NEED TO KNOW
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Bryan Frederick Jennings, 66, received a lethal injection on Thursday, Nov. 13
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He was convicted of abducting, raping and murdering 6-year-old Becky Kunash in 1979
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Jennings, the 16th person executed in Florida this year, spent the past four decades appealing his conviction despite allegedly confessing to police after his arrest
Becky Kunash was sound asleep in her bedroom when the unthinkable happened on the night of May 11, 1979.
A man broke into the 6-year-old’s bedroom, snatched her out of her bed and drove off with her. She was then raped, bludgeoned and drowned in a canal, where her body would be found later that day.
A few hours later, police arrested a Marine by the name of Bryan Frederick Jennings, and now, 46 years after he ended Becky’s life, the state of Florida executed him by lethal injection.
He becomes the 16th person to be put to death in Florida this year, which doubles the previous record of eight executions set in 2014.
Jennings attempted to appeal his sentence up until his very last days, with his brief making it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court — who denied his final appeal just 24 hours before his execution.
Florida Department of Corrections
Bryan Frederick Jennings
Jennings was convicted of Becky’s murder in 1986 at the conclusion of his third murder trial, according to an appeal filed that same year in the Seventh Judicial Circuit Court and obtained by PEOPLE.
That appeal revealed that Jennings, who was 20 years old at the time, was taken into custody that day so he could be processed on a traffic warrant.
It was only after he arrived at the Brevard County Jail and was being booked into custody that officers realized he matched the description of a man seen near Becky’s home on the night of her abduction.
Investigators started to look into it and quickly learned that footprints found at the scene and near the home were a match for Jennings, noting that his “latent fingerprints were found on [Becky’s] windowsill” and he returned home “with his clothes and hair wet” around the time the victim was believed to have been drowned in the canal.
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A timeline was assembled and presented by prosecutors in court. As obtained by PEOPLE, that same timeline appeared in an October 2025 Florida Supreme Court order denying Jennings’ appeal.
Prosecutors believed that Jennings, who was on leave from the Marine Corps at the time, dislodged the screen from Becky’s window, broke into her home and fled with the girl while covering her mouth so she did not wake her sleeping parents in the next room, the order stated in a summary of the case.
He then drove to a canal on Merritt Island, a peninsula located 60 miles east of Orlando, where he “raped [Becky], swung her by her legs to the ground with such force that she fractured her skull, and drowned her while she was still alive,” per the order.
Jennings, who police alleged confessed to the crime after his arrest, was convicted three times but successfully petitioned the court for a retrial after those first two convictions. However, that was not the case after his third trial despite the fact that he spent the past four decades filing briefs and appeals.
In addition to being sentenced to death for murder, he also received life sentences on charges of kidnapping, sexual assault and burglary.
Read the original article on People
