The Florida Supreme Court has halted the execution of former Mascot police officer James Duckett just five days before he was scheduled to die by lethal injection, freezing a case that has haunted Lake County for nearly four decades. The stay, issued on March 26th, 2026, did not come because new evidence cleared Duckett or because his conviction was suddenly in doubt. It came because one DNA test was not yet finished. Biological evidence recovered from the underwear of 11-year-old Teresa May McCabe, the girl Duckett was convicted of abducting, raping, and murdering in 1987, was still being analyzed. The court said simply, not yet. On March 27th, the result came back. It was inconclusive. The state did not hesitate. Florida immediately asked the court to lift the stay and let the execution proceed. As of March 30th, 2026, the stay remains in place. A man on death row, an execution paused, and a scientific result that answered nothing. The question now sitting at the center of this case is whether inconclusive should be enough to stop a lethal injection, or enough to carry one out.
To understand why that question even exists, it is necessary to go back to a small town in Florida, back to 1987, back to the night an 11-year-old girl left home to buy a pencil and never came back. The last person seen with her was a police officer. Mascot, Florida, a small town in Lake County, May 11th, 1987. It was a Monday night. Nothing about it signaled what was coming. Teresa May McCabe was 11 years old. Sometime between 10:00 and 10:30 that night, she told someone at home she needed a pencil. The convenience store was close to home, close enough that it was not a conversation. Teresa walked out the front door. She made it to the store. People saw her there. What she did not do was come back. That is the detail that anchors everything. Not a runaway, not a child who wandered off, a girl on a five-minute errand who simply did not return. The entire case, the witnesses, the forensics, the trial, the death sentence, all of it traces back to the window of time between Teresa leaving her front door and the moment the store came into view. Once she arrived, the timeline tightened. Every minute after that was documented. Every person she encountered was eventually questioned. Every movement was traced. At the center of all of it, one location, one store, one night, one officer on patrol. That is where the case begins.
Teresa reached the convenience store. Outside, near the entrance, was a 16-year-old boy. He had been next door at the laundromat waiting. Nothing unusual about him being there. He was just passing time before his uncle came to pick him up. The two of them ended up talking. That conversation lasted roughly 20 minutes. Still nothing alarming. Two young people near a store on a Monday night. A public place, visible, open. Then James Duckett walked in. Duckett was a Mascot police officer. He was on duty that night, in uniform, in his patrol car. He was also, and this matters, the only officer Mascot had on patrol that night. That meant his movements were not shared with another officer. Nobody to cross-check his location. Nobody to confirm where he had been or where he was going. Just Duckett, alone, on duty. He entered the store. A clerk was working behind the counter. She watched what happened. Duckett approached and asked how old Teresa was. Not, is she okay? Not, does she need help getting home? How old is she? Then he said he was going to go check on her. On the surface, that framing sounds responsible. An officer noticing a young girl out late, checking in, doing his job. The clerk had no reason to question it in the moment. But when investigators came back to that store later, after Teresa’s body had been found, that question sat differently. He did not ask her name. He did not ask if she was lost. He asked her age. Duckett stepped back outside. Teresa was still there. The teen boy was still there. The officer had now inserted himself directly into the scene. From this point forward, every confirmed movement Teresa made involved James Duckett. The clerk’s account became one of the first pieces the prosecution used to build its timeline. Duckett being at that store, asking that specific question at that specific time, was not coincidence. It was the beginning of a sequence.
