Kayle Bates was the 116th person executed by Florida since 1976, for the brutal slaying of a young woman in Panama City in 1982. Although he was quickly apprehended and convicted of his crime, it would take much longer for him to end up in the execution chamber. Bates, an African-American, was born in Riviera Beach on February 19, 1958. He was the eldest child of Jack Bates and Inez Williams and he had a sister Susan, who was seven years his junior. Jack was described as an amicable but lazy head of a household who had little interest in work or fatherhood and mostly left his wife to put food on the table and raise the children. Inez worked herself to the point of exhaustion many days to provide for the family. Kayle himself was about as good of a child as any parent could ask for; well-behaved, polite, responsible, and a good big brother to his sister.When Kayle was 9 years old, his mother tired of her useless husband and filed for divorce. The divorce hurt him and damaged his psyche; Susan, who was only 3 at the time, didn't understand what was going on. However she would later say their mother told her Jack was a nice guy, but completely useless and uninterested in being the head of a household. Inez eventually married a different man named Cleveland Williams. Williams was a good stepfather who accepted Kayle and Susan as his own and was the provider his biological father never was, working as a groundskeeper for the city park. Jack Bates also re-married to a woman named Eleanor Walker and she too eventually came to bond with his children.
The neighborhood the Bateses lived in was by black standards a quite well-off, orderly, and middle class community; most of its residents were gainfully employed and churchgoing people who took pride in their community. Kayle was a reliable student in school who tried his best, but did not do well academically--psychiatrists described him as simply being "low IQ" and in the 7th grade was put in special ed class. His IQ was estimated as being somewhere in the 70s or 80s and he had the approximate intellectual level of an 8 or 9 year old child. Bates graduated high school in 1976, finishing 409th out of a class of 458.He was remembered as a well-behaved child who joined a scout troop and was well-liked by others in the neighborhood and he was also involved with athletics and his family's church. Kayle was described as a "gentleman" to his high school girlfriends. After finishing school, Bates, like a number of his classmates, decided to join the military. He and his friend Reginald Smith both enlisted in the Army but Kayle failed the entrance exams and was rejected by the service. He re-took the exam six months later and just barely qualifed as an infantryman. Bates underwent basic training at Ft. Benning, Georgia. Afterwards, he volunteered for the Florida National Guard. Bates eventually contemplated moving to Tallahassee and moved into an apartment with his father's stepdaughter Diedre and her roommate Renita Bookman, both enrolled at Florida A&M.Bates and Bookman soon started dating and by 1979 he'd gotten hired by Jim Walters Paper Co. as a delivery driver. The two got married and became parents when their daughter Aleah was born in 1980. In four years delivering for Jim Walters, Bates was a dependable employee well-liked by colleagues and received a pay raise each year for his good performance.
Aside from that, Bates served part-time in the National Guard and was a reliable service member, well-liked by colleagues, although in an unfavorable situation he would get unnerved and try to avoid other people. He successfully completed a jungle warfare training course down in Panama and his company was sent to help deal with the 1980 Miami Riots, which Bates handled himself well in. In the spring of 1982, the Bateses became homeowners as Renita was now expecting their second child and they decided they needed a proper house rather than an apartment for the children. Kayle was excited but also a bit nervous about the prospect of two children in the household and in the first week of June, he learned that he would not be promoted to sergeant in the National Guard, which he particularly hoped for due to the increased pay. According to his service records, Bates was denied promotion as he was not considered smart enough and it was a "significant blow to him" especially as he'd purchased his home with the idea that he would get the promotion.On June 14, 1982, a Monday, Bates got up and had breakfast with his wife and daughter as he prepared to head off to work; Renita recalled that he was his normal self that morning and gave off no indication whatsoever of what was coming. He watered the front lawn and then took off. His co-workers also noticed nothing off about him; he was cheerful and eager to discuss a couple of boxing matches that had taken place over the weekend. Bates got into his delivery truck and took with him a folding knife which was a normal tool he carried on the job. He made his usual rounds of paper product deliveries in Panama City that morning and pulled up to ABC Printing a little before noon. Bates talked to an employee there who also recalled him as being cheerful and entirely normal.
