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Death row inmate's competency leaves appeal hanging

Tribune photo by TODD DAVIS

Franklin Floyd believes he's the illegitimate son of longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

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By MARK  DOUGLAS | News Channel 8

Published: June 23, 2009

Updated: 06/23/2009 06:33 pm

For the moment, convicted killer Franklin Floyd is heading back to death row, where Pinellas Circuit Judge Nancy Moate Ley sent him seven years ago for the 1989 murder of teenage stripper Cheryl Ann Commesso.

Ley presided over a four-hour competency hearing today, aimed at determining whether he is mentally capable of assisting in his ongoing appeals.

The judge said she will probably take about three weeks to draft an order dictating what should happen next with Floyd's case.

Ley likely will again find Floyd to be incompetent, based on the unanimous opinions of four physicians, the prosecutors' lack of objections and her previous rulings.

That would put Floyd's case into legal limbo. The state wouldn't be able to execute him, and he wouldn't be able to proceed with any of his remaining post-conviction relief efforts. Even where he would be housed would become an issue.

Forensic psychiatrist Ryan Estebez testified that psychotropic medication might help Floyd overcome his delusional thinking enough to become legally competent.

But Floyd doesn't think he's mentally ill, even though, among other things, he's convinced that he's the illegitimate son of longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

"I don't claim to be Abraham Lincoln," he said at today's hearing. "My mother told me I was the biological son of J. Edgar Hoover, and I don't doubt it."

Floyd also said he wants to live long enough to see his "son," Michael Hughes, who disappeared after Floyd kidnapped him in Oklahoma in 1994. Floyd has never revealed the boy's whereabouts, and prosecutors suspect foul play.

They also suspect Floyd had something to do with the hit-and-run wreck that claimed the life of Hughes' mother, Sharon Marshall, who worked as an exotic dancer with Commesso at the Mons Venus strip club in Tampa before Commesso vanished in 1989.

Investigators linked Floyd to Commesso's murder with pornographic pictures found taped to the gas tank of the truck Floyd used to abduct Hughes and the principal.

The photos depicted Commesso's badly beaten body posed in a sexually explicit manner while bound, restrained and blindfolded on a couch. A witness later testified the couch was in Floyd's Pinellas Park trailer.

The photos surfaced almost at the same moment a maintenance worker stumbled across Commesso's skull while maintaining the right of way along I-275 in St. Petersburg.

Moments before today's hearing ended, Floyd issued a sweeping warning to the two lawyers representing him and everyone else involved in the case for branding him incompetent and not letting him have his way.

"I will file a $1 billion dollar lawsuit against all parties," Floyd said.

Reporter Mark Douglas can be reached at (727) 709-2753.

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