Miami Death Row inmate to be executed for 1976 motel torture murder

Crime admin September 14, 2026 0 Comments

Miami Death Row inmate to be executed for 1976 motel torture murder

A man who tortured and beat a woman to death in a North Miami-Dade motel room is set to be executed — more than 50 years after the crime.

William Lee Thompson, 74, will be put to death on Oct. 13 at Florida State Prison for the March 30, 1976, killing of 23-year-old Sally Ivester, who had moved to Miami from Georgia with the hope of starting a new life. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Thompson’s death warrant on Friday.

Thompson is Miami-Dade’s longest-serving Death Row inmate — and is among the oldest awaiting execution in Florida.

Thompson, then 23, and Rocco James Surace, then 30, beat Ivester with chains, burned her with cigarettes and assaulted her with a chair leg during the horrific ordeal inside the Sunny Isles Motel, 16375 Biscayne Blvd. in North Miami Beach. Ivester died of shock and internal injuries.

The details of Ivester’s murder are so haunting that a juror fainted during Thompson’s trial. Police called it “Dade’s meanest murder,” according to the Miami Herald archives.

Thompson and Surace, court records state, ordered Ivester to ask her parents for money. When she came up with just $25, they were enraged. Surace took off his chain belt and began beating Ivester, and Thompson also beat Ivester — with the belt, a chair leg and a night stick.

Over the course of several hours, Ivester also was sexually assaulted, kicked and left to die, according to reports at the time in the Herald.

The men only stopped the attack, the Herald’s reports say, when they hauled Ivester to a phone booth and forced her to call her mother for more money. Ivester’s mother, Betty June Ivester, recalled that her daughter sounded as if there was a “death rattle” in her voice when she called.

“’I’m all right. I’m all right. I’m going to be all right,’” Betty June said her daughter told her, according to the Herald’s report at the time.

Case has haunted Miami courthouse

In 1976, Thompson and Surace pleaded guilty to Ivester’s murder and received death sentences. But the case didn’t end there. Instead, it dragged on for decades.

Both Thompson and Surace appealed and were granted new trials. Thompson again pleaded guilty, and in 1978 was sentenced to die for the killing. Surace was found guilty of second-degree murder after Thompson took the stand, accepting all the blame. He was sentenced to 203 years and died in prison in 1993.

“Everything I did, I did by myself,” Thompson testified during the trial, according to news reports. He later claimed that he was threatened by Surace into testifying and accepting full responsibility for the murder.

Thompson was set to be executed by the electric chair in 1982 and 1987, when then-governors Bob Graham and Bob Martinez signed death warrants for Thompson. But the executions were stayed, and in 1987, Thompson’s death sentence was overturned again.

Two years later, a jury recommended that Thompson be executed, and a judge sent him to Florida’s Death Row for the third time.

Thompson attempted several other times to spare himself from the ultimate punishment — but has been unsuccessful.

The last time he appeared in court in Miami was in 2009, when he was granted a hearing where a judge considered whether he had an intellectual disability. People with intellectual disabilities cannot be executed because the U.S. Supreme Court has found it to be “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Family held on to hope

Despite the decades of legal limbo, Ivester’s parents Betty June and James Ivester, who have since died, believed that justice would one day be carried out, according to Herald archives. They said they suffered physically and emotionally due to the lengthy court battle.

“I know that justice will be done. I stand on it. God takes care of His own,” Betty June told the Miami Herald in 1988. “I think he ought to be dead; he should have been dead 10 years ago.”

Ivester’s parents faced their daughter’s killer for the last time during Thompson’s 2009 hearing. At the time, Betty June said she would never have closure because she wouldn’t be getting her daughter back.

“As for the execution, it’s something he’s going to have to bear,” Betty June said, according to a Miami Herald story at the time. “It’s not something that’s going to give us closure, but he did the deed and he needs pay the price.”

This report was supplemented by the Miami Herald archives