Former Long Island man executed in Florida

A former Long Island man who was convicted in 1967 of sexually assaulting and killing an elderly Greenport woman was executed in Florida Wednesday night, 32 years after he beat, raped and drowned another woman in that state.

The state of Florida put Robert Brian Waterhouse, 65, to death by lethal injection at 8:22 p.m. at the Florida State Prison at Starke, correction officials said.

Waterhouse was paroled in 1975 for killing Ella Mae Carter, 76, of Greenport. He was convicted of the January 1980 beating and drowning of Deborah Kammerer, 29, of St. Petersburg, whom he had met in a Tampa Bay area bar. Waterhouse had been on death row ever since.

"It's about time," said Arlene Hubbard of Greenport, whose late husband, former Greenport Village Mayor George Hubbard Sr., was Carter's nephew. "He brutalized Aunt Ella. We've been waiting all these years. She was a very, very dignified woman and there was no reason whatsoever for him to brutally kill her the way that he did."

June Hubbard Harris, George Hubbard's daughter, cheered when she heard the news.

"If he hadn't been released from New York, he would never have murdered Deborah Kammerer," she said."He's an evil man, a monster. My father, who passed away five years ago, is smiling now."

Waterhouse was 19 when he attacked Carter in her home in 1966.

The case wound up before the U.S. Supreme Court when he unsuccessfully appealed his conviction for the Long Island murder.

That conviction contributed to a Florida jury's decision to sentence him to death for the murder of Kammerer.

Waterhouse had argued that his conviction in the Long Island case should be overturned because his lawyer, Edward LaFreniere, was incompetent. The attorney had been notified that he was being disbarred for mishandling clients' money during a pretrial hearing.

Waterhouse also argued that Greenport and Suffolk County police illegally coerced his confession by making him sit naked while they interrogated him.

But the high court in December 1989 let the conviction stand.

The justices denied his stay of execution on the Florida murder Wednesday morning, according to The Associated Press. That denial came after Florida Gov. Rick Scott rejected a plea by the Catholic Bishops of Florida for Waterhouse's death sentence to be commuted to life in prison without parole.