As a literary device, it might work well to trace the parallel lives of John Ferguson and Beauford White. But the truth is that their lives ran at opposing angles, at least as far as the crime and its aftermath were concerned. So the night of the Carol City killings is as good a place as any to start their story. On July 27, 1977, Ferguson, identifying himself as “Lucky” and posing as an employee of Florida Power and Light, entered a house in a suburb of Miami. Shortly thereafter, he pulled a gun and demanded drugs, money, and jewelry from the female inhabitant. His co-conspirators, Beauford White and a man named Marvin Francois, joined Ferguson inside the house; all of the men were armed. Eventually, seven more people entered the home, including the woman's boyfriend and the owner of the house.

At this point, the prosecution and defense versions of the story veer away from each other. The state claimed that the killers wanted to eliminate the witnesses; lawyers for White argued that their client was along for the robbery, but the murders were part of a prearranged contract involving only Ferguson and Francois. In either case, two facts were undisputed: Eight people had been forced to lie on the floor, their hands tied behind their backs, and shot in the back of the head (two miraculously survived). And Ferguson and Francois had pulled the triggers. This was not a whodunit.

Everyone agreed that White had never attempted to kill anyone, or even intended that anyone should be killed—that he had, in fact, tried to talk Ferguson and Francois out of killing. While White took his share of the drugs, money, and jewelry, the testimony revealed that he appeared to be in shock after the murders, his eyes glazed over and his expression blank, “just sitting there like he seen a ghost.” And then there was this testimony of his refusal to cover up the crime, from the man who drove the killers to the crime scene:

Q: Somebody said something about getting rid of the .38, I think is what you said before we took the break.

A: Yes. Marvin [Francois] and Ferguson was talking about getting rid of the guns. They asked Beauford to get rid of it.

Q: What did Beauford say?

A: Beauford said, "I ain't getting rid of nothing."

So the picture was clearly drawn for the jury: Beauford White had not killed or attempted to kill—had, in fact, been shocked that killing had occurred—and was unwilling to join in the cover-up afterwards. When the jury sat down to decide if White was the worst of the worst, it wasn’t even close. All 12 voted that life imprisonment for him was more appropriate than execution.

John Ferguson did not fare nearly as well in front of his jury. Logic dictated that he was the leader—at the very least, he was the first to enter the house and pull a gun, the first to bind and blindfold a victim—and it was clear that Ferguson, along with Francois, had placed the eight victims on the floor and shot them in the back of their heads. While there was evidence that Ferguson had been mentally ill for some years before the date of the crime, he was clearly sane under any legal definition of insanity; and with six murders and two near misses on the docket, the jury had little choice. At the end of May 1978, less than a year after the slaughter in Carol City, the jury unanimously recommended that John Errol Ferguson be executed by the state of Florida.