Debbi Johnson, sister of murder victim Karen Slattery, speaks to reporters after the execution of Duane Owen on June 15 at Florida State Prison. Behind her are former Delray Beach police officers (l-r) Robert Stevens, John Evans and Ross Licata. Daron Dean/The Coastal Star
By Rich Pollack and Jane Musgrave
Margaret Garetano-Castor hadn’t yet cried that day.
Last month, as she and longtime friends huddled together in Boynton Beach at the almost 40-year-old gravesite of Karen Slattery — their classmate from elementary school and high school — Castor remained strong.
Hours later, after Duane Eugene Owen was pronounced dead at 6:14 p.m. Thursday, June 15, emotions that had been in hibernation, perhaps for decades, escaped uncontrollably.
“Once the day had passed, it was like a huge exhale and I cried my eyes out,” said Castor, who was watching television news coverage with her husband after Owen’s execution. “I said, ‘It’s over.’”
For some, the death of Owen — who was convicted of murdering the 14-year-old Slattery while she was babysitting in Delray Beach and of the beating death of 38-year-old Boca Raton mother Georgianna Worden — may be the closing of a chapter.
For others, however, the physical finality that comes with the end of the killer’s life will do little to erase the invisible emotional scars that could last a lifetime.
“Closure may be a myth, but justice isn’t,” Karen Slattery’s sister Debbi Johnson said during a news conference minutes after the execution.
Behind her as she spoke, a small group of former Delray Beach police officers who witnessed the execution stood silently. Among them was Ross Licata, the lead detective in the investigation.
“This isn’t closure,” Licata, now Lighthouse Point’s police chief, said later. “I’ve been thinking more about this case since the execution than I did before.”
Licata, who saw the evidence of Owen’s violence in the home where Karen Slattery had been stabbed 18 times that March 24, has stayed in contact with Johnson and her mother,
Carolyn Slattery, over the years even after they moved to Monroe County, where Johnson is a deputy sheriff.
“I don’t know if there’s a day that goes by when I don’t think about Karen Slattery and the things that happened to her and the impact it had on her family, her community and me,” he said. “I saw the brutality and I felt the heartache of the family.”
All of what Licata saw, how he and others in the department struggled for two months to find leads and how the case finally came together will stay with him for as long as he lives, Licata said.
“There is never going to be a time in my life when I don’t think about this case,” he said.
Friends and family visit Karen Slattery’s grave last month in Boynton Beach, hours before her killer was executed. Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star
‘I’m still afraid’
For friends of Karen’s, young teens in 1984 who are now in their 50s with adult children, the fear they felt in the immediate aftermath of her murder still lingers.
Ana McNamara, who had called the house where Karen was babysitting the night she was killed but got no answer, remembers being awakened early the next morning by a phone call from Karen’s mother, who was crying.
“She said, ‘Ana, she’s dead,’ and told me there was a detective who wanted to talk to me,” McNamara said.
Investigators say it’s possible Owen might still have been in the house when McNamara called.
McNamara said that after the murder she became more cautious and didn’t ride her bike around the neighborhood as she had done.
“I was afraid,” she said. “I’m still afraid.”
Another classmate says she still won’t sleep with an open window.
Others who went to St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic School in Delray Beach or Boca Raton’s St. John Paul II Academy with Karen, and who, like her, were part of a group of friends who would exchange babysitting jobs, all stayed home after Karen’s death.
“It was impossible to find a babysitter for months,” said Kevin McCoy, a retired Boca Raton police officer who was the lead detective on the Georgianna Worden case. “People were afraid, they were really shocked.”
That fear was well-founded. During a collection of interviews in early June 1984 with detectives from both Boca Raton and Delray Beach, the then 23-year-old Owen wove a horrifying tale of his menacing actions that escalated over time.
Retired Delray Beach detective Marc Woods says that Owen confessed to several burglaries in the city, including some in which women’s underwear was taken. He also later confessed to burglarizing a home and hitting a Florida Atlantic University professor over the head with a concrete block. He later would give her the nickname Professor Blockhead.
In Boca Raton, Owen detailed for McCoy and other investigators how he committed a half-dozen burglaries and assaults, including a couple that occurred prior to the Slattery murder. Owen confessed to the 1982 assault of the resident manager of the Peter Pan Motel in Boca. The attack left his victim with a fractured skull and brain damage. In February 1984 he assaulted an 18-year-old woman, hitting her over the head with a wrench he had found in a nearby truck. In May 1984, less than two months after Karen Slattery’s murder, Owen nearly got caught breaking into a home where a woman was sleeping alone when the woman’s brother came home, saw him and chased after him.
A few days later, he broke into a home not far from Worden’s where he threw a clothes iron at a woman, hitting her in the head and inflicting a wound that needed stitches.
Owen almost got caught again, according to McCoy, when he broke into an occupied home just east of Federal Highway and almost fell into the pool while running away when the women screamed. That same night, he broke into Worden’s house and killed her. It was a December 1982 arrest, after Owen was caught in the ceiling above the women’s bathroom in a bowling alley, that would eventually lead to his becoming a “person of interest” in the Worden and Slattery cases.
After Boca Raton police received a pencil sketch from FAU police of a man a student had seen masturbating outside a classroom, McCoy compared it to a photo of Owen taken after the bowling alley incident and kept in the department’s book of known sex offenders.
