Phyliss Minas, a 63-year-old court clerk who lived alone with her cats, worked in relative anonymity at the Miami-Dade criminal courthouse. She was keenly aware of the violent stories that filled the courthouse — as part of her job, she mailed hearing notices to the lawyers who represented accused criminals.

She told coworkers she always shopped before dark and carried little cash to avoid becoming a target for muggers. “She was so careful about her life,” her supervisor once said.

Minas became a victim, not in public but in her own apartment in North Miami, in 1992. A drug-addicted junkie neighbor named Jose Antonio Jimenez broke into her house, then stabbed her to death so viciously that jurors showed him no mercy — they voted unanimously to send him to Florida’s Death Row.

Twenty-six years after Minas was murdered, Jimenez is scheduled to be executed Thursday evening at Florida State Prison in Starke. In a case that drew little media attention then and over the years, Minas’ story has not been forgotten by her few remaining relatives and those who worked to put Jimenez behind bars.

“It was a very gruesome crime. He was utterly merciless,” said Miami lawyer Michael R. Band, who convicted Jimenez as a prosecutor in 1994. “There was no need to harm her. He could have walked out. She wasn’t a threat to him in any fashion.”

Jimenez, 55, was also convicted separately of an earlier murder — the 1990 strangulation killing of a woman found dead inside her Miami Beach apartment. He pleaded guilty and got 17 years for that killing.

Gov. Rick Scott originally scheduled Jimenez’s execution for July 18, but the Florida Supreme Court issued a stay as his defense lawyers claimed that North Miami hadn’t turned over key police records. The high court rejected the appeal in October, paving the way for Thursday’s execution by lethal injection.

Jimenez is still appealing his execution to the Florida Supreme Court, a federal court and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Among his chief arguments: that voters in November authorized a key change in state law that means Jimenez should be allowed a new sentencing hearing under Florida’s current death penalty law, not the one in existence in 1992 when the murder happened.

Unlike the early 1990s, jurors today must be unanimous in meting out the death penalty, and must also prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the aggravating circumstances of the murder — the cruel nature of the killing, plus his criminal background and the fact that it happened during a burglary — outweigh the “mitigating” factors. At trial, his defense lawyers argued that Jimenez should be spared the death penalty because of a crushing drug problem that had turned his life into chaos.

“I believe the execution is wrong. I believe the execution is unconstitutional,” his lawyer, Martin McClain, said on Tuesday.

Minas worked as a clerk for 15 years and her savage killing stunned the criminal courthouse. Fellow clerks, on lunch breaks at the building, watched the weeklong trial.

“We deal with these things daily,” Frank Sherod, boss of the criminal clerk section, told the Miami Herald at the time. “It’s a number until you learned it was one of us. Everyone up here is devastated about this.”

Minas was murdered on Oct. 2, 1992, inside Apt. 207 at a building on the 13700 block of Northeast Sixth Avenue.

Detectives believe Jimenez, an upstairs neighbor, broke into the apartment looking to burglarize the place. Minas surprised him. Evidence showed that Jimenez beat the woman repeatedly, then stabbed her eight times — twice plunging a knife into her heart.

“Ms. Minas was alive and conscious during the entire attack,” then Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Leslie Rothenberg said at sentencing.

At the 1994 trial, neighbors testified that they heard thuds and Minas yell out: “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” Two neighbors said they tried to opened the door, which the killer slammed shut.

Another neighbor, Clifford Merriweather, was standing by the street and said he saw Jimenez scaling down the building from a balcony adjacent to the Minas apartment. “He dropped and started walking toward me,” Merriweather testified. “His eyes were wider than a Kennedy 50-cent piece.”

Jimenez’s fingerprint was also found on the interior of Minas’ front door.

Jurors deliberated less than two hours in convicting Jimenez. At a sentencing hearing a couple months later, his defense lawyers depicted him as a high-school dropout controlled by his addiction to drugs.

Jimenez had dropped out of two rehab programs for his cocaine appetite, which cost him as much as $300 a day. His lawyers claimed that he smoked $200 worth of crack cocaine on the day of the murder.

But Judge Rothenberg, who is now on the Third District Court of Appeals, noted that Jimenez knew what he was doing.

“He still had the presence of mind to take the murder weapon with him and to conceal it from view when he dropped from the balcony,” the judge said before sentencing him to death.

This story was originally published December 12, 2018 at 6:00 AM.