The Killing Cousins

David Alan Gore grew up in Indian River County, Florida, hunting and fishing with his older cousin Fred Waterfield. In 1981 Gore was sworn in as an auxiliary sheriff’s deputy, and he used the badge and a pistol to stop women on rural roads. By Gore’s own account, Waterfield paid him $1,000 for each young woman he delivered.

Six people were killed between February 1981 and July 1983: Ying Hua Ling, 17, and her mother Hsiang Huang Ling, 48; Judith Kay Daley, 35; and two fourteen-year-olds, Barbara Ann Byer and Angelica LaVallee. On July 26, 1983, the cousins picked up hitchhikers Lynn Elliott, 17, and Regan Martin, 14. Elliott broke loose and ran naked down the gravel driveway of the Gore house. Michael Rock, a fifteen-year-old on a bicycle, heard screaming, saw Gore chase her down and shoot her in the head, and rode home so his mother could call police.

Deputies found Elliott’s bound body in a car trunk in the driveway and Regan Martin alive in the attic. Gore confessed and led investigators to the earlier victims. He was sentenced to death in 1984 for Elliott’s murder, resentenced to death in 1992 after that sentence was vacated, and executed on April 12, 2012. Waterfield was convicted in the Byer and LaVallee killings, given two consecutive life terms in January 1985, and convicted of manslaughter in Elliott’s death.