Dustin Honken was executed by the Federal Government for five murders that were committed in Iowa in connection to his drug empire
According to court documents Dustin Honken was a meth kingpin who would murder five people in order to thwart a Federal drug investigation. Honken believed that two of the people were cooperating with the Government in the investigation. Those killed were: Greg Nicholson, his girlfriend, Lori Ann Duncan, 31, and her two daughters, Kandace Duncan, 10, and Amber Duncan, 6 / Terry DeGeus, 32
Dustin Honken was arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Dustin Honken would be executed by lethal injection on July 17 2020
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When Was Dustin Honken Executed
Dustin Honken was executed on July 17 2020
How Was Dustin Honken Executed
Dustin Honken was executed on lethal injection
Dustin Honken Case
Nearly three decades after Dustin Honken’s crime spree gripped Iowa, the small-town boy turned murderous meth kingpin was executed Friday at the Federal Correctional Complex.
Starting just minutes after its scheduled time, Dustin Honken recited Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “Heaven-Haven,” before saying a Hail Mary, though he tagged on an additional line: “Hail Mary, Mother of God, pray for me.”
His time of death was marked at 3:36 p.m. Central Daylight Time.
Families for two of Honken’s victims provided public statements, differing in tone and length, but each rife with emotion.
The family of Terry DeGeus, one of two government witnesses Honken was convicted of killing, said attending Friday’s execution was the “least they could do.”
“The reason for us being present today was not to watch a man die. It was to show love, support and respect to my daughter’s father, Terry,” read the short letter, “that we loved him until the end and still do.”
A statement from relatives of Lori, Amber and Kandace Duncan — the 31-year-old mother and her 6- and 10-year-old daughters whom Honken also killed — lamented that their lives were “taken” while Honken’s continued for 27 more years.
“Their mother never got to see them having a first dance, first date or walk down the aisle at their wedding,” the statement read. “Finally justice is being done. It will bring a sense of closure, but we will continue to live with their loss. However this is a step toward healing of broken hearts and shattered lives.
A statement from the Department of Justice echoed the Duncans’ sentiment that due process had been seen through.
“Nearly three decades after Honken coldly ended the lives of five people, including two young girls, all in an effort to protect himself and his criminal enterprise, he has finally faced justice,” said department spokesperson Kerri Kupec.
But his lawyer, Shawn Nolan, countered, saying that Dustin Honken had been “redeemed” and that he “recognized and repented for the crimes he had committed.”
“During his time in prison, he cared for everyone he came into contact with: guards, counselors, medical staff, his fellow inmates and his legal team. Over the years he grew incredibly close to his family, becoming a true father, son, brother and friend. There was no reason for the government to kill him, in haste or at all.”
Dustin Honken, a community college drop-out who created his meth empire in the early 1990s, was the third federal prisoner executed this week.
Daniel Lewis Lee, a white supremacist who killed a three-person family that included an 8-year-old girl, and Wesley Ira Purkey, who raped, murdered, dismembered and dumped the body of a 16-year-old girl in a septic pond, were put to death Tuesday and Thursday, respectively.
The executions were scheduled after the Department of Justice announced last year that it would carry out capital punishments again after a 17-year hiatus, saying “that defendants convicted of the most heinous crimes should be subject to a sentence of death.”
“We owe it to the victims of these horrific crimes, and to the families left behind, to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system,” Attorney General William P. Barr said in a statement.
Honken’s execution was the last one in this weeklong spree. Keith Dwayne Nelson, who kidnapped and raped a 10-year-old girl, is scheduled to be executed Aug. 28.
When the time of death was announced, Dustin Honken, 52, became the first Iowan in more than 50 years to be put to death in an Iowa case. In 1963, Victor Feguer, who kidnapped and killed a Dubuque doctor, was executed by hanging at the Iowa State Penitentiary.
Iowa abolished the death penalty in 1965, but Dustin Honken was convicted in federal court because he killed government witnesses, interfering with a federal case.
Like the other inmates put to death this week, Dustin Honken had appealed his sentence up until the last moments before his scheduled execution at 3 p.m. Central Daylight Time Friday.
But unlike the two executed earlier this week, Dustin Honken lacked headline-grabbing mitigating circumstances. In Lewis Lee’s case, his victims’ family had requested his sentence be reduced to life in prison; in Purkey’s, his lawyers asserted that dementia and schizophrenia meant he was not competent to be executed.
