Wade Steven Wilson became notorious in Florida after murdering two women in a single day in 2019.
Dubbed the “ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool Killer” because he shares a name with the Marvel character, Wilson had prior encounters with law enforcement before Oct. 7, 2019, when he killed Kristine Melton, 35, as she slept and later murdered Diane Ruiz, 43, while she was walking to work.
Authorities say Wilson met Melton at a Fort Myers bar and later strangled her to death in her home. Hours after her murder, Wilson encountered Ruiz and persuaded her to get into his vehicle under false pretenses, and then killed her before running her over multiple times and abandoning her body in a nearby field, per Gulf Coast News Now.
During police interviews and later testimony, Wilson reportedly made disturbing admissions about the crimes, including allegedly telling detectives he would “do it again.”
After a lengthy legal process, a Lee County jury convicted Wilson of two counts of first-degree murder in June 2024. In August of that year, a judge imposed two death sentences, ensuring Wilson will spend the rest of his life on Florida’s death row unless his appeals succeed.
In January 2026, Paramount+ released a documentary on Wilson’s life and crimes called Handsome Devil: Charming Killer. Netflix later featured the ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool Killer in season 2, episode 1 of Worst Ex Ever, which premiered on May 6.
So, where is Wade Wilson now? Here’s what to know about the killer’s life today.
Who is Wade Wilson?
Wilson was born in 1994 in Florida to teenage parents and was adopted shortly after birth by Cindy and Steve Wilson, a couple from Cape Coral, per the News-Press. From a young age, Wilson struggled in school, facing repeated suspensions due to aggression in the classroom, according to Newsweek.
Those problems followed him into adulthood. Court records and testimony revealed that Wilson cycled in and out of counseling programs, substance abuse treatment and brief periods of stability. By his early 20s, Wilson had developed an extensive criminal history that included arrests related to domestic violence, Sєxual battery, drug possession and more.
People who knew Wilson described him as unpredictable — capable of being personable and engaging, then quickly becoming hostile or threatening. Prosecutors later argued that his volatile patterns, paired with violence, showed a clear progression long before the 2019 murders.
After his arrest, Wilson’s adoptive parents wrote a letter to the courtwhich was read by one of his attorneys during his sentencing, per Newsweek.
“Wade was a joyful child, loved his parents and sisters and was loved immensely in return. But over the teen years, and then especially in the early years of adulthood, Wade began to slip away from us, becoming withdrawn, erratic and depressed at first,” they wrote. “Then his addiction was added to mental illness and [he] became, frankly, paranoid and delusional and a sense of loss became increasingly sharp.”
What events led up to Wilson murdering Melton and Ruiz?
According to court testimony and investigative records, Wilson met Jayson Shepard, Melton and her friend, Stephanie Johnson, at a Fort Myers bar. After the establishment closed, the group went to Shepard’s home.
In the early morning hours of Oct. 7, 2019, Wilson, Melton and Johnson went to Melton’s residence. After Johnson left, prosecutors say Wilson strangled Melton in her bed, killing her. He then took her car and fled the scene.
Later that morning, Wilson went to his then-girlfriend’s workplace, where he ᴀssaulted her. A short time later, he encountered his second victim — Ruiz — as she walked to work. Investigators say Wilson approached her under the pretense of needing directions. After convincing her to get into the car, he strangled her.
How did Wilson kill the women?
Court testimony revealed that Melton was killed in her bed, with the medical examiner later determining the cause of death to be manual strangulation.
Several hours later, Wilson strangled Ruiz. When he attempted to dispose of her body, Wilson realized she was still alive and repeatedly ran her over with Melton’s stolen car, causing catastrophic injuries. The medical examiner testified that Ruiz suffered both strangulation injuries and blunt-force trauma consistent with being struck by a vehicle.
During the investigation, Wilson made graphic admissions about both killings, including details that aligned with forensic findings.
How was Wilson caught?
Wilson was taken into custody less than a day after the murders, largely because of his own actions. After killing both women, Wilson contacted his biological father, Steven Testasecca, in a series of phone calls that would become central to the case.
During those conversations, Wilson confessed to killing two women and provided graphic, unsolicited details about how the crimes occurred, according to court testimony.
Testasecca later told authorities that the calls alarmed him immediately. After pressing his son for clarification and realizing the seriousness of what he was hearing, he contacted law enforcement and relayed the information, including Wilson’s admissions and the fact that he was driving a stolen vehicle. That tip prompted Cape Coral police to begin actively searching for Wilson.
Officers located Wilson later that evening and he was arrested without incident. During police interviews, Wilson did not deny his involvement. Investigators testified that he spoke openly about the killings and made statements that aligned with physical evidence already collected at both crime scenes.
Where is Wilson now?
Wilson is currently incarcerated at the Union Correctional Insтιтution in Raiford, Fla., which houses the state’s male death row inmates. Like others sentenced to death, Wilson is confined under strict conditions, spending the majority of his time in his cell with limited movement and restricted contact with the outside world.
Although Wilson has been sentenced to death, his execution is not imminent. His legal team filed several appeals to the Florida Supreme Court in August 2024. One of those cases began in early January 2026, according to WINK News. However, they halted their challenge one month later in February 2026, with his attorneys acknowledging that recent rulings had already shut down the arguments they planned to make, per ABC Gulf Coast.
💔 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.
