Daniel Owen Conahan Jr. (born May 11, 1954) is a convicted American murderer, rapist, and suspected serial killer. Conahan was convicted of one murder, but has been linked to a dozen murders, mostly of transients seeking employment and gay men in the Charlotte County, Florida area in what came to be known as the Hog Trail Murders. Early life and career Conahan was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, and moved with his family to Punta Gorda, Florida, shortly after birth. When he was a teenager, he discovered he was homosexual; this displeased his parents, who sent him to several psychiatrists. He graduated Miami Norland High School in 1973 and joined the United States Navy in 1977, stationed at Naval Station Great Lakes in Illinois. In 1978, he was nearly court-martialed for taking fellow Naval officers off base for sex, and was discharged a few months later after getting into a fight with a man upon whom he had attempted to force oral sex. After his Navy discharge, Conahan stayed in Chicago for 13 years before moving back to Punta Gorda to live with his elderly parents in 1993. In 1995, he became a licensed practical nurse, graduating at the top of his class from Charlotte Vocational-Technical Center. He was employed by Charlotte Regional Medical Center in Punta Gorda. Murders On February 1, 1994, the mutilated corpse of a man was discovered in Punta Gorda. The body had been outside for about a month and had rope burns on the skin and the genitalia had been removed and discarded. The man was not identified until 2021, when the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office announced that new DNA testing confirmed the victim as Gerald (Jerry) Lombard, of Lowell, Massachusetts. On January 1, 1996, a North Port family's dog brought home a male human skull. Police eventually pieced together much of a skeleton and determined that the genitalia had been cut out, similar to the 1994 victim (Lombard). The North Port skeleton has not been identified. A third man's mutilated body was discovered in North Port on March 7, 1996. He had been killed only 10 days earlier. He also remained unidentified until June 1999, when he was identified as John William Melaragno. Another man's skull was found in Charlotte County on April 17, 1996. Police searched the surrounding woods and found the rest of the man as well as a second body. The