Polk County's tie to the women of death row

BARTOW, Fla. (AP) — In July, a Polk County jury unanimously agreed that Cheyanne Jessie should be executed for brutally killing her 6-year-old daughter, Meredith.

Should Circuit Judge Jalal Harb follow that recommendation, 29-year-old Jessie would become the first woman to be condemned to death for a Polk County murder, but she wouldn't be the first Polk County woman on Florida's death row.

That would be Virginia Larzelere.

Those who grew up with her in Lake Wales might not have recognized the name emblazoned across headlines nearly 30 years ago. To them, she was Gail Antley — one of William "PeeWee" Antley's four daughters and a 1970 graduate of Lake Wales High School.

But that was then.

Since 1993, she's been inmate #842556, the moniker assigned to her after a Volusia County jury found her guilty of masterminding the execution-style killing of her husband, Norman, 39, who was gunned down in the hallway of his Edgewater dental practice in March 1991. Prosecutors argued she wanted to cash in on his $2.1 million in life insurance. To this day, Larzelere maintains she's innocent.

Larzelere, now 66, spent 15 years on death row before the Florida Supreme Court overturned her death sentence in 2008 on grounds that her lawyer, the late Jack Wilkins of Bartow, failed to adequately prepare her case during her trial's sentencing phase. The state's high court sent the case back to Volusia County, and lawyers there agreed to a life sentence without presenting any testimony.

But those 15 years, spent in part in #2201, Quad 2, T Dorm at Lowell Correctional Institution near Ocala, remain burned in her memory.

"During my death row stay at Lowell, the entire compound was locked down anytime that I exited the cell," she said in a recent email to The Ledger, "and I was accompanied...