Execution set Tuesday for killer of Orlando woman in 1991

ORLANDO — Denise Collins was found nude, moaning, covered in blood and barely conscious in her apartment's bathroom in October 1991. The sliding glass door to the second-floor balcony was partially open, and there were ladder impressions in the ground under the balcony.

The 28-year-old aspiring artist was rushed to a hospital, where she died the next day.

A neighbor in Collins' Orlando complex told detectives he had seen a man near Collins' apartment near a ladder by the apartment's balcony, and the neighbor later identified Darius Kimbrough, 19, as the man from a picture lineup. A maintenance man at the complex said Kimbrough had watched him putting away a ladder in the complex around the time of the murder.

Kimbrough was charged with the first-degree murder, sexual assault and burglary almost a year later. He was found guilty at his 1994 trial, during which experts testified that blood and semen samples taken from Collins' bed were compatible with Kimbrough's DNA. More than two decades after Collins' death, Kimbrough is scheduled to be executed Tuesday at Florida State Prison in Starke.

"He lived 22 years too long and too well and he's going to go out clean and easy, and he doesn't deserve it," said Diane Stewart, Collins' mother, in a recent telephone interview. "She didn't go out that way, and he doesn't deserve what he's getting. He should go out the way she did. That's how we feel."

Stewart, who lives in New Jersey, said she planned to attend the execution with Collins' sister.

Kimbrough's attorneys are appealing the active death warrant. In previous appeals, his defense attorneys have said the evidence was circumstantial and that the neighbor who placed Kimbrough by Collins' apartment balcony was elderly and had memory lapses. Kimbrough says he had ineffective legal representation at trial and that his attorney didn't hire a mental health professional to evaluate him.

Kimbrough's attorneys had blamed Collins' former boyfriend for the crimes. He had beaten her before, they said, and he had a key to her apartment. That evidence was excluded from the trial, and Kimbrough's attorneys argued it should have been allowed.

Gary Boodhoo, the former boyfriend, described the defense attorneys' allegations as ludicrous. "It was devastating. I was suffering a loss. Everyone was suffering a loss," said Boodhoo, a video game designer in San Francisco.

Defense attorneys also said a juror didn't reveal that his fiancee was employed at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, whose crime lab analyst testified at the trial, and that the DNA testing used to convict Kimbrough was faulty.

"The defendant was denied his right to a fair and impartial jury by prejudicial pretrial publicity, by lack of a change of venue, by failure to sequester the jury and by events in the courtroom during trial," Kimbrough's post-conviction attorney Robert Strain said in a recent filing.

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Collins was an aspiring artist at the time of her death. She went to high school in Titusville and attended colleges in Boston. She got a job at Kinko's in Orlando after earning a fine arts degree, but she wanted to be a graphic artist. She loved cats and was "big-hearted," said her mother.