At 12:30 PM, a witness named John Boney saw his truck on Route 39 at Aztec Village heading towards Lynn Haven just outside Panama City. This location was a 10 minute drive from the Lynn Haven State Farm office. Bates pulled his truck down the dead end lane behind the State Farm office to eat his lunch; he had made at least delivery to the place before and was passably familiar with it. At 1:00 PM, Janet Renee White, 24, was arriving back at the office from her lunch hour which she usually spent at home with her husband Randy, a salesman for Maxwell House Coffee. According to Randy White, his wife ate a sandwich and watched the soap opera Days Of Our Lives as she ritually did every day. The couple then parted ways to go back to their respective jobs.An acquaintance of hers named Terri Walden spotted White, thought about stopping to chat with her, and then realized she'd be late for work and thought better of it. While this was going on, her friend Geri Gilchrist called up the State Farm office. White picked up the phone and said "State Farm..." followed by the sound of screaming, shouting, and the phone being dropped. Gilchrist was alarmed by this; she immediately hung up, then called 911 and reported what she'd heard. A female Lynn Haven PD officer named Kate Spiedel responded to the call and immediately headed for the State Farm office.
Meanwhile, Renee (she went by her middle rather than her first name) White's supervisor Jim Dickerson had just come back from lunch. He saw her '79 Chevette parked outside and as he went into the office realized something was very wrong here. On the floor lay Renee's shoes, car keys, a can of mace, and the cover to a typewriter. As Dickerson went to his own office, he saw the drapes covering the sliding glass door pulled open and his desktop calculator unplugged. He walked back to the front of the office just as Officer Spiedel arrived. It was about 1:08 PM. Spiedel and Dickerson noticed the sliding glass door at the rear of the building was unlocked and ajar but there was no sign of anyone or anything behind the building. Police Chief David Roy and Officer Al Cieota of the Lynn Haven PD arrived as backup.Noticing the Knight Paper Co. delivery truck behind the office, still more officers arrived as the search expanded, including Bay County Sheriff Lavelle Pitts. Walking some distance outside the rear of the office and to the edge of a wooded area, he found Renee White's body...
White lay in some bushes, blood all over her face and clothes, which had been partially removed, and obviously dead of stab wounds to the chest. Just then, Kayle Bates came out of the woods, a few cattails in hand. Officer Cieota pointed a shotgun at him, demanded to see some ID, and then arrested him on suspicion of murder. Bates was soaking wet, his clothes covered in mud, and there was a visible blood stain on the left side of his shirt. Taken downtown, he denied everything and claimed he parked his truck well behind the office so as to prevent any employees there from coming and bothering him and to eat lunch and collect some cattails to plant around his home. The blood he said was his and he had a gum disease. Inside Bates's pocket was what later turned out to be Renee White's wedding ring. He insisted he stopped at the insurance office but just for directions. White didn't know where the place he was looking for was located, so he left and while departing saw the ring laying in front of the office.Bates then went in the woods to collect cattails and as he came out found White's body. He examined it, realized she was dead, and fled the scene in a panic. When the detectives told him that his story was contradicted by various evidence at the crime scene, Bates then came up with a different story. This time he said he saw a white man attacking White, he tried to go over and help her, and the man punched him in the lip, causing him to bleed onto his shirt. He fled and hid in the woods. The detectives didn't buy this story either, so Bates told them yet another one.
This time, said Bates, he claimed he went in the office to ask for directions. White was cordial at first but then inexplicably lost it and started yelling and throwing things. She sprayed mace at him; he attempted to wrestle the mace can out of her hands, and they got into a brawl. White grabbed a pair of scissors to use as a weapon and during their struggle accidentally stabbed herself. Bates admitted that he then tried to rape her but was unsuccessful in the attempt. He insisted he didn't take her wedding ring though.Apparently Renee White was quite conscious about self-defense and had two different cans of mace with her; one on her keychain and another in her desk drawer at work. Both cans had been partially used. Her desk phone was turned around as if someone came into the office and grabbed it from in front of the counter to answer it. The disordered condition of the office indicated that a struggle had taken place there; there was no blood inside the office, but a tiny amount was found on the sliding glass door.Autopsy of Renee found that she died of two stab wounds to the chest that punctured the heart and caused her to die of a cardiac tamponade, ie. blood filling the pericardium (the sac surrounding the heart) and crushing it. She would have lost consciousness in only a minute and died in about five minutes. These wounds were inflicted with a knife matching the type that Bates carried. She had also been strangled via ligature and her eyes had the petichial hemorrhages consistent with strangulation. Renee's head and limbs had numerous bruises and scrapes consistent with a struggle. There was no sign that her wedding ring was forcibly removed and she wasn't sexually penetrated, however there was dried semen on both his and Renee's clothing and fibers from his pants found on her clothes.
