2 – Gary Alvord (39 Years)
In the end, it seemed as if Gary Alvord was ‘too crazy’ to be executed. He was sentenced to death for a triple murder on April 9, 1974, but died from a brain tumor on May 19, 2013. Alvord was convicted of the cold-blooded killings of Georgia Tully, her daughter Ann Hermann, and her granddaughter Lynn Herrmann which occurred on June 18, 1973. There was no doubt about his guilt and the vicious nature of the murders. The fact that he also raped Lynn Herrmann meant few people complained when Alvord was sentenced to death in Florida the following year.
Alvord was born in Michigan in 1947 and doctors suggested he suffered from antisocial personality disorder and paranoid schizophrenia from a young age. He was jailed for raping a 10-year-old girl in 1967 but was released after three years because a jury overturned the verdict and declared he was not guilty because of insanity. Alvord spent the next three years in a mental institution but escaped and managed to live a relatively normal existence; he even had a girlfriend.
It was always likely that Alvord would revert to his criminal ways, and he did so in the most violent manner within a few months of his move to Tampa. One day, the owner of the Guys and Dolls Billiard Hall, Ann Herrmann, got into an argument over the cost of a pool game with someone Alvord knew. Apparently, Alvord said: “Usually when someone rips off my friends, I kill them.” Unfortunately, this was no idle boast, because Alvord broke into the Herrmann house and strangled three generations of the family. At that time, he used the alias ‘Paul Brock’ and confessed the murders to his girlfriend.
Alvord was among half a dozen inmates considered in the late 1970s when prominent people in the state of Florida began looking to resume executions, but his mental state prevented it. In what is a terrible paradox, Alvord was on Death Row in the first place because he was most likely insane, yet this mental condition ensured he could never be executed. He was sent to a state facility in 1984 to receive treatment yet doctors refused to comply; they didn’t want to restore his mental faculties just to ensure he died.
Alvord was returned to Death Row in 1987 and remained there until his death in 2013. His lawyer, Bill Shepherd, complained about a ‘sick’ system that spent a fortune keeping a man who couldn’t be killed on Death Row. During the 39 years Alvord waited to die, 75 other prisoners were executed in Florida, with most of them spending less than half the time that he did on Death Row. Death warrants were signed for him in 1981 and 1984, but he was always deemed mentally unfit. In the end, Alvord died from a brain tumor; his health was poor in his later years as he also suffered from lung cancer.