David Funchess: The First Vietnam Veteran Executed in America — and the Uncomfortable Questions His Case Still Raises

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Collage of David Funchess with a mugshot, court scene, and police incident. Text: "David Funchess: The First Vietnam Veteran Executed in America."

On the afternoon of April 22, 1986, a 39-year-old Black man from Jacksonville, Florida, was led into an execution chamber at Florida State Prison. He looked at his defence attorney, mouthed "I love you," and sat down in the electric chair known as "Old Sparky." He'd declined a final meal, eating only a bowl of vanilla ice cream beforehand. A single two-minute surge of 2,000 volts was applied. A wisp of smoke rose from an electrode on his calf. He was pronounced dead at 5:11 pm.

His name was David Livingston Funchess. He was a decorated United States Marine, a Purple Heart recipient with five commendations, and a convicted double murderer. He was also, by his own later admission, a war criminal. He was the first Vietnam War veteran to be executed in the United States.

His case remains one of the most contested executions in American history, raising questions that still don't have easy answers: Does military trauma diminish culpability for violent crime? Should a man who killed civilians under orders be shown mercy when he kills civilians at home? And what does it say about a country when it sends men to commit atrocities abroad, then executes them for what happens when they come home?

Early Life: Before Vietnam

David Funchess was born on March 16, 1947, in Jacksonville, Florida, to Alice and Venis Funchess, who worked operating tractors at a fertiliser plant. He was one of at least six children. The family lived in poverty, in Jim Crow Florida, where racial segregation was still legally enforced. His sister Mary later told his appellate attorneys that the children's upbringing was defined not just by poverty but by severe physical abuse: "When most children got spankings when they misbehaved, we got 'killings.' We would have been glad to have been hit with just a hand or a belt, but it was usually with fists, sticks, extension cords or a piece of water hose."

A black-and-white photo shows a smiling person in military uniform and cap, surrounded by floral arrangements. The mood is respectful.

Despite this, Funchess graduated near the top of his high school class in 1965. Childhood friends, a Baptist minister who'd attended middle school with him, and a high school biology teacher all described him to his later appellate team as "a quiet, intelligent, and caring person who was in no way headed toward a life of crime." He'd never used illicit drugs. He had no criminal record.

In 1967, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. He was 20 years old.

Vietnam: Combat, Atrocity, and a Landmine

That same summer, Funchess and his unit, the 3rd Marine Division, were deployed to Vietnam near the Laotian border during one of the war's most intense periods. He was exposed to Agent Orange, the toxic herbicide and chemical defoliant, the US military used extensively throughout the war and which has since been linked to neurological damage, cancer, and other serious health conditions in veterans and their offspring.

Funchess later told his sister that he had very few clear memories of his service. What he could remember included watching a fellow Marine decapitated by a missile, having his own body thrown into the air by a mortar explosion, and being ordered to shoot a severely disabled elderly Vietnamese man who couldn't walk, let alone flee. "He could hardly walk, much less run," Funchess told his sister. "He was totally harmless. He couldn't have done anything to anyone, but I had to shoot him down in cold blood."

Two and a half months into his deployment, Funchess stepped on a landmine. The explosion caused severe injuries to his ankle and leg. He was medically evacuated to a naval hospital in Japan and then transferred to a psychiatric ward at a naval hospital in Virginia, where he received a diagnosis of "Psychoneurotic Depressive Reaction", a clinical precursor to what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder.

During his recovery, one of his brothers was murdered. Funchess was granted leave for the funeral but didn't return on time, earning his first AWOL designation, which was later lifted. After his hospital discharge, he again failed to report back to active duty in January 1968, resulting in a second AWOL and a dishonorable discharge. That discharge would later prevent him from accessing Veterans Affairs benefits. However, he did receive a Purple Heart, along with the Vietnam Service Medal and the Republic of Vietnam Campaign Medal.