Psychiatric examinations of Bates concluded that he had a difficult time handling stressful situations and would tend to fall apart under them. He also had a pronounced lack of self-awareness or self-examination as well as an overly rigid sense of morality and duty and became depressed when he couldn't always live up to it. It was believed that he entered the State Farm office in an attempt to steal from it out of a desperate need for money. Renee White was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.Bates was indicted for first degree murder with a deadly weapon on July 6 as well as robbery, kidnapping, and attempted rape, and tried the following January. It took only three days before the jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to death. Bate appealed his conviction and the state supreme court tossed it due to an improper procedure and ordered a re-trial. His second trial in 1985 saw him re-sentenced to death. Bate's execution was scheduled for December 1989 but the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals granted him a stay of execution on appeal.Florida law when the crime had been committed allowed either death or life with the possibility of parole in 25 years. By 1995 this had been amended to allow life without parole. Bates was worried the jury would re-sentence him to death out of fear he'd get out someday otherwise; were his sentence commuted to life, he might be paroled by 2008 and he had already served half the mandatory minimum. The modified life without parole statute didn't apply retroactively but Bate indicated that he would waive his ex posto facto rights in exchange for getting a life without parole sentence. However the state supreme court denied his request; come what may, Bate at his third trial would be sentenced according to 1982 Florida laws, not 1995 Florida laws.
The new trial began May 15 and lasted ten days. No major new evidence was presented and although the jury was willing to give Bate life without parole, they were informed that that was not an option and so he was once again sentenced to death. Prior to his sentencing in July, an evidentiary hearing showed Bate's good conduct in prison and that he had not "forcibly" torn Renee White's wedding ring from her finger. By 2000 Bates had exhausted his appeals.By 2025, the end had finally come for Bates after a last round of unsuccessful Federal and state appeals. Governor Ron DeSantis signed his death warrant July 18, and he was executed by lethal injection on August 19, forty-three years and three months after the murder of Renee White.
>>17965521>>17965514dis gun be gud
>>17965521WTF? She was hot. This nog should have suffered a far more slow, drawn-out death for this. I don't even care how he helped old ladies cross the street when he was a Boy Scout or that his mom said he was the best son a mother could ask for or whatever other excuses.
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>my life is in total disarray i didn't get that promotion at work and i was dumb enough to buy a house before i knew that therefore i must killNo fuck you, Kayle.
>>17965514>>17965517too bad. he had a pretty good start to life but in the end he was still a nig and just couldn't help nigging out.
>>17965578he's lucky this was 1980s Florida and not 1920s Florida because in that time he would have been swinging from a tree
oh boy another unnecessarily drawn out execution where the guy's guilt was never in the slightest in doubt and somehow he still is allowed to fight it for decades. i mean his happened in Reagan's first term and he's just being executed like last week? come on.
>>17965541i can tell she had le no boobs and was probably an A-cup
>>17965521>and watched the soap opera Days Of Our Livesyep it's a white woman
>>17965591>he's luckyBeing hung immediately would probably be more humane than being in a florida prison for 50 years
>>17965715Or a white boomer woman I don't think anyone born after 1966 has ever watched a soap opera.
>>17965726Southern prisons are always medieval.
>>17965549>but Bate indicated that he would waive his ex posto facto rights in exchange for getting a life without parole sentence. However the state supreme court denied his requestMy guess is they didn't want to set a precedent where prisoners could all start waiving their constitutional rights to get more favorable sentencing than what existed when their crime was committed.
>>17965727fuck Coronation Street, man
>>17965541>Apparently Renee White was quite conscious about self-defense and had two different cans of mace with her; one on her keychain and another in her desk drawer at workgiven nationwide crime rates back then, one had to be prepared in case SHTF
>>17965524looks like their office hadn't quite entered the computer age and was running a little behind
>>17965578>we should brutally torture someone like the Middle Ages because the victim made my pee-pee hard
>>17965726at least on death row you're not in general pop and in fact just live in a concrete box 23 hours of the day except for 1 hour of exercise and shower a day
>>17965521>which she usually spent at home with her husband Randy, a salesman for Maxwell House CoffeeThe bad old boomer days when coffee was just Maxwell House and Folger's slop.
>>17965866Not having to work for 50c/hour is a plus but most prisons in florida don't have air conditioning. Basically a living hell
>>17965887more in the sense that you don't have to interact with the human scum that are a prison population very much
ok
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Well, I don't own a condo in Panama city, you might call me a member of the poor boy's committee.https://youtu.be/u9ZaqZXVy2A?si=ud6c1LCTgJaaFvDe
nigga named kale
