Bennie Demps

Common card · No. 301193

Bennie Eddie Demps (June 17, 1950 – June 7, 2000) was an American serial killer and Vietnam War veteran convicted of three murders committed between 1971 and 1976. On February 15, 1971, Demps and 16-year-old accomplice Jackie Hardie shot and killed Robert Brinkworth and Celia Puhlick, and for this double murder, Demps and Hardie were sentenced to death, but in 1973, their death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment when the U.S. Supreme Court suspended the death penalty in a 1972 landmark ruling. Four years later, on September 7, 1976, Demps and two other prisoners stabbed and killed fellow inmate Alfred Sturgis at Florida State Prison. As the death penalty was reinstated in Florida just two months earlier, Demps was found guilty and sentenced to death a second time for this offence, while the other two prisoners, James Jackson and Harry Mungin, were given additional life sentences for the same case. Demps was executed by lethal injection on June 7, 2000.

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