Miami Herald
November 13, 2013
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 underneath the balcony.
The 28-year-old aspiring artist was rushed to a hospital where she died the next day. Detectives found semen on her sheets and pubic hairs in her bed and in a towel.
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 also 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.”