Coming Home: Foxholes, Heroin, and Unravelling

Funchess returned to civilian life a changed man. Pain medication prescribed for his injuries led to a heroin addiction. His family watched him transform. His sister Queenie described him going completely blank mid-conversation, becoming unresponsive for several minutes at a stretch, and weeping in his room at night. He told her he had recurring nightmares about the Vietnamese civilians he'd been ordered to kill. He dug foxholes under his mother's house and slept in them. He started locking himself in his bedroom for days at a time.

"He came back from the Marines crazy as a loon," said Tom Fischer of Veterans for Peace, who knew Funchess after his return.

In 1972, a man held Funchess at gunpoint. Funchess, unarmed, walked calmly towards him. The man shot him several times in the stomach. Witnesses believed he'd wanted to be shot; it was, effectively, a suicide attempt.

He drifted in and out of petty crime: arrests for loitering, public intoxication, grand larceny, breach of the peace. His family believed his inability to hold a job, combined with his addiction and trauma, had pulled him into vagrancy. He stopped bathing. He stopped tending to his clothes or hair. He was, by any reasonable assessment, a man in serious psychological crisis with no institutional support.

Police carry a person on a stretcher outside a store. Officers and bystanders are watching. Black and white image, somber mood.

The Murders: December 16, 1974

Approximately a year before the murders, Funchess had worked as a porter at the Avondale Liquor Store, a lounge in Jacksonville. He'd been fired after his employers suspected him of stealing $800. He retained knowledge of the place, its layout, and its routine.

On the morning of Monday, December 16, 1974, before 9:15 am, Funchess entered the lounge. He encountered three people: Anna Waldrop, 52, a barmaid who'd worked there for seven years; Bertha McLeod, 62, who was actually on vacation that day but had decided to come in anyway; and Clayton Ragan, 56, a customer visiting Jacksonville from Live Oak, Florida, to see his children.

Funchess beat, stabbed, and slashed the throats of all three. Police later found a bloodstained grapefruit knife at the scene. He stole between $5,500 and $6,500, mostly in cancelled cheques, then shared some of the money with two women he'd just met on the street, and took a cab to Ocala, Florida.

Waldrop and Ragan were pronounced dead at the scene. Police found them behind the bar "head to head" in a pool of blood. Ragan had apparently tried to escape through a rear door before collapsing. McLeod was barely alive. She was hospitalised and remained in a coma for over two years before dying from her wounds on July 10, 1977. Funchess was never charged with her death.

He was arrested in Ocala approximately two months later. He initially claimed no memory of the events. A psychiatrist eventually induced a narcosynthesis confession using a so-called "truth serum," during which Funchess admitted he'd used heroin the morning of the murders before going to the bar.

Trial and Sentencing: 1975

At trial, prosecutors called Funchess an "animal." A court-appointed psychiatrist labelled him a "sociopath." The jury voted 10 to 2 to recommend the death penalty. Circuit Judge Gordon A. Duncan agreed, calling the crimes "some of the most senseless, heinous, and horrible murders that have ever taken place in Jacksonville." He described Funchess as having "carefully chosen the time to strike while casually drinking a cup of coffee across the street."

Three men in a room, one writing, one smiling, one holding a folder. Black and white photo with editing marks and red text: "12p4x3" pg4A 153%".

Critically, PTSD was not raised as a mitigating factor. This wasn't a tactical blunder. It was an impossibility. The American Psychiatric Association wouldn't formally recognise PTSD until 1980, when it was added to the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III). At the time of Funchess's trial, there was simply no recognised clinical framework for what he was experiencing. The dominant public perception of Vietnam veterans, as his later attorney Michael Mello noted, was that they were "either violent or drug addicts, or both," not that they might be suffering a diagnosable and treatable mental health condition rooted in state-sanctioned trauma.

Funchess was formally sentenced to death on July 18, 1975.

Death Row: Eleven Years of Legal Battles

His case ground through the courts for over a decade. The Florida Supreme Court upheld his sentence 7 to 0 in December 1976. In 1979, the US Supreme Court vacated his sentence because his attorneys had successfully argued that Judge Duncan had used confidential information, unavailable to the defence, in reaching his sentencing decision. Funchess got a new sentencing hearing. Judge Duncan resentenced him to death anyway.

