Orange County jury convicts Demorris Hunter in 2002 Theresa Green killing

An Orange County jury found Demorris Hunter guilty of murdering Theresa Green, closing a 24-year wait for a verdict in one of Central Florida’s longest-running cold-case prosecutions. The April 8 decision sent the case into the penalty phase, where jurors will decide whether Hunter gets death or life in prison.

Prosecutors said Green, 38, was strangled and left in the trunk of her white Oldsmobile, which was abandoned in a Walgreens parking lot in Sanford. Green was a hospital secretary from College Park, and the murder quickly became one of those cases true-crime watchers never quite let go of, because the trail went cold for years before detectives finally tied Hunter to it.

The jury reached its verdict after about seven hours of deliberation. That speed mattered in a case that took years just to reach trial. Jury selection began March 30, opening statements were set for April 6, and the verdict came on April 8 after years of legal motions and repeated attorney changes that kept the case from ever getting in front of jurors sooner.

Investigators say Hunter was living in the same apartment building as Green in the Bay Run II apartments at the time of the killing and was using the alias Michael Berry. Other reporting said Green and Hunter were seen together the night she died, and that the evening followed a party and a drunken altercation, giving prosecutors a timeline built around access, conflict and opportunity.

The case had already taken an unusual path by the time it reached the courtroom. Orange County prosecutors first signaled in 2015 that they would seek the death penalty, the same year Hunter was extradited to Florida after an Orange County grand jury indicted him in Green’s death. WESH-referenced reporting also said Hunter had once been on the FBI’s most wanted list before he was captured in Texas and returned to Florida.

Hunter is already serving a 110-year sentence in California for an unrelated murder, which gave the Florida case extra weight for prosecutors who have portrayed him as a serial killer. The Orange County case is the first time prosecutors have sought the death penalty against him in that county.

For Green’s family and everyone who has tracked the case since 2002, the conviction turned a decades-old file into a live sentencing decision. After years of delay, the jury has finally said Hunter is guilty, and now the fight over whether he lives or dies begins.