After Duckett came back outside, the teen boy made a decision that turned out to be critical. His uncle was coming to pick him up. So he went back to the laundromat to wait. When the uncle arrived, both of them looked back toward the store area. Duckett was still there, still with Teresa. They watched. What they saw next became the most important moment in this entire case. Duckett opened the passenger side of his patrol car. Teresa got in. Then Duckett walked around and got in himself. The car pulled away. That was the last confirmed sighting of Teresa McCabe alive. Two witnesses, one vehicle, one officer. Not a vague description. Not a distant glance across a parking lot. Two people who watched it happen up close and remembered it clearly. The patrol car sighting became the load-bearing fact of the entire prosecution. It did something no other piece of evidence could do alone. It placed Teresa inside Duckett’s vehicle, voluntarily or not, with no one else present, after which she was never seen alive again. The teen boy added detail to his account. He said that during the time they were all outside near the store, he never saw Teresa climb onto the hood of Duckett’s patrol car. The uncle said the same thing. He watched the interaction. He saw Duckett with Teresa. He watched her get into the passenger seat. At no point did he see her on the hood. Not once. That detail, the hood, meant almost nothing to either of them that night. They were not looking for it. They had no reason to document it. It only surfaced later when investigators asked them directly, after fingerprint evidence had already been recovered from the car. At that point, both witnesses confirmed independently, Teresa never touched the hood at the store, which meant if her fingerprints were on the hood, they got there somewhere else. But that came later. Right now, the patrol car was gone. Teresa was inside it. The witnesses drove away, and Mascot was quiet. No alarm, no pursuit, no radio call flagging anything unusual. An officer in uniform had just driven away with a child, and from the outside, it had looked completely routine.
By around 11:00, Teresa had not come home. A five-minute errand had stretched past an hour. Her mother waited. Then she stopped waiting and started moving. She went to the convenience store first. The clerk told her what she had seen, that Duckett had been there, had spoken with Teresa, and may have taken her to the police station. That was a reasonable thing to hear. An officer notices a child out late, brings her somewhere safe while the family is contacted. Teresa’s mother held onto that possibility and went looking for the patrol car. She could not find it. She drove to a neighboring police department, asked for help, explained what she knew. Then she came back to Mascot, and eventually, she walked into the Mascot police department and filed a missing person report. The officer who took it was James Duckett. Let that land for a moment. The clerk had told her Duckett might have Teresa. She had spent time driving around looking for his patrol car. She had gone to another department for help. And when she finally filed a formal report, the person on the other side of that report was the last officer confirmed to have been with her daughter. Duckett gave her an account. He told her he had found Teresa with the older boy. He separated them. Then he told Teresa to go home. That was his version. Simple, resolved, finished. According to Duckett, Teresa had walked away just fine. He went further. He collected a photograph of Teresa from the family. He said he was making flyers. He framed himself as part of the search. But one store clerk later gave investigators a different account. Duckett had brought a flyer to the store. He told her not to post it. The reason he gave, the photo was not good enough. He said he would come back with a better one. He never did. The flyer was never posted. The better photo never arrived. The official early narrative about Teresa’s disappearance, the one that shaped the first hours of the search, came directly from the officer last seen putting her into his car. That created a specific kind of problem for investigators. Duckett was not just a witness to what happened. He was inside the response to it. He took the report. He collected evidence from the family. He made decisions about what got posted and what did not. Every step in the initial search had his fingerprints on it. Figuratively, before investigators found them literally. The night ended without Teresa. The search was shaped by Duckett’s account. His account had her walking home safely at a time when two witnesses had already placed her in his patrol car, driving away from the store, heading somewhere unknown.
The search carried through the night. Teresa did not come home. The next morning, May 12th, 1987, her body was found in a lake, less than a mile from the convenience store. Less than a mile. The same store where two witnesses had watched her get into a patrol car. The same area where her mother had gone looking for her the night before. That proximity was not just geography. It was the first piece of physical evidence that collapsed the gap between the last known sighting and the end. The case changed permanently in that moment. This was no longer a missing child. This was a crime scene, a body, a cause of death that had to be established, evidence that had to be collected before it degraded. The medical examiner’s findings were precise. Teresa had been sexually assaulted. She had been strangled, and she had drowned, with drowning recorded as the official cause of death. The examiner’s testimony also made clear this was a sequence, not a single act. Multiple things had been done to an 11-year-old girl before she ended up in that lake. Biological evidence was also recovered from her clothing. That evidence was collected, documented, and it would eventually become the subject of legal battles that stretched nearly four decades into the future. But at this point, in May of 1987, it was simply evidence. One more thread in a case that was now moving fast. Everything Duckett had told Teresa’s mother the night before now sat under a different light. He had said Teresa walked home safely. She was found in a lake, less than a mile away, the morning after he was last seen driving away with her. The distance between his account and that lake was the space the prosecution had to fill, and investigators were now working forward from two points at once. The patrol car sighting the night before, and the crime scene that morning. The question was no longer where Teresa went. It was what the physical evidence could prove about how she got there, and who brought her.
