CAPE CORAL, Fla. — The man once dubbed the “Deadpool killer” has spent nine months on Florida’s death row, and newly obtained prison records reveal a detention marked by repeated disciplinary infractions, violent outbursts, and a pattern of behavior that corrections officials describe as among the most volatile they have ever managed.
Wade Steven Wilson, 31, was formally sentenced to death on August 30 of last year for the brutal October 2019 murders of 35-year-old Christine Melton and 43-year-old Diane Ruiz. But according to a 163-page set of discipline reports obtained exclusively by Wink Investigates reporter Olivia Jean, Wilson’s time behind bars has been anything but compliant. It took just 20 days after his arrival on death row before he first ran afoul of prison rules, and the infractions have only multiplied since.
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The documents, which have not yet been made public in full, paint a portrait of a condemned man who refuses to yield to the authority of the state that sentenced him. Prison sources describe a series of verbal altercations with guards, property damage inside his cell, and multiple violations of institutional regulations that have landed him in solitary confinement more than once. The exact nature of the most serious incidents remains under review, though officials have confirmed that the write-ups range from failure to follow orders to more aggravated charges that required internal use-of-force reviews.
Wilson’s case first captured national attention not because of the nature of his crimes alone, but because of the grim irony of his name. Sharing a name with Wade Wilson, the Marvel character Deadpool, the real-life defendant became a figure of online infatuation. Strangers across true crime forums and social media sent fan mail and letters to the judge pleading for mercy, urging the court to consider his erratic upbringing and documented claims of mental health struggles.
Yet, inside the walls of the Florida State Prison, there is no comic-book narrative that protects him from what he has done.
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The crimes that put Wilson on death row took place during a 12-hour stretch of horror on October 10, 2019. On the night of the sixth, Wilson had been out in Cape Coral, a quiet coastal city defined by its proximity to the Caloosahatchee River, its canal-front homes, and a general sense of safety. Among those he met was Christine Melton, a 35-year-old waitress who had moved to Florida from Colorado with her best friend, Stephanie Sailors, believing she had found a fresh start.
By the morning of October 10, just hours after they left a bar together, police were already working to understand the chain of events that would end Melton’s life.
Investigators would later determine that Wilson killed Melton inside her own home. The motive was immediate desperate flight. Following Melton’s death, Wilson took her car keys and drove away in her vehicle, leaving her body in the sagging bedroom of the home shared with Sailors.
But that morning was not over.
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## The second murder
As the sun came up, Diane Ruiz, a 43-year-old mother, was heading to her job for her 10:00 AM shift at a restaurant. She walked to the curb near a quiet street where she often traveled, a routine she had followed for years. She had no connection to Wilson, no knowledge of him, no reason to suspect he had anything to do with her life.
Yet Wilson, driving the stolen vehicle he had taken hours earlier, pulled up beside her and asked for directions. When she approached to help, he forced her into the car.
Witness at the scene has testified that Wilson, in the following hours, could not say exactly how or when he killed Ruiz, claiming he had blacked out. But the evidence shows that this lone mother of a son aged just 14 was taken to an unknown wooded location, attacked, and left dead. Her body was not recovered by police until the next day.
Crime scene stops and forensic evidence piecing together the same death. The cruelty of the aftermath is noted in court documents, with her remains found in a way that was described as “deposing.” Investigators from the Cape Coral Police Dept, in a formal investigation, wrote that the murder was “premeditated, cold, and without mercy.”
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The one morning devastated two families. Christine had been in the process of forming her life; Diane was a beloved mother, and her then-14-year-old son and her fiance were left to carry a grief that would follow them into the courtroom testimony from the trial in June 2024.
The county coroner’s office piecemeal investigation slowly tracked Wilson’s location through that fatal day and across the following days. But the police investigation was perhaps most chillingly solved by someone Wilson trusted most: his father. In a call that detectives rarely see, Wilson reached out to his biological father, Steven Testika, and described what could not be taken back.
Testika list to his son and then made a decision that no parent should ever have to make. He turned his son in, contact with authorities.
With this lean assist, Wilson was arrested within 12 hours of the report and was subsequently indicted for the robbery. But the killings were not a first for him. His criminal history documented an arrest in Nov.
13 for burglary and grand theft. In 2015, an accusation some considered more severe was known to have ended in a quiddle – a legal term that leaves a file closed with no finding of guilt. By 2017, he was arrested for theft of a firearm; in Aug of 2019, just months before the murders, he had been arrested for battery.
Collectively, they were a landslide of consistent violence building to the tri-pronged emphasis of the 2019 murders.
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On June 12, 2024, after a trial that began with the dismissal of two jurors and featured extremely difficult testimony from Melton’s best friend and the son and fiance of Ruiz, a jury convicted Wilson on all counts: two counts of first-degree murder, grand theft of a motor vehicle, battery, burglary of a dwelling, and petty theft.
The jury reconvened to recommend sentence. Their vote was divided, proportional to a new state law passed in 2023 that permitted a death penalty recommendation with a simple majority, rather than a unanimous vote. For the murder of Christine Melton, the split was 9 to 3 for death.
For the death of Diane Ruiz, 10 to 2 voted for death, 2 held back. Wilson’s defense team appealed to Judge to understand his history, citing years of mental instability; the prosecution asserted a pattern of coldness that had continued even after his arrest. The turnaround of these numbers was the case-of-state for Florida: Wilson had become, according to the prosecutor, the poster child for a new era of capital punishment.
