FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — As the execution of convicted killer Dennis Sochor draws near, his victim’s sister is bracing for a reality she has dreaded for 44 years.

“I wish we had her home,” Marilyn Gifford said of her slain sister, Patricia. “I want her back. We want to lay her to rest.”

With his execution date set for Tuesday, time to learn from Sochor where the body was hidden is quickly running out.

Sochor, 74, was convicted and sentenced to death for the Jan. 1, 1982 murder. Patricia Gifford, 18, was out celebrating the new year at the Banana Boat lounge in Fort Lauderdale and planned to meet up later with her boyfriend, Johnny Vasel, a chef working a party at a nearby hotel.

Sochor, then 29, had been on probation for a 1980 Oakland Park rape at the time. According to his own brother’s testimony, Sochor raped and murdered Gifford, then hid her body.

“He has, multiple times, told law enforcement, and also told me, that he was too drunk to remember where the body is,” said Jeff Hood, an anti-death penalty advocate who has met with Sochor as a spiritual adviser. “He has been unable to remember. He wants people to know that if he could help locate the body, he, of course, would.”

Sochor grew up in Michigan and was living in Fort Lauderdale in 1980 when he raped a woman and choked her unconscious. He was on probation after spending a year in jail in that case when he went to the Banana Boat lounge with his brother on New Year’s Eve, the last day of 1981.

Sochor’s brother, Gary, told police under oath that he thought Dennis was demon-possessed when he attacked and raped Gifford after the party. He did not remember where the body was.

In an interview with the South Florida Sun Sentinel on Friday, the victim’s sister said she doubted the sincerity of Sochor’s claim to cooperate with police looking for Patricia’s body. His account too perfectly matched his brother’s effort to help after Sochor was arrested and charged with the murder in 1986, she said.

“I don’t believe him for a second,” Marilyn Gifford said. “He knows damn well where she is. I don’t believe him for a second. He’s a liar. He’s a murderer. He’s a brutal killer whose word cannot be trusted.”

When Sochor dies, the secret of his victim’s location dies with him, Gifford said. It is not the outcome for which she and her family have longed for decades.

Gifford said she plans to attend Sochor’s execution. A member of Patricia’s boyfriend’s family will also be there. “He never got over her,” Gifford said. “He never married.”

Johnny Vasel died in July 2020. The family never held a funeral for him, Gifford said. They were waiting for Patricia’s body to be found so the two could be buried together.

Sochor is scheduled to be the second Broward convict executed this year.

In May, Richard Knight, 47, was executed for the June 2000 killings of Odessia Stephens and her daughter, Hanessia Mullings, in Coral Springs.

Sochor is not Broward’s longest-serving death row inmate. That notoriety goes to James Rose, 80, who was sentenced in 1977 by Broward Circuit Judge M. Daniel Futch Jr. for the November 