In 1982, Funchess was diagnosed with PTSD by two separate doctors, including Dr John Smith, described as one of the country's leading experts on the condition. Dr Smith said Funchess's diagnosis was consistent with the full clinical history and that PTSD "could erupt, on occasion, into uncontrollable outbursts of aggressive behaviour." Another physician concluded Funchess had likely committed the murders during "a prolonged episode of cognitive confusion and dissociation."

On May 17, 1982, Funchess and his attorneys attended a clemency hearing before Florida Governor Bob Graham. They argued that his PTSD hadn't been recognised at the time of trial, that it couldn't have been raised as a defence before 1980, and that two formal expert diagnoses supported the claim that his culpability was significantly diminished. Graham denied clemency, claiming PTSD "did not apply in Funchess's case." Some observers accused Graham of political calculation: he was campaigning for a US Senate seat at the time, in a state where support for the death penalty ran high.

A federal appellate court later found that Funchess's lawyers were themselves partly to blame. They'd known about the PTSD diagnosis since 1982 but had failed to raise it in either of their two subsequent habeas corpus petitions. His attorney's anguished response: "How can trial lawyers in 1986 be blamed for not raising a claim that did not exist in 1976?"

Person holding sign reading "FLORIDA SAYS THANKS TO A 'PURPLE HEART' VET" in a grassy area. Mood is respectful and appreciative.

On death row, Funchess was a model prisoner. He received only one disciplinary infraction in eleven years: a single refusal to approach the front of his cell for a count. He wrote poetry. He found religion. Guards spoke well of him.

The Execution: April 22, 1986

Governor Graham signed Funchess's final death warrant in February 1986, scheduling the execution for 7:00 am on April 22. Veterans for Peace set up a round-the-clock vigil at the Florida Vietnam War Memorial. Vietnam veteran and attorney Jeff Thompson held a press conference calling Funchess's case a symptom of a country that had never properly reckoned with what it had done to the men it sent to war:

"He had never been violent except in Vietnam, in the service of his country. If not for that service, he would not have committed these crimes."

Funchess spent his last hours with his parents, wife, two sisters, and three brothers. He received two 5-hour temporary stays that morning, one from the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals and one from the Supreme Court. Both expired. The Supreme Court voted 7 to 2 to dismiss his final appeal.

He walked to the electric chair calmly. He mouthed "I love you" to his attorney Susan Cary. He made no final statement. He was dead by 5:11 pm.

Anna Waldrop's daughter and Clayton Ragan's daughter were outside the prison. Ragan's daughter later said she felt she'd owed it to her father to be there, but expressed discomfort at the crowd of death penalty supporters who cheered when the news of Funchess's death was announced: "No death is a reason to be happy."

Linda Reynolds, Director of the Florida Clearinghouse on Criminal Justice, said at the moment of execution:

"David Funchess was killed twice by society: once in Vietnam, and once today."

The Uncomfortable Part: Was He Owed Sympathy?

This is where the case gets genuinely difficult, and where the traditional narrative around Funchess tends to go quiet.

Funchess was a self-confessed war criminal. He admitted to killing unarmed Vietnamese civilians under orders. This is treated in most sympathetic accounts as further evidence of his trauma. He was compelled to do terrible things, and the horror of those acts broke something in him. That may well be true. But it raises a question that doesn't get asked often enough: does participation in atrocity, even under orders, automatically transfer all moral responsibility upward?

Most Vietnam veterans who committed or witnessed war crimes came home and reintegrated into civilian life. Thousands of them carried their secrets to their graves. They didn't murder anyone at home. Funchess's defenders attributed his violence entirely to his PTSD, but his war record, which included killing civilians, could equally be read as evidence of a pre-existing capacity for violence that the war didn't create, only expressed.

He's not alone in that ambiguity.

A Pattern: Veterans, War Crimes, and Domestic Violence

The overlap between confessed or convicted war criminals and subsequent domestic violence is not a coincidence, and it's not simply a product of PTSD. Consider the following cases.

Samuel McDonald, executed in Missouri in 1997 for the robbery and murder of an off-duty police officer, confessed shortly before his execution that he'd machine-gunned an elderly woman and a baby in Vietnam.