Investigators processed the lake scene. They were not just looking for cause of death. They were looking for anything that placed a vehicle there. They found it. Tire impressions left near where Teresa’s body was recovered. The tread pattern was unusual. Goodyear Eagle mud and snow tires, not a common choice for Central Florida. No snow, no ice, no reason most local vehicles would have them. Investigators widened the inquiry. How many vehicles in the area were running those tires? The answer came from a local tire center. A shipment had come in by mistake. Two sets of Goodyear Eagle mud and snow tires, ordered for somewhere else, delivered to Mascot. The center installed them on the two vehicles they had in for service at the time. Both were Mascot police cars. That changed everything. The tire impressions at the lake were not pointing toward a category of vehicle. They were pointing toward a pool of two. In circumstantial murder cases, tire track evidence works differently than fingerprints. It does not place a person at a scene. It narrows who could have been there, and eliminates almost everyone else. Here, that narrowing was severe. Two cars in the entire area with those tires, both patrol vehicles, both from the same small department. Duckett was the only officer on patrol that night. So the question the defense now had to answer was not just why witnesses saw Teresa get into his car. It was why tire impressions consistent with his patrol vehicle were found at the same lake where Teresa’s body was recovered. The case had crossed a line. Witness memory could be questioned. Tire impressions at a specific location with a verified accidental origin story were much harder to dismiss. The vehicle was no longer background. It was evidence.
With the tire evidence established, investigators turned to the patrol car itself. They examined it closely, and what they found directly contradicted what Duckett had already told them. Fingerprints on the hood, two sets, Duckett’s and Teresa’s. The print pattern was not random contact. The Florida Supreme Court later noted the positioning indicated Teresa had been sitting backward on the hood and moving up the car. Before the physical evidence surfaced, Duckett had been clear. Teresa was never on the hood of his car. That was his statement to investigators before his arrest. Flat, certain, no room for interpretation. But the uncle, the man who had watched Duckett put Teresa into the patrol car, had already added something important to his account. He said he never saw Teresa touch the hood. Not at the store, not at any point during the sighting. So both Duckett and the uncle agreed on one thing. Teresa had not been on the hood at the convenience store. The uncle’s testimony was not designed to trap Duckett. It was simply what he observed. But combined with the print evidence, it quietly closed the only exit. After investigators introduced the fingerprint findings, Duckett’s position shifted. He no longer said Teresa was never on the hood. Now, he suggested she may have sat there earlier, at the store, before the uncle arrived. That revision mattered for one reason. It did not arrive with new information. It arrived after the evidence did. A denial that held firm until the prints were on the table. Then suddenly, a new explanation appeared. Juries notice timing like that. A changed story before evidence appears can look like honesty. A changed story after looks like reaction. The hood prints did not just add physical contact to the record. They showed the jury that Duckett’s original account could not survive the evidence. Once that happened, everything else he said carried less weight. The fingerprints damaged Duckett’s credibility. What came next damaged his distance from the crime.
During the examination of evidence recovered from Teresa, a pubic hair was found in her undergarments. It went to the FBI. FBI analyst Michael Malone examined it at trial. His testimony was specific. There was a high degree of probability the hair came from Duckett. He went further and methodically excluded the other men known to have been around Teresa that night. The teen boy, the uncle, others placed in her proximity. None of them were consistent with the hair recovered. Duckett was. That gave the state something the tire tracks and fingerprints alone could not provide, a biological link between Duckett’s body and Teresa’s. But the prosecution was not finished. They brought in witnesses the defense had not expected to define the case. Other young women. Multiple women came forward with accounts of Duckett’s conduct while he was on duty. Two described the same sequence. Duckett had picked them up in his patrol car at night, driven them to remote, isolated areas, and made sexual advances. The defense challenged this testimony. The Florida Supreme Court later reviewed the question directly and ruled that testimony from two of those women had been properly admitted. The reason mattered. It was not admitted to show Duckett was generally dangerous. Courts do not allow that. It was admitted because the conduct showed a recognizable pattern. Young females, nighttime contact, a patrol car, isolation. The same elements present the night Teresa disappeared. This is what lawyers call similar fact evidence. It does not prove what happened on a specific night. It argues that the method was not accidental. That Duckett had used the same setup before with different victims, and it had produced the same result. Control through authority, isolation through the patrol car, no witnesses. By the time the prosecution rested, the case had layers the defense could not peel back one at a time. Last seen witnesses, tire impressions at the lake, fingerprints on the hood, biological evidence linking Duckett to Teresa, a changed story. And now, a documented pattern of conduct involving the same vehicle and the same method. Each piece was circumstantial, but circumstantial does not mean weak. It means the evidence surrounds the defendant from every direction and leaves fewer and fewer ways out.
