's request for postconviction DNA testing on a decades-old swab from the victim's underwear, containing a small number of sperm heads. On March 26 the Florida Supreme Court stayed the execution to allow testing to proceed.

SNP testing completed — and the sample is gone

The 1987 slide (“Q-6(3)”) — too degraded for 2003-era testing, per the Florida Supreme Court's own 2005 opinion — was sent, at the State's insistence over the defense's preference for a Texas lab, to a private Florida laboratory, DNA Labs International (Deerfield Beach), for Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) testing, a technique suited to small, degraded samples. Testing consumed the entire remaining sample. The lab's Certificate of Analysis reported the profile “indicates at least one male contributor” but was “not suitable for genealogical comparisons or phenotype and ancestry estimations.” Neither the lab nor the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) could assign a statistical weight to the male-specific (Y-chromosome) results they did obtain — meaning they could report neither a match nor an exclusion. The state's own Deputy Director of Forensic Sciences recommended further analysis; Attorney General James Uthmeier nonetheless moved to lift the stay, arguing the results “did not exonerate Duckett.” On March 30 the Florida Supreme Court declined to lift the stay and retained concurrent jurisdiction with the circuit court.

A win for Duckett, on a narrow point — and a forceful dissent

With no one able to say what the inconclusive result actually meant statistically, Duckett asked the circuit court to order the underlying testing data released to an independent bioinformaticist, and separately filed public-records demands for the lab's testing process and protocols. The circuit court denied both. On appeal, the Florida Supreme Court reversed in Duckett's favor on the data question, holding that the “results” of court-ordered DNA testing under Florida law must include the underlying data an expert would need to testify to a statistical weight — not merely a bare report calling the test “inconclusive” — and remanded for that data to be released. It separately affirmed denial of the protocols request, agreeing that was sought only for impeachment, not to support a colorable postconviction claim. Justice Tanenbaum dissented at length, arguing the Court had no jurisdiction to hear the appeal at all: the DNA-testing statute was, in his view, a freestanding proceeding unconnected to any pending attack on the death judgment, and by the time of this appeal the testing itself was already complete, making the dispute a closed matter over which only a district court of appeal — not the state Supreme Court — had jurisdiction. He wrote that Duckett was “gaming the process… to delay execution of his sentence, which he has yet to demonstrate is unlawful, despite his having had decades to do so,” using an active death warrant “to manufacture urgency… where none exists.” The majority (Muñiz, C.J., and Labarga, Couriel, Grosshans, Francis, and Sasso, JJ.) held otherwise, and no rehearing was permitted.

The bioinformaticist's analysis: still inconclusive

Once the underlying data was released under the April 30 ruling, an independent bioinformaticist retained by the defense analyzed it and, per the Florida Supreme Court's subsequent July 8 opinion, likewise could not reach a conclusion either including or excluding Duckett as the source of the male DNA detected. With the biological sample already consumed in the original March testing, no further round of analysis was possible. On July 8, 2026, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed denial of Duckett's fifth successive postconviction motion, denied habeas relief, and lifted the stay of execution.

Second warrant: execution reset for July 28

Governor DeSantis reset Duckett's execution for noon on July 28, 2026 — the same day, six hours apart, as Dominick Occhicone's, marking Florida's first double execution since 1964 and the country's first since Arkansas in 2017. Duckett's lawyers had under two weeks' notice, shorter than any Florida capital defendant in over two decades. His federal cert. petition states that, under the compressed schedule that followed, he became the only capital defendant in Florida, under the state's current death-watch policies, not permitted a final visit with his family on the day of his own execution.

Last filings: a sixth postconviction motion, and a constitutional challenge to dying in tandem

Duckett filed a sixth successive postconviction motion arguing the state acted in bad faith by consuming the only remaining biological sample without conclusive results, and a second DNA motion seeking testing of items the state said contained no usable genetic material. The circuit court denied both; the Florida Supreme Court affirmed on July 24, with six justices in the majority — five per curiam (Couriel, C.J., and Muñiz, Grosshans, Francis, and Sasso, JJ.) plus Justice Labarga concurring separately — and Justice Tanenbaum concurring in part and dissenting only in part, on the narrow question of jurisdiction over the second DNA motion. Labarga's concurrence pushed back directly on Tanenbaum, defending capital counsel's “solemn obligation” to keep pressing the courts up to the end against the dissent's characterization of the litigation as frivolous. Separately, Duckett and Occhicone jointly argued in federal court that scheduling both executions six hours apart violated the Eighth Amendment, citing botched double-executions in Oklahoma (2014) and Arkansas (2017). Every court — district, Eleventh Circuit, and finally the U.S. Supreme Court — declined to intervene.

Duckett is pronounced dead

James Duckett, 68, was executed by three-drug lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke, roughly an hour behind schedule after a last U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the double-execution challenge arrived after noon. He woke at 4:45 a.m., ate a last meal of eggs, grits, bacon, biscuits, and chocolate milk, met with a spiritual adviser, and declined a final statement — answering “No, sir,” when asked. Occhicone was executed five hours later, at 6:13 p.m., making it Florida's first double execution since 1964 and its first by lethal injection — and the first double execution in the U.S. since Arkansas in 2017.

Polk County names Duckett as Jeanifer Weldon's killer

Sheriff Grady Judd held a press conference announcing that investigators were now confident in naming Duckett as the person responsible for Jeanifer Weldon's 1987 murder, with detectives set to meet with the State Attorney's Office to formally close the 39-year-old cold case. Judd disclosed that detectives had gone to Florida State Prison before the execution and offered Duckett a final opportunity to confess to Weldon's murder; he declined.