‘Hog Trail Killer’ may have killed as many as 13. Florida is about to execute him

The Hog Trail Killer's approach was devious.

He'd target young white men who needed some cash. He'd offer them a couple hundred bucks to pose nude in bondage photos. And once he got them where he wanted them − isolated and tied up in the woods − he would put them through living hell before killing them.

Prosecutors called it "a dark fantasy" come to life along Florida's Gulf Coast in the 1990s.

Now 30 years later, Florida is set to execute the man identified as the Hog Trail Killer, Daniel Conahan, Jr. He is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Thursday, Sept. 10, for the murder of 21-year-old Richard Allen Montgomery's nude body was found tied to a tree, covered in rope burns, and strangled on April 16, 1996. Montgomery's genitalia had been cut off.

"It was a death which occurred solely for the pleasure of the defendant," prosecutor Bob Lee told jurors in 1999, according to an archived story in The News-Press, part of the USA TODAY Network.

Jurors also heard from a man who testified that Conahan had tied him naked to a tree, performed a sex act on him and tried to strangle him…

Original source: https://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/