A murder 'most cruel,' Florida man who killed stay

This story contains details of a violent crime that some readers may find disturbing.

A Florida man who stabbed a stay-at-home mom to death and later orchestrated a daring jailbreak has become the 18th man executed in the state this year, a record.

Mark Allen Geralds, 58, was executed by lethal injection on Tuesday, Dec. 9, for the 1989 murder of Tressa Lynn Pettibone, whose brutalized body was found by her 8-year-old son in their Panama City home. He was pronounced dead at 6:15 p.m. ET.

In a statement, Pettibone's family said they've “endured so much as this long legal journey has seemed unending at times.”

“Tomorrow, when we wake up, it will be the first time in nearly 37 years that we don’t have to worry about another appeal being filed or another law changing that could potentially thwart the justice we have been fighting so hard for for so long,” the family said.

At trial, prosecutor Jim Appleman called Tressa Pettibone's murder "one of the most cruel cases ever" in the region.

"The cruel beating he put on Tressa Pettibone is outrageous," Appleman told jurors, according to an archived report by the Associated Press.

Geralds did not fight his execution in his final weeks alive. His attorneys had previously argued that he didn't get a fair trial and the jury became biased against him after seeing gruesome crime-scene photos.

Here's what you need to know about the execution and the case, including Geralds' escape from jail with four other inmates while he awaited trial and more about who Tressa Pettibone was.

Execution deepens Florida's record-setting year

Geralds became the 18th inmate executed in Florida so far this year, blowing past the previous annual high for executions in the state: eight, set in 1984 and matched in 2014.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has been signing more death warrants than any other governor in state history, saying in May that he wants to bring closure to families who've been waiting sometimes decades for their loved one's killer to be executed.

The state has another execution scheduled next week, serial killer Frank Athen Walls, for the double murder of a Florida couple in 1987.

Meanwhile, Geralds became the 45th inmate executed in the U.S. this year, a number that hasn't been reached since 2010. Death penalty experts attribute the uptick in executions to the political climate under pro-death penalty President Donald Trump and a more conservative U.S. Supreme Court.

What was Mark Allen Geralds convicted of?

On Feb. 1, 1989, 8-year-old Bart Pettibone came home from school and found the unthinkable: his mother's bloodied body on the kitchen floor. Tressa Lynn Pettibone, 33, had been beaten, tied up, gagged and fatally stabbed twice in the neck and once in the side. A medical examiner determined her wrists had been bound with a plastic tie for at least 20 minutes before she was killed.

The home had been robbed of designer sunglasses and jewelry, and Tressa's Mercedes was gone.

Bart and his older sister, then-14-year-old Blythe, became pivotal in the subsequent investigation, according to court records. They told police that about a week before their mother's murder, they were with her at the mall and ran into Mark Geralds, a 22-year-old carpenter who had worked on remodeling the family's home.

During their chat, the kids recalled their mother mentioning that her husband, Kevin, was out of town on business. Soon after, Bart recalled how Geralds walked up to him at the mall's video arcade and asked when his dad would be back and when the kids were normally at school.

Police later found that Geralds had pawned a gold herringbone necklace that matched one missing from the Pettibone home and had given the pair of sunglasses to a friend. A plastic tie matching the one used on Tressa matched the ties found in Geralds' car, according to court records.

Prosecutors told jurors that Geralds was at the home looking for $7,000 in cash that he knew about and beat Pettibone to find out where it was.

"For 20 minutes, Tressa Pettibone suffered an agonizing beating and torture," they said. "She bled to death in her own home. A woman who was a caring person ... And in her own home, she took the last gasps of breath that she could and sucked blood into her lungs."

The jury found Geralds guilty of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to death.

Who was Tressa Lynn Pettibone?

Tressa Lynn Pettibone was a 33-year-old married mother who originally came from Ohio before she and her husband settled in a charming, upscale waterfront neighborhood of Panama City, located in northwest Florida between Pensacola and Tallahassee.

Tressa's children went on to have their own kids. She would have been a grandmother of at least five and one of her granddaughters bears her name.

"She was a wonderful person with a family and many friends who loved her dearly," the Pettibone family said in a statement after the execution on Tuesday, adding that her family "was her world."

“Today we crossed the finish line for her, and we close this very painful chapter in our lives," they said.

Pettibone's daughter Blythe posts a tribute to her mom every Mother's Day, saying in a 2024 post that she cherishes each one of the few photos she has of her and her mother.

"Happy Mother’s Day in heaven, Mom!" she wrote. "Thank you for setting the bar so high. You taught me how to be a Mom, and I am so grateful for your example."

In May 2020, she wrote that there's never a time she doesn't wish her mom was with her, "just to talk to me."

"There have been many times over the years that I would have loved to have asked for her advice, and boy, do I sure miss having her in my corner when life gets rough," she wrote. "She believed in family and fought like a caged lion if you messed with her kids! She was the great protector and defender, and she loved her family with every fiber of her being."

The family was hit with another shocking tragedy in 2022, when Tressa's son Bart Pettibone died suddenly and left behind a wife and three children at the age of 41. His obituary said he "went home to be with his beloved mother and Jesus."

Who was Mark Allen Geralds?

Mark Allen Geralds was a 22-year-old with eight prior convictions when he robbed the Pettibones after doing a construction job for them.

During the sentencing portion of his trial, Geralds' attorneys argued that he should be spared from the death penalty because of his young age, his "love and concern" for his daughter and wife, his bipolar manic personality disorder and because "he came from a divorced family and was unloved by his mother," according to court records.

In 1990, Geralds made headlines when he escaped from jail while awaiting trial.

According to archived news reports, Geralds' was behind bars at the Bay County Jail, Florida's first privately run jail in state history. His wife was accused of slipping saw blades to Geralds during a visit.

He and four other maximum-security inmates used the blades to cut through a metal frame and punch out a sixth-floor window. They then climbed down a rope made of bedsheets and blankets. Geralds and most of the other inmates were recaptured within hours of the escape.

When is the next execution?

The next execution in the U.S. is set for this week in Tennessee. The state is scheduled to execute serial rapist Harold Wayne Nichols on Thursday, Dec. 11, for the 1988 rape and murder of 20-year-old Karen Pulley.

Two more executions are scheduled this year, one in Georgia and another in Florida. That puts the U.S. on pace to put 48 men to death in 2025.

Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime reporter who covers cold case investigations and the death penalty for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: A murder 'most cruel,' Florida man who killed stay-at-home mom is executed

Reporting by Amanda Lee Myers, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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