Michelle Herndon: The Propofol Murder and Manhunt for O’Quinn

The Michelle Herndon murder was the 2005 killing of a 24-year-old University of Florida senior by Oliver Travis O’Quinn, a Shands Hospital nurse who had become obsessed with her and injected her with more than four times a lethal dose of the anesthetic propofol stolen from his workplace. O’Quinn fled the country, was tracked from Ireland to West Africa, and in May 2008 was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole.¹

Who Michelle Herndon Was

Michelle Ann Herndon was born July 15, 1981, and grew up in Live Oak, Florida. By the fall of 2005 she was a senior at the University of Florida in Gainesville, working as a personal trainer at Gainesville Health and Fitness, volunteering at the St. Francis House homeless shelter and a local primate sanctuary, and planning to join the Peace Corps.² She was in a serious relationship with her boyfriend, Jason Dearing, who lived in Miami.³

The Killer and His Obsession

Oliver Travis O’Quinn was a 27-year-old registered nurse at Shands Teaching Hospital (now UF Health Shands) in Gainesville, trained in anesthesia and assigned to surgical and intensive care settings.¹ He was the roommate of Herndon’s close friend Jessica Seipel, and Herndon had made a point of including him in social outings because she felt sorry for him, telling friends he reminded her of “the kid that got picked on in school.”²

What she treated as a casual friendship, O’Quinn treated as something else. He followed her, dropped by her home unannounced, and called her 43 times in the 30 days before her death. Her friends had taken to calling him “stalker boy,” and Herndon herself had begun pulling away.⁴ A jailhouse witness later testified that O’Quinn said he killed Herndon after overhearing her make derogatory comments about him during a phone call with her boyfriend: “Because she put him down, he was going to put her down.”³

How She Was Killed

On the evening of November 8, 2005, O’Quinn went to Herndon’s home at 115 SE 10th Street in Gainesville and injected her with more than four times a lethal dose of propofol, a fast-acting hospital anesthetic that renders a person unconscious within seconds.⁵ Omnicell automated dispensing records at Shands later confirmed O’Quinn had withdrawn propofol on multiple days leading up to the murder, including November 3, 2005.⁴ A state anesthesiologist testifying for the prosecution said Herndon could not have self-administered the dose and then disposed of the medical waste herself.⁶

Two days later, on November 10, Dearing drove five hours from Miami after being unable to reach her. Herndon’s car was in the driveway and her phone was ringing inside the locked house. He called police.³ Officers found Herndon dead in her bed, face down. There was no forced entry, no visible trauma, and no obvious signs of foul play. Her death was initially categorized as natural causes.²

How Investigators Cracked the Case

Medical examiner Dr. Martha Burt found a single tiny needle puncture mark on the inside of Herndon’s left elbow during the autopsy. The precision of the mark, Burt said, pointed to someone with medical training. The pattern of lividity also indicated Herndon had been placed face down in her pillow shortly after dying, inconsistent with a natural collapse.²

Investigators then found a discarded Publix grocery bag about 62 feet from Herndon’s back door. Inside were empty vials of propofol, midazolam, and etomidate, along with syringes and a pediatric butterfly IV catheter.⁶ DNA testing linked O’Quinn directly to the kill: his DNA was on the needle cap of one of the syringes, and Herndon’s blood was inside the syringe.¹ Phone records tracked by Gainesville Police Detective Michael Douglas showed O’Quinn’s obsessive calling pattern and the abrupt stop on the day Herndon died.⁴ Herndon’s friend Seipel also testified she had seen bloody, uncapped syringes on O’Quinn’s nightstand before the murder.³

By then O’Quinn was already gone. He resigned from Shands the day after Herndon’s death and left the country.