The jury deliberated. They had no confession, no direct eyewitness to the killing itself. What they had was a case built piece by piece, each layer pointing in the same direction. In 1988, the verdict came back. Guilty, sexual battery, first-degree murder. The jury then had to decide the sentence. The vote was eight to four. Eight jurors recommended death. The trial judge accepted that recommendation and imposed the death sentence. Two aggravating factors drove the decision. First, the murder occurred during or immediately after a sexual battery. Second, the killing was especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel. Both findings were supported by the medical examiner’s testimony. The sequence of injuries told a story the jury had already heard. Duckett was sentenced to death. In 1990, the Florida Supreme Court reviewed the conviction and the sentence. It affirmed both. The court found the circumstantial case was legally sufficient. No confession required, no single smoking gun moment required. The accumulated evidence, as a whole, was enough. What that affirmance did was harden the case into something durable. Post-conviction challenges came over the years. They continued for decades. The conviction held. The death sentence held. Every legal door Duckett’s team pushed on stayed closed. For nearly 40 years, that was the state of the case. A man on death row. A verdict that had survived every challenge thrown at it. A sentence that Florida said it was ready to carry out. The only question left was when. On February 27th, 2026, Governor Ron DeSantis signed James Duckett’s death warrant. The execution was scheduled for March 31st, 2026. That is normally the final narrowing. A signed warrant means the legal process has run its course. It means the state is ready. But Duckett’s attorneys had been pursuing one remaining thread. New DNA testing. Biological evidence recovered from Teresa’s undergarments had never been subjected to modern forensic analysis. The defense argued that testing it could change the picture. A lower court agreed and granted the request. So as the execution date approached, two processes were running at the same time. Florida was preparing to carry out the execution, and a lab was still processing DNA evidence from a 1987 crime scene.
On March 26th, five days before the scheduled execution, the Florida Supreme Court stepped in. It issued a stay. The execution was paused pending further order. The court directed the state to report the status of the DNA testing. That stay meant something. Courts do not pause executions lightly. The fact that Florida’s highest court intervened five days before the date indicated the unfinished testing was being treated as a serious open question, not a formality. On March 27th, the result came in. Inconclusive. Not a match to someone else. Not a clear exoneration. The test produced no definitive answer either way. The state moved immediately. Florida argued that because the testing was complete and because the result did not exonerate Duckett, the stay should be lifted. Their position was straightforward. Inconclusive is not innocence. The conviction stands. The sentence stands. Proceed. As of March 30th, 2026, the Florida Supreme Court had not lifted the stay. It remained in place pending further order. That left the case in a position no one had expected after nearly four decades. Not executed, not exonerated, suspended. The science had been given its moment, and it had not delivered a clean answer. Which raises a question the legal system now has to answer directly. When the punishment is permanent and irreversible, what level of certainty is required before it is carried out? Inconclusive does not clear James Duckett, but it also did not close the door. One more thing sits at the edge of this story. Not as evidence, not as proof, just as context. Duckett’s son, Joshua, remains connected in public record to another unresolved case. The disappearance of his own son, Trenton Duckett, in 2006. That case was never solved. Two generations, two unresolved disappearances, one name at the center of both. Teresa McCabe left home to buy a pencil. She was 11 years old, and nearly 40 years later, the man convicted of killing her is still alive, still on death row, still waiting. So is her family.
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