ORANGE COUNTY, FLORIDA: A 56-year-old Florida man has been sentenced to life in prison for the brutal 1996 murder of a convenience store worker.
Kenneth Robert Stough Jr reportedly stabbed the defenseless 31-year-old man more than 70 times and left him bleeding to death in the store bathroom.
On Friday, August 26, Ninth Judicial Circuit Court Judge Robert J Egan sentenced Stough to life imprisonment for the slaying of Terrance Paquette, authorities announced.
According to the prosecutors, they were able to identify Stough as the killer by using the DNA received from discarded beer cans.
What charges does Stough face?
After a five-day trial that ended Friday afternoon, Stough was found guilty on one count of first-degree murder with a weapon in Paquette’s death by a jury in Orange County, Florida, reported Law and Crime.
As per a press release from the State Attorney’s Office, the victim was the only employee who was supposed to be working at the Lil’ Champ mini-mart on Clarcona Ocoee Road on the morning of February 3, 1996.
However at around 6.55 am that morning, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office deputies responded to a call from the store after someone noticed that all the lights were off despite the store always being open.
Officials said that Paquette was supposed to open the store by 6 a.m. that day. A couple of men from an armored car company were there to pick up a cash deposit from the business but they discovered that the door was locked.
Deputies later got inside the store when one of Paquette’s co-workers, who closed shop the night before, handed over the keys to the business.
Paquette was stabbed 73 times
First responders found Paquette in the store bathroom where he succumbed to his injuries. An autopsy revealed that he was stabbed 73 times.
Investigators also led to believe that the attacker was also injured during the attack as the assailant left a bloody crime scene.
“This theory was based on the fact that blood other than Paquette was located throughout the Lil’ Champ convenience store. Specifically on the freezer door, the freezer flap, the lottery machine behind the counter, the key cylinder on the entry/exit door, and the push bar on the door,” police wrote in the affidavit.
“The blood pattern showed movement in the scene by the suspect; from the bathroom to the beverage freezer, to behind the counter where money was taken, and finally on the entry/exit door where the suspect more than likely escaped the scene.”
Deputies said the murderer stole Paquette’s keys and locked the business after stealing about $1,000 from the safe under the cash register.
How was Kenneth Robert Stough caught?
Even though officers collected evidence from the gruesome crime scene, they were unable to identify a suspect due to the lack of technology at that time to create a DNA profile.
A detective closed the case on September 29, 1997, pending further leads. The case was then reopened by another investigator on July 22, 2003.
He re-interviewed witnesses and took buccal swabs to compare to the suspect’s blood but there were no matches.
There were also no matches when an analyst put the unknown DNA profile from the freezer door handle into the Combined DNA Index Database (CODIS) on March 17, 2003.
In March 2021, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement finally got an outside forensic laboratory to analyze a sample for testing.
The bloodstain from the beverage freezer handle showed a link to Stough’s parents, authorities said.
Stough was 28 at the time of the Paquette murder and lived across the street from him.
Investigators claim that they obtained the beer cans after getting an order allowing GPS surveillance of the killer.
According to the documents, the GPS device was placed on Stough’s vehicle on August 27 outside of his building supply business.