The International Manhunt

O’Quinn flew to Dublin, Ireland, on November 29, 2005. He stayed in a hostel, obtained a local phone, and applied for nursing jobs through the Irish Nursing Board, submitting a fraudulent letter claiming he was a licensed paramedic and registered nurse in good standing.⁶ Extraditing him from Ireland was unlikely to work quickly. Between 1999 and 2005, the United States had failed on all 12 of its extradition requests to Ireland, partly due to Irish restrictions on extraditing people who could face the death penalty.⁴

Instead, investigators worked with journalist Sean O’Driscoll to publish details of the case in the Irish press. O’Quinn fled.³ On June 6, 2006, he turned up at the U.S. Embassy in Mauritania to collect a money order. Embassy staff recognized his flagged passport. He bolted across the border into Senegal, where local authorities caught him and handed him over to U.S. custody. He was removed from Dakar in handcuffs that July and booked into the Alachua County jail in October 2006.⁷ The FBI, U.S. Marshals Service, Irish police, and Senegalese authorities all took part in the pursuit.²

Trial and Life Sentence

An Alachua County grand jury indicted O’Quinn for first-degree murder in November 2007. Trial began May 20, 2008, before Judge Peter Seig. Prosecutors James Colaw and Tim Browning argued that O’Quinn’s nursing training gave him the knowledge and access, his obsession supplied the motive, and his flight across three continents showed consciousness of guilt.²

Jail cellmate Thomas Rauscher testified that O’Quinn had confessed to him. Prosecutors also presented evidence that O’Quinn had told his father a “girlfriend” had died of a drug overdose before toxicology results were public. His father, Beecher O’Quinn, later recanted and told O’Quinn’s half-sister to stay silent about the conversation.⁴ The state introduced further evidence that O’Quinn had fabricated an Air Force paratrooper background and falsely claimed to have been a first responder on September 11; his sister confirmed he had never served.⁶

Assistant Public Defender Drew McGill argued the case rested on “probabilities, not dead-bang proof” and that O’Quinn’s conduct was the “normal behavior of a shy person.” The defense called no witnesses. O’Quinn did not testify, but his stated position was that he had tried to relieve Herndon’s chronic migraines and accidentally administered a fatal dose.¹

The jury deliberated about three hours and returned a guilty verdict on May 23, 2008. Judge Seig sentenced O’Quinn to life in prison without the possibility of parole, telling him from the bench: “It is beyond my comprehension how an intelligent mind could conceive of what we’ve heard about this week. You executed Michelle Herndon.”¹ Herndon’s mother, Belinda, addressed O’Quinn at sentencing: “I look at you and see a small, small man. I hope you never feel the pain and devastation that her dad and I do every day, because Michelle is no longer here.”⁸

The Civil Case Against Shands

Herndon’s parents, Richard and Belinda Herndon, sued Shands Teaching Hospital and Clinics, Inc. for negligent hiring and supervision. The complaint alleged Shands had failed to run a competent background check that would have surfaced O’Quinn’s prior history of stealing controlled drugs, and that after employees reported O’Quinn was taking propofol, midazolam, and etomidate from the hospital’s drug depository, Shands responded only by holding a conference with him about his “job performance.” O’Quinn resigned two weeks later, and the suit alleged the hospital took no immediate steps in the interim to dismiss him or restrict his access to controlled substances.⁹ The case reached the Florida First District Court of Appeal in 2009 on legal questions about the scope of the hospital’s liability, not a verdict on the merits. A dissenting opinion argued the complaint was ambiguous about whether Shands had actually received reports that O’Quinn was “stealing” drugs as opposed to violating internal protocols.

Where O’Quinn Is Now

O’Quinn’s direct appeal was denied by the Florida First District Court of Appeal in September 2009, and the same court affirmed the denial of his state post-conviction motion in June 2014. His 2015 federal habeas petition, raising 19 grounds including 11 claims of ineffective assistance of counsel, was recommended for denial in full.⁶ His Florida nursing license was revoked.¹⁰ As of September 2025, he was being held at Zephyrhills Correctional Institution in Florida, after an earlier stretch at Walton Correctional Institution in Defuniak Springs.⁴

1
The Gainesville Sun. Ex-Shands Nurse O’Quinn Gets Life Without Parole
2
NBC News. Murder Trial of Oliver O’Quinn
3
Oxygen. Oliver O’Quinn Guilty of Propofol Murder of Michelle Herndon
4
Forensic Files Now. Oliver O’Quinn: Nursing a Grudge
5
The Gainesville Sun. A UF Murder Mystery
6
GovInfo. O’Quinn v. Jones, Case No. 1:15-cv-00021
7
The Gainesville Sun. Suspect in Death of UF Student in Area Jail
8
Valdosta Daily Times. Herndon’s Killer Convicted
9
Findlaw. Herndon v. Shands Teaching Hospital and Clinics Inc.
10
Florida Department of Health. License Verification – Oliver Travis O’Quinn