The crime Honken was executed for started as a missing-persons case tangentially connected to a federal drug trafficking charge. But nearly seven years after five people went missing, including witnesses scheduled to testify against Honken regarding his meth operation, a mobbed-up jailhouse informant would lead investigators to the victims’ bodies and a murder plot would unravel.
Dustin Honken, who had the look of a classic 1980s nerd and the smarts to back up the appearance, was talented in math and science, but was an eloquent writer, too. He had a rare right-left brain combination that made him attractive enough to land a scholarship to North Iowa Area Community College in the early 1990s.
Born into a life of uncertainty, Dustin Honken grew up in Britt, a small town west of Mason City in north central Iowa. His father, Jim, a drunken schemer, held powerful sway over his two sons, Jeff and Dustin, Honken’s sister, Alyssa Nelson, said during her brother’s murder trial.
After convincing Honken, then a recent high school graduate, to steal and copy the key to a local bank, his father robbed it. A second bank robbery would land him in prison, where he would regale his frequently visiting sons with tales of his criminal exploits.
Bumming around before starting at North Iowa, Honken fell into selling marijuana and cocaine, quickly building a list of customers who paid thousands for their fix.
Meth didn’t enter the picture until 1991, after he had completed a year of community college chemistry, earning an A- average.
Within a year, Honken and his childhood friend, Tim Cutkomp, had moved to Arizona, built a sophisticated methamphetamine cooking setup and all but perfected a recipe for pure meth, which they sold mainly through two dealers in northeast Iowa: DeGeus, 32, and Greg Nicholson, 34.
By 1992, their multi-state ring was netting hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But as Honken’s operation grew, so too did his dependence on meth and his singular focus on success — no matter the cost.
Soon, he would meet Angela Johnson, a woman who shared his ruthless worldview. Their attraction was mutual, and she would shortly dump her current boyfriend, Honken’s dealer, DeGeus, for the boss.
But what Honken didn’t know in early 1993 was that Nicholson had decided to cooperate with federal investigators, wearing a wire to a meet and recording Honken making a $3,000 deal for a future meth pickup. Honken and Cutkomp were promptly arrested on federal drug-trafficking charges.
After inadvertently learning that Nicholson had turned state’s witness, Honken and Johnson set out to find him and force him to recant his statements. They discovered him staying at the home of a friend, Lori Duncan, a single mother with two children, Amber, 6, and Kandi, 10.
Using a ruse to gain entry, Johnson and Honken did make a video of Nicholson denying his previous police statements, but then bound and gagged the adults, forced the children to pack bags and walked them at gunpoint to their car.
Johnson and Honken drove the four to a wooded area north of Mason City where Honken first took Duncan and Nicholson to an already dug grave and shot them execution-style. He then came back for the children and shot them, too.
Later, after learning DeGeus also agreed to cooperate with authorities, Johnson tricked him into taking her to a vacant farm where Honken beat and killed him.
With no witnesses, the government dropped their drug case in 1995 and Honken went back to making meth. That stint was short-lived, however, as he was picked up on new drug charges when his garage was raided in 1996.
This time his co-conspirator, Cutkomp, turned state’s witness, collecting Honken’s musings about destroying evidence, buying a gun and eliminating investigators and others who he thought would testify against him.
Investigators were sure Honken was involved with the earlier missing people; the coincidences were too great, but they were no closer to finding the bodies.
Acting on a tip that Johnson might be skipping town, authorities indicted her with aiding and abetting the murders of Nicholson, Duncan, Kandi, Amber and her ex-boyfriend DeGeus.
Law enforcement had enough evidence to believe Johnson had something to do with the murders, though Honken remained their suspected triggerman. But authorities needed five things before they could begin to prove their case: the bodies.
In jail, Johnson made friends with Robert “Bobby” Gene McNeese, a career criminal doing a life sentence who was a prolific snitch. Saying he knew a “lifer” who might take the rap for her and Honken, McNeese convinced her to tell him details about the crime only a participant would know and to draw him maps to the bodies.
Using this evidence, and testimony from a collection of prisoners Honken told in not-so-subtle terms that he killed a handful of people in 1993, prosecutors brought murder charges against the former underworld honcho.
After a two-month-long trial, the jury found him guilty on all 17 counts. They sentenced him to death specifically for the brutality and senselessness of the children’s killings.