When the student later picked out Owen’s picture from a photo lineup, he became someone McCoy thought warranted more attention.
“I thought all along he was a strong suspect,” McCoy said, although there was not yet a connection to Worden’s murder. “Honestly, we had nothing else.”
Owen was arrested just a few days after Worden’s murder on an outstanding warrant and false ID charges. He was also charged with one of the burglaries. The murder charge came later, after his fingerprints were found on a library book — Mistral’s Daughter — in Worden’s bedroom.
Although the Karen Slattery case has always overshadowed Georgianna Worden’s murder — perhaps because of Karen’s age or because of the fear that lingered during the two-month gap between the crime and the arrest — it was the Boca case and a sketch that eventually led to both being solved.
While he was in jail, Owen’s criminal mind continued to calculate ways he could get out and he concocted an escape scheme that almost worked.
A former Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputy, who was a sergeant in the jail at the time, said that Owen tucked himself into a large laundry basket used to take out trash and hid under bags of garbage. Had it not been for a deputy who noticed the garbage bags moving, Owen could have gotten to an area outside the jail building, scaled a fence and fled.
McCoy said that during a break in the interview process at the jail, Owen climbed up on a table inside the interview room and started checking for a way to hide in the ceiling.
Another view of killer
While investigators will tell you that Owen was cold, calculating and pure evil, Palm Beach County Public Defender Carey Haughwout, who was in private practice when she was appointed to represent Owen the second time he was convicted of Slattery’s murder — after a successful appeal — sees a different side of the man. Haughwout said she grieves for Worden’s and Slattery’s families. But, she insisted, Owen wasn’t a monster. “He was smart, witty, compassionate. He built relationships,” she said. “But he was traumatized. He was damaged. It’s so easy to see folks as perpetrators of a bad act. He was so much more than that.”
Haughwout, who traveled to Starke to witness the execution, said the meticulously scripted death ritual was difficult to watch. Although she has experienced the loss of close friends and family, she said she was unprepared.
“I just can’t wrap my head around the fact that in our society we have choreographed murders that spectators watch,” she said several days after she joined reporters, prison officials and family members of Owen’s victims to see the 62-year-old take his last breath.
Her reaction to the macabre scene was compounded by her decades-long relationship with Owen and her belief that he was “deeply mentally ill.”
Psychiatrists who examined Owen over the years said he was schizophrenic and had gender dysphoria. He wanted to be a woman. Injuries he sustained when a car he was repairing fell on his head damaged the frontal lobe of his brain, which controls impulsivity, they said in court papers.
That combination, along with alcohol and drug abuse that began when he was 9, led to delusional thinking. Owen believed he could change his gender by absorbing a woman’s hormones during sex, the psychiatrists said. Prosecutors scoffed at the diagnoses, insisting Owen knew exactly what he was doing when he raped and killed Slattery and Worden.
But, even judges acknowledged, Owen was haunted by a horrific childhood. “Is it any wonder the defendant is, and has been, mentally sick?” Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Harold Cohen wrote in a 1999 order sentencing Owen to death.
Cohen ruled that the trauma Owen experienced didn’t trump the brutality of Slattery’s murder. But, he said, it contributed to Owen’s actions.
Detective Woods, who recorded more than 20 hours of jailhouse interviews with Owen, acknowledges that Owen had deep psychological issues but says they don’t excuse his calculated actions.
“Looking at the horrific manner of his crimes and his consistent efforts not to get caught, it shows that he knew exactly what he was doing,” Woods said.
Traumatic childhood
Haughwout, who has represented more than a dozen people who faced the death penalty, said all had scars from their upbringing. But, she said, Owen’s childhood was “one of the most heart-breaking and traumatic I’ve ever seen.”
During his Indiana upbringing, his parents were alcoholics. His father regularly raped Owen’s mother and locked his half-brother in the basement. Owen watched his mother die a long, painful death from cancer.
Two years later, when Owen was 13, he and his brother found their father in the family car, dead from self-inflicted carbon monoxide poisoning.
Afraid they would be separated, the boys left their father in the garage for several days before calling authorities. With no family to care for them, Owen and his brother were sent to an orphanage in Michigan where Owen was sexually and physically abused by older boys and staff. They eventually escaped and made their way to Palm Beach County, where Owen began his savage spree. After one of his earliest arrests, Owen realized he had a dangerous fixation and tried to get help, Haughwout said.
None was offered.
“If only there had been intervention, we wouldn’t be here and Karen Slattery would be,” she told WPTV-Channel 5 in the days before the execution.
During the 38 years he spent on death row, Owen developed an interest in physics, astronomy and black holes, Haughwout said. His final note, released by prison officials after his death, may have reflected that.
“I have seen the visions of the crow, my energy and particles will transform ad infinitum, I will live on. I am Tula. 13.”
The last line may be a reference to a book by Caroline “Tula” Cossey, a transgender woman who became a top model.
Not surprisingly, Owen’s name was not mentioned at the graveside gathering of classmates on the day of the execution. Instead, remembrances of Karen and sharing of stories brought smiles.
“In a weird way, Karen has continued to keep us together,” said former classmate Carlos Muhletaler.
Like Castor, Slattery’s best friend, Woods says the execution didn't close the book on the murders for him but did come with a small bit of relief.
“I can’t say anything is better after the execution but I can say that it feels different, like it’s finished,” he said. “A big weight is gone.”
