40 years later, a guilty plea to 2 Tampa murders

TAMPA — One of two men charged with the random murders of two Tampa women in 1983 pleaded guilty Wednesday to both killings in exchange for his second and third life sentences.

Abron Scott, 58, admitted to his role in the murders of Linda Lansen and Barbara Grams, according to court records. The plea deal, state prosecutors said, included a provision wherein Scott agreed to testify against his co-defendant, Amos Robinson, who still awaits trial.

It is a case that may not have surfaced but for the exoneration of an innocent man.

Robert DuBoise was wrongfully convicted for the murder of Grams and spent 37 years in prison before a review of his case pointed to Robinson and Scott.

Grams, 19, was attacked one night in August 1983 as she walked home from her job in a Tampa shopping mall. Police identified a wound to her left cheek as a human bite mark. They collected bite samples from suspects, hoping to link the killer’s teeth to the mark.

DuBoise, then 18 and known to frequent the neighborhood near where the murder occurred, was one of dozens of men who provided bite samples. A dentist later opined that DuBoise’s teeth were a match. No other physical evidence linked him to the crime. He was convicted in 1985. Although a jury recommended life in prison, Judge Harry Lee Coe III, who was known as “Hangin’ Harry,” sentenced DuBoise to die.

His sentence was reduced to life in prison three years later. In the decades since, bite mark analysis came to be regarded as a highly subjective, unscientific and unreliable form of evidence. It has been cited as a factor in more than 30 wrongful convictions nationwide.

DuBoise obtained the help of the Innocence Project, the New York legal organization that works to root out wrongful convictions. They sent a petition to the conviction review unit in the Hillsborough State Attorney’s Office.

In 2020, the unit located old biological samples taken during a rape exam of Grams, which were stored in the Hillsborough Medical Examiner’s Office. Tests of those slides revealed DNA that did not match DuBoise.

When uploaded to a national database, the DNA yielded a match to Robinson, who along with Scott was already in prison for a different murder that occurred in October 1983. In that case, both men admitted taking part in the murder of Carlos Orellana, who was attacked as he left a Kennedy Boulevard nightclub. They forced Orellana into his car, then drove him to a remote area of Oldsmar, where he was run over.

Further DNA testing also linked Scott to the Grams murder. He and Robinson were 18 and 20, respectively, in 1983.

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Thereafter, a review of other unsolved cases from the same era led to the pair’s indictment for the killing of Lansen, 41, whose case was long unsolved.

A freelance photographer, she left her Tampa apartment one night in July 1983 and never returned. Her body was found the next day in weeds at a dead-end of old Memorial Highway in Town ‘N Country. She’d been shot multiple times in her head with a small-caliber gun.

Advanced DNA testing linked Robinson and Scott to Lansen’s killing.

DuBoise was released from prison in 2020. Two years later, a grand jury issued indictments against Scott and Robinson for the murders of Grams and Lansen. The indictments came, coincidentally, the same day Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended then-State Attorney Andrew Warren from office.

Last month, the Tampa City Council agreed to give DuBoise $14 million to settle a lawsuit he brought against the city for his wrongful conviction.

Robinson remains charged and still awaits trial in the Grams and Lansen murders. In addition to the life sentence he is serving for his role in Orellana’s murder, Robinson has two additional life sentences for the murders of two men he killed in Florida’s prison system.

If he’s found guilty in the Grams and Lansen cases, prosecutors have said they will seek a death sentence.