Samuel Green, who in 1975 murdered his 16-month-old son and then took his own life in Texas, had been among the Marines court-martialled for the Sơn Thắng massacre of February 1970, in which a five-man "killer team" shot dead 16 unarmed women and children in a Vietnamese hamlet. Green had served an absurdly brief sentence before release. The massacre, often described as the Marine Corps' worst known war crime in Vietnam, saw sentences drastically reduced by a general despite jury verdicts calling for far longer terms.

Michael Nicholaou, who murdered his wife and stepdaughter in Florida in 2005, had previously been acquitted of strafing civilians in Vietnam. Years later, military colleagues stated he'd abandoned his post on at least one occasion to go "hunting", meaning seeking individual hand-to-hand combat with civilians using a knife.

Wayne DuMond, a convicted rapist and later murderer who became the centre of a controversial Arkansas clemency decision in the 1990s, told reporters at one point that he'd once "helped slaughter a village of Cambodians."

Edward Richmond Jr., who assaulted multiple police officers with a metal baton during the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots, had previously served prison time for the murder of a handcuffed and zip-tied Iraqi civilian in 2004.

John Boltz, a Korean War veteran convicted of murdering his stepson in Oklahoma in the 1980s, had told people shortly before the killing that he'd murdered civilians in Korea and that killing "didn't faze him." These statements were introduced at trial to undermine his self-defence claim. Boltz later insisted they were "false braggadocio" and he may well have been telling the truth. But the jury was entitled to conclude otherwise, and did.

The point isn't that all veterans are dangerous, or that military service causes violence, or even that PTSD isn't real and devastating and it plainly is. The point is that the narrative which frames veterans who commit murder as purely victims of the state that broke them doesn't always hold. Some of them were willing participants in violence long before anyone gave them a gun and a uniform.

The Broader Pattern: Vietnam Vets and the Death Penalty

Funchess wasn't the last Vietnam veteran executed. He was only the first.

Manny Babbitt, a Marine who'd fought in the horrific 77-day siege of Khe Sanh in 1968, suffered a shrapnel wound to the head that left him with lasting brain damage, and was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, was executed by lethal injection at San Quentin in California on May 4, 1999, the day after his 50th birthday. He'd murdered a 78-year-old Sacramento woman during a burglary in 1980. His final request, that the $50 prison meal allowance be donated to homeless veterans, was denied. He's buried with full military honours in Massachusetts. His brother, who'd turned him in believing the justice system would get him psychiatric help, has spent decades campaigning against the death penalty.

Wayne Robert Felde, Herbert Lee Richardson Jr., Larry Joe Johnson, and Leonel Herrera were all Vietnam veterans executed in Southern states during the 1980s and 1990s, all with documented psychiatric histories, all in cases where PTSD was either not raised at trial or raised too late. In every case, the Supreme Court refused to intervene.

It wasn't until Porter v. McCollum in 2009 that the US Supreme Court explicitly stated that military service is a mitigating factor in capital sentencing and that failure to present evidence of combat trauma can constitute ineffective assistance of counsel.

That ruling came far too late for Funchess, Babbitt, or any of the others.

What His Case Actually Shows

The story of David Funchess is often told as one of institutional failure: a country that broke a man, then killed him for being broken. And that's partly true. PTSD wasn't in the DSM. The government failed veterans comprehensively throughout the 1970s. Funchess's dishonorable discharge cut him off from VA benefits. His attorneys failed to raise his diagnosis in time. Governor Graham likely factored electoral politics into his clemency decision.

But Anna Waldrop spent seven years working in a bar before Funchess slit her throat. Clayton Ragan drove to Jacksonville to visit his children. Bertha McLeod was on vacation and decided to go in for one extra shift. All three of them were entirely innocent. The fact that Funchess was damaged doesn't make them any less dead, and the fact that he'd been ordered to kill civilians in Vietnam doesn't mean he had no agency over his actions at home.

The Funchess case remains genuinely unresolved, not because the facts are unclear, but because the moral weight of the thing refuses to settle neatly on either side.