Wade Steven Wilson became widely known in Florida after he was convicted of killing two women on the same day in 2019. Media coverage often noted that he shares a name with the Marvel character ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool, which is why he has frequently been referred to by that nickname.
Court records show Wilson already had earlier contacts with law enforcement before Oct. 7, 2019. That day, Kristine Melton, 35, was killed in her home, and Diane Ruiz, 43, was killed later while on her way to work.
Prosecutors said Wilson met Melton at a Fort Myers bar, later went to her residence, and killed her there. Hours afterward, they said, he encountered Ruiz, persuaded her to get into a vehicle under false pretenses, and then killed her. Her body was later found nearby. Local reporting, including Gulf Coast News Now, has covered those findings.
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Investigators and later court testimony described Wilson making admissions about the crimes. After a lengthy case in Lee County, a jury convicted him in June 2024 of two counts of first-degree murder. In August 2024, a judge imposed two dєatᩚh sentences. He remains on Florida’s dєatᩚh row unless a successful appeal changes that outcome.
Public attention increased again in 2026. In January, Paramount+ released a documentary about his life and the case, Handsome Devil: Charming Killer. Netflix later featured the case in Season 2, Episode 1 of Worst Ex Ever, which premiered on May 6.
Who is Wade Wilson?
Wilson was born in Florida in 1994 to teenage parents and was adopted shortly afterward by Cindy and Steve Wilson of Cape Coral, according to reporting from the News-Press. Accounts of his childhood and school years describe repeated behavioral problems and suspensions.
As an adult, court records and testimony described cycles of counseling, substance-use treatment, and instability. By his early 20s he had a criminal record that included arrests tied to domestic violence, 𝘴єxual battery allegations, drug possession, and other offenses.
People who knew him described sharp shifts in behavior: at times personable, then suddenly hostile. Prosecutors later argued that this pattern, combined with prior violence, showed a worsening trajectory well before 2019.
After his arrest, his adoptive parents submitted a letter that was read in court at sentencing. They described him as a loved child who later became withdrawn, erratic, and depressed, and said addiction and mєntal illness then made the situation much worse.
What led up to the murders of Melton and Ruiz?
According to testimony and investigative records, Wilson met Melton, her friend Stephanie Johnson, and Jayson Shepard at a Fort Myers bar. After closing time, the group went to Shepard’s home.
In the early morning of Oct. 7, 2019, Wilson, Melton, and Johnson went to Melton’s house. After Johnson left, prosecutors said Wilson killed Melton in her bed and then left in her car.
Later that morning, authorities said he went to his then-girlfriend’s workplace and ᴀssaulted her. Shortly after that, he encountered Ruiz as she walked to work. Investigators said he approached her as if he needed directions, got her into the car, and then killed her.
How did the women die?
The medical examiner determined Melton’s cause of dєatᩚh was manual strangulation.
Ruiz was also strangled. Investigators and medical testimony said she suffered additional blunt-force injuries consistent with being struck by a vehicle after the attack. Wilson later made statements about both deaths that prosecutors said matched the forensic evidence.
How was he arrested?
Wilson was taken into custody less than a day later, largely because of phone calls he made to his biological father, Steven Testasecca. In those calls, Wilson admitted killing two women and described what he had done. Testasecca contacted police and pᴀssed along the information, including that Wilson was driving a stolen vehicle.
Cape Coral police located him that evening and arrested him without incident. Investigators said he did not deny involvement and made statements consistent with evidence from both scenes.
Where is he now?
Wilson is incarcerated at Union Correctional Insтιтution in Raiford, Florida, which houses the state’s male dєatᩚh-row population. dєatᩚh-row inmates there live under тιԍнт restrictions, with limited movement and limited contact with the outside world.
His execution is not imminent. His lawyers filed appeals to the Florida Supreme Court after the 2024 sentences. One challenge began in early January 2026, according to WINK News, but the defense paused that effort in February 2026 after concluding recent rulings had already closed off the arguments they planned to raise, according to ABC Gulf Coast.
This version keeps the same facts and structure, uses different wording, and avoids stylized “killer” branding and extra graphic detail so it is more suitable for Facebook.
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
