1993 Iowa murders

In 1993, Dustin Lee Honken was a methamphetamine manufacturer and dealer in northeast Iowa facing federal drug trafficking charges. When one of his dealers, Greg Nicholson, agreed to become a government informant against him, Honken and his girlfriend, Angela Jane Johnson, searched for Nicholson's whereabouts after Honken was released on bond. On July 24, 1993, Johnson gained entry to Nicholson's home by posing as a saleswoman. She and Honken bound Nicholson, forced him to record a false statement, and then bound his girlfriend, 37-year-old Lori Ann Duncan, along with Duncan's daughters, 10-year-old Kandace and 6-year-old Amber. The family was forced into a car and driven to a wooded area outside Mason City, where Honken killed the adults and then the two children at a pre-dug grave.

Honken had been prepared to change his plea and admit guilt in the federal drug case, but after Nicholson's disappearance the government's case instead turned on the testimony of another former dealer, Terry DeGeus. On November 4-5, 1993, Johnson lured DeGeus to meet her under the pretext of rekindling their relationship, then drove him to an abandoned house where Honken beat, shot, and buried him. With no surviving witnesses, the government dropped the criminal case tied to those disappearances at the time, and Honken was later convicted only on drug trafficking charges, receiving a lengthy prison sentence after a 1999 appellate ruling removed a sentencing deduction.

The murders were not solved until 2000, when Johnson's friend Christi Gaubatz came forward to police with information about the search for Nicholson and the weapon used. Johnson was charged with five counts of murder in furtherance of a continuing criminal enterprise in July 2000. In custody, a fellow inmate, Robert "Bobby" Gene McNeese, obtained a recorded confession from Johnson and a map to the victims' bodies, which were recovered in October 2000. Honken was charged with the murders in 2001.

Honken and Johnson were tried separately. Honken was convicted in October 2004 on all counts, including the five murders, and jurors recommended life sentences for the adult victims but death sentences for the killings of the two children; he was formally sentenced to death in October 2005. Johnson was convicted in 2005 and sentenced to death in December 2005, becoming the first woman since the 1950s sentenced to death by a U.S. federal jury. In March 2012, the presiding judge vacated Johnson's death sentence due to deficient legal representation regarding her mental state, and in December 2014 prosecutors declined to seek a second death sentence; she was resentenced to life without parole and is incarcerated at FCI Aliceville.

Honken exhausted his appeals in 2015, but his execution was delayed by a moratorium and subsequent litigation over federal execution protocols. He was executed by lethal injection on July 17, 2020, becoming the first defendant from Iowa executed by the federal government since 1963.