Waterhouse executed proclaiming innocence

February 16, 2012
By: Michael Abrams
Tallahassee

Robert Waterhouse, convicted twice of murder, has been put to death at the Florida State Prison in Starke after the U.S. Supreme Court denied a last-minute appeal.

The 65-year-old former plasterer and drywall-installer was tied to a gurney and hooked up to intravenous tubing. He died 11 minutes after the procedure began. After injection, death normally occurs in three or four minutes, but some time is taken to make sure that the system is hooked up.

These lethal injection executions occur in the same “chamber” as the electrocution. The wooden electric chair is stored in a back room and can be used at the option of a prisoner.

From behind a wall in a small room, an anonymous person earned $150 for operating the system that stops the heart of the death row inmate, sending three separate kinds of chemicals into his body. The doctor or doctors who set up the system and hooked him up are not allowed, by their Hippocratic oath, to start the poisons through his body.

Those who were invited to watch in rows of chairs in front of a plate glass window don’t include any relatives. Those are the rules.

The bodies of those who are executed are scheduled to be driven down to Gainesville for an autopsy. People know how and why the prisoner died, but there are some state regulations these days.

The autopsy is required because of a bleeding incident that scandalized the prison and horrified onlookers during the 1999 execution of Allen L. “Tiny” Davis who suffered what turned out to be a nosebleed while being electrocuted.

This grisly picture can be found on the Web, as it was released in the decision of the Florida Supreme Court which halted executions for awhile.

Waterhouse, himself, had the problem of a previous murder. He had already spent eight years in prison for his manslaughter conviction in the death of a 77-year-old woman in New York whose home he burglarized.

He was released on parole, however, and police say he found another victim, this time in Florida.

He was convicted of raping and killing a 29-year old Deborah Kammerer in St. Petersburg. She had been beaten and raped and she had drowned in Tampa Bay where her body was dragged, according to police.

His last words were to deny that he had anything to do with the murder.

“You are about to witness the execution of a wrongly convicted and innocent man,” Waterhouse was reported to have said in his last statement. He has argued that the state destroyed DNA evidence that would have exonerated him in the murder. He said he had sex with Kammerer, but has denied involvement in her murder. He had been on Death Row for 31 years.

During his prison time, he had married a woman named Fran, and had a three hour visit from her in the morning before the execution.

A newspaper reporter with the same name had become a friend of Waterhouse. He wrote a story in The Guardian in Great Britain suggesting that perhaps Waterhouse had not received justice. It is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/15/robert-waterhouse-namesake-condemned-to-die?newsfeed=true

Waterhouse’s profile was quickly removed from the Department of Corrections website. He was not shy of the press and was interviewed more than 50 times by one reporter. http://riverheadnewsreview.timesreview.com/2012/02/34260/from-the-archives-what-went-wrong-with-robert-waterhouse/

He had been lucky enough to get out of jail once.

The second time proved fatal.