Tampa Strip Clubs: Death row inmate’s mental competency at issue
June 23, 2009Death row inmate’s mental competency at issue
Tribune file photo
Franklin Delano Floyd attends the penalty phase of his murder trial in 2002.
Published: June 23, 2009
Four years after Pinellas Circuit Judge Nancy Moate Ley sent convicted killer Franklin Delano Floyd to death row for murdering an exotic dancer, he’s coming back to face her again today.
This time the issue is Floyd’s mental competency, not whether he killed Cheryl Ann Commesso, whose bones were found along Interstate 275 in 1995.
Commesso disappeared in 1989, when she was working at the Mons Venus strip club in Tampa with another dancer who was married to Floyd.
Prosecutors say that woman, Sharon Marshall, died under suspicious circumstances in a hit-and-run accident in Oklahoma, but Floyd was never charged in her death or the death of her son, whom Floyd kidnapped in Oklahoma, along with the boy’s school principal.