A man who was sentenced to two life sentences for the murder of Lisashante “Lisa” Dyke in 1993 and for the death of her disabled son in 2016, caused by the attack on his mother while she was pregnant with him, died in prison earlier this year.
Records obtained Monday by the South Florida Sun Sentinel show that Ronnie Keith Williams died in a hospital in the Orlando area on April 25 from natural causes. He was 62.
Eighteen-year-old Lisa Dyke was babysitting her friend’s 9-month-old son on the morning of Jan. 26, 1993 in Wilton Manors. Williams came to the home that morning looking for his girlfriend, who was the baby’s aunt, who had just broken up with him.
But it was Lisa Dyke who was home that morning in the kitchen, and Williams, who was drunk on vodka and had smoked numerous rocks of crack cocaine, stabbed her repeatedly with a long knife and bit her on different parts of her body, court records say.
Lisa Dyke managed to call 911 and said she was stabbed in her heart and back and nearly eight months pregnant, according to court records. She told the 911 operator who did it, giving a name that sounded like “Rodney.”
She survived the attack and was taken to a hospital where she was able to identify Williams in a photo lineup before her death there on Feb. 14.
Julius Dyke came into the world at 4 pounds, 11 ounces two days after the stabbing. He suffered brain damage as a result of the attack and lived his entire 23 years paralyzed, requiring the constant care of his grandmother Margaret Dyke. He died in December 2016, and his death was ruled a homicide.
Murder victim’s son, injured in her attack, dies after 23 years confined to bed
Margaret Dyke told the Sun Sentinel on Monday that someone in Tallahassee had called her in April to notify her of Williams’ death. She remembered when the call came — in April, the same month her daughter was born.
Even hearing Williams’ name still makes her weak, she said. The family has been ripped apart, first by her daughter’s death and then by her grandson’s death, and never wholly recovered.
“I am not a judge. God is the judge. I always make that clear to everybody … I prayed and I stayed close to God all these years. God is the one that judged it, and God took care of it,” she said of Williams’ death.
When Williams murdered Lisa Dyke in 1993, he had only recently been released from a prison sentence for another murder. On Sept. 12, 1984, Williams stabbed to death Gaynell Jeffrey, a 21-year-old woman whose sister was dating Williams.
Jeffrey’s sister had been in the process of ending her relationship with Williams after finding out about a pending unrelated criminal charge involving a 9-year-old child from 1982, according to court records. Williams walked up to the family’s home and stabbed Jeffrey repeatedly when she opened the door.
Williams was sentenced to 17 years for both Jeffrey’s murder and the indecent assault on a child charge that had been pending also in Broward County, but he was freed after only seven years due to prison crowding.
During the years and years of court proceedings in Lisa Dyke’s death, Williams twice escaped a death sentence.
A jury first convicted Williams in 1996 and recommended death by an 11-1 vote, but that conviction was overturned on appeal in 2001 because a juror had an emotional collapse. He sat for a retrial in 2003, where a prosecutor’s error resulted in a mistrial just minutes before Williams was set to testify in his own defense. At his third trial in 2004, a new jury convicted him and once more recommended death.
And then in 2016, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that a death sentence cannot be imposed unless a jury recommended it unanimously, which meant Williams’ case was one of nearly a dozen at the time in Broward County that had to be sent back for a new sentencing hearing.
Not long after the state’s law on the death penalty changed, in 2017, prosecutors charged Williams with homicide in the death of Julius Dyke. Prosecutors were seeking the death penalty in both deaths at first.
However, in late 2023, Williams agreed to spend the rest of his life in prison. He pleaded no contest to two counts of first-degree murder in exchange for the two life sentences and was committed to the Florida Department of Corrections in January 2024.
Williams’ defense attorneys depicted his life as rough and one that should be spared as a result of a troubled upbringing. Williams’s sister, Clinita Lawrence, testified in court proceedings that his mother died during childbirth when he was 7 years old and he grew up fatherless, according to court records.
Williams lived with his sister, who was then 19 and caring for four other children, after his mother’s death. For a few months, they all lived in an abandoned car that didn’t have a roof, she testified, according to court records. Williams did not enter the first grade until he was 10 and never graduated from high school.
He was often picked on and beat up by other kids because of his small size and was teased about being parentless, his sister and a friend testified. A psychologist testified that Williams started drinking when he was 18 and using crack cocaine two years later.
Records obtained by the Sun Sentinel on Monday show that Williams was serving his sentence at Avon Park Correctional Institution in Polk County, about 85 miles south of Orlando.
Williams was in his cell on April 23 when he began complaining of shortness of breath, according to an investigation report from the District 9 and 25 Office of the Medical Examiner, which covers Orange and Osceola counties. Staff called 911, and he was unresponsive and intubated when emergency medical personnel arrived.
He was first taken to a hospital in Seabring and diagnosed with “a mass in his heart,” according to the report. He was taken to a second hospital, where he was diagnosed with a mass aneurysm. His condition continued to decline and he was pronounced dead on April 25.
The medical examiner who performed the autopsy concluded that Williams died “as the
result of cardiogenic shock, due to a ruptured aortic root aneurysm” and that his asthma contributed. His death was ruled natural.
Information from the Sun Sentinel archives was used in this report.