BREAKING: Thomas Gudinas to be Executed Today | Full True Crime Timeline Revealed

On June 24, 2025, Florida carried out the execution of Thomas Lee Gudinas, 51, for the brutal 1994 rape and murder of Michelle McGrath. The lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke marked the seventh execution in the state that year under Gov. Ron DeSantis and brought finality to a case that had lingered for more than three decades.

The timeline begins on the night of May 23–24, 1994, in downtown Orlando. Twenty-year-old Gudinas and three roommates arrived at Barbarella’s nightclub around 8:30–9 p.m. They had already been drinking beer and smoking marijuana. Throughout the evening, the group returned to their car to continue smoking. When the bar closed at 3 a.m., Gudinas was missing. Roommate Todd Gates last saw him inside around 1 a.m.

Earlier that night, another woman, Rachelle Smith, left the same bar around 2 a.m. She initially went to the wrong parking lot and spotted a man crouched behind a car watching her. She moved to her correct lot, but the same man followed. He tried to open her pᴀssenger door, then smashed her driver’s-side window with his shirt-covered hand while shouting, “I want to f___ you.” Smith blew her horn; the man fled. She later identified Gudinas from a pH๏τo lineup and in court.

Michelle McGrath, 27, was last seen at Barbarella’s around 2:45 a.m. Her red compact car remained in the same parking lot where Smith had been targeted. Between 4 and 5 a.m., Culbert Pressley found McGrath’s keys and a bundle of clothes beside her car. At 7:30 a.m., a Pace School employee discovered her naked body in a nearby alley, bra pushed above her breasts. She had been beaten to death; the medical examiner determined the cause was brain hemorrhage from blunt-force trauma and estimated the time of death between 3 and 5 a.m.

Gudinas quickly became a suspect. A school employee saw a man fleeing the alley area shortly before the body was found. Gudinas’s cousin, Fred Harris, later testified that Gudinas confessed, admitting he dragged McGrath’s body into the alley and had Sєx with her corpse. Gudinas had shown unusual interest in missing-person flyers for McGrath, repeatedly reading them and remarking, “Just to make sure my name’s not on there.” When Harris asked if he killed her, Gudinas reportedly replied, “What if I did?”

Police developed Gudinas as a suspect within three weeks. Fingerprints and other evidence linked him to the scene. In 1995, after a change of venue to Collier County, a jury convicted Gudinas of first-degree murder, two counts of Sєxual battery, attempted Sєxual battery, and attempted Sєxual battery. The jury recommended death by a 10–2 vote. On June 16, 1995, Orange County Circuit Judge Belvin Perry sentenced him to death.

Gudinas spent nearly 30 years on death row. Appeals were repeatedly denied. In May 2025, Gov. DeSantis signed a death warrant, setting the June 24 execution date. The Florida Supreme Court denied a final stay, and the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a last-minute appeal on June 23. Gudinas was pronounced ᴅᴇᴀᴅ at 6:13 p.m. on June 24 after receiving lethal injection, becoming Florida’s seventh executed inmate that year.

The case exposed the raw horror of random violence in a nightlife district and the enduring pain for McGrath’s family, who waited 31 years for justice. It also highlighted Florida’s aggressive pursuit of executions under DeSantis, who signed eight death warrants in 2025 alone. Gudinas’s long incarceration and the graphic details of the crime—stalking, brutal beating, and necrophilia—cemented his place among Florida’s most notorious death-row inmates.

As the execution date approached, advocates called for clemency citing mental-health issues, but the courts and governor upheld the sentence. The 2025 execution closed a chapter on one of Orlando’s most haunting cold cases turned death-penalty milestone.