On this date in August 2024, Judge Nicholas Thompson, seated in a packed Lee County courtroom, looked down at Wilson and warriors as the sentence was read. The moment will go down in Florida court history: the sentence was delivered twice over, one for Melton, one for Ruiz. Wilson, standing in a suit, did not flinch.
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But in the nine months since, according to the prison reports, there has been trouble. The Florida State Prison death row unit is designated for those sentenced to the capital punishment sentence. The rules are the strictest, the monitoring constant.
Yet Wilson has reportedly incurred fresh a significant number of disciplinary actions. Starting in September of 2024, 20 days into his stay, signing reports of verbal altercation with a corrections officer. In late Oct, he was written up for violating basic institution rule, potentially regarding to his communication.
In December, there was a psychological exam ordered when he refused to adhere to a direct order to reenter his cell.
The most serious infractions on the log, for which “ter”, Wilson was transferred to an even more secure facility inside the prison for 3 weeks of solitary confinement before being returned to the general death row population. Correct officials who spoke with the investigator would not confirm the actions of violence, but described the series of reports as “culturally dissimilar” from the average set, showing a psychological pattern consistent with someone who has trouble adjusting to the new permanent environment. Aware interviews from other inmates and staff to have been, in the words of one, “feeling transactional — no regret, just a simmering frustration at the guards who hold the keys.”
Despite his vivid exit from the public eye, Wilson remains much more a public figure than most death row inmates. Due to the online need of his name, his case has been followed by legions of “web sleepers” who write letters, stream the hearings, and even appeal to his personal aesthetics The irony of him being the same name as the anti-hero in the Batman, has crucified over his grave, so he can’t escape it.
Now, in 2026, in a process that extends further into the country, state law. In an unusual legal move, Wilson’s appeals team vacated convictions of prison, but specifically the “jury recommendation” process that came after the new law. They argue that he was sentenced death due to non-unanimous recommendation, which they argue violates his right to a fair trial when the law was passed in 2023.
If you appeal, the 163-page report is entered into the record. The state’s attorney’s office and the Florida Attorney General have respectively responded, citing precedent from other state lower courts that have already decided that law is constitutional, also asserting that the new limit is advisory, and that the judge’s decision was independently verified, and not bound by the split jury vote. The oral arguments in the case were presented in February of 2026, and observers say that the decision in the assessing trial case, which of serious significance for the future of Florida death penalty, could drop at any time from the Court of Appeals as early as mid-2026.
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But what cannot be dismissed is the human element left behind in the prison infirmary. While murderers and appeals are fought in the courtroom, the families of Christine Melton and Diane Ruiz continue to arrive to the bar of the American justice system, purpose-built to remind it of the weight that the case carries. Their grief may not be a factor when the gavel falls on a procedural matter, but the son of Diane Ruiz, along with her fiancé, have kept a vigil.
“He walked away with her death—no reason, no chance—I believe justice is served, but no memory will ever fill her chair at dinner. The trauma is and will always be ours,” added a father in a recent success statement. On the other side, they don’t take notice of Wade Wilson’s mistreatment of the prison as a source of ease.
There’s an uneasy feeling that even a punitive system won’t satisfy, ever.
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The appeal now pending in Florida’s second highest court, is making significant strides to expand into the U. S. Supreme Court, just as defense attorneys have argued that, under Florida law, the role of a jury in capital crimes is now no more than “advisory,” which is a violation of federal standards and Ring versus Arizona.
They argue that Wilson should have been granted a life sentence because a minority of the jury chose to favor it; the judge was the only real determining authority. The State of Florida denounces this premise.
Regardless of the outcome, Wilson is currently on the worse side of the law. As of today, there is no schedule execution. In the appeal, any lethal injection is at least 15 years away and likely more, unless he dies of new cause first.
But that’s not what the family wants to hear from a country that hears “community” and “prevention”. The prison solves nothing; it is an impossible dilemma for the women’s loved ones.
In the wire, Wilson’s problems inside the prison counts now as you cannot find peace in the Jackson Prop, only the cold, empty realization that 26 other cellmates have a target on your back. . His arrival at the new facility, which has the trauma history, has been him in a truly worse environment than anything imagined.
Inside the dimly lit unit, death is not a punishment postponed; it is a daily companion.
As the courtroom 𝒹𝓇𝒶𝓂𝒶 fades from the front page, it leaves a question: Is this sentence worse than a quick death? For Wilson, the answer is constant, just prisons surrounded by the crowds and the silence where he can have no one. Judges, family, victim—the 163-page discipline report is the textbook of what nothing to do with a condemned man.
He will not be given a name and a pension; he will simply be given a number, and later, on a gantry, a needle. For the family of Melton and Ruiz, this is more than the ritual of this appeal; the appeal is simply a maze that keeps them from the actual “event” that will end the emotional crisis.
And for Wilson, whose suppressed name has become his own defiance tactic, he is currently at the lowest point: he is alive, and yet we continue to face retribution of the state’s law. Countless hours— surviving today. Under the confines of night, he is the man in the world’s silencers, awaiting a new nightmare—one that with each 24 hours, carry with a bushel of the control of the Florida Correctional System.
And the new days are not his.
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This article includes reporting from an investigator video segment on the Wilson case containing material support from Florida court records and official testimony. Names of a lower officer have been redacted pending the investigation in the internal affairs department. This report contains podcasts because the details of the crime are considered sensitive; we create a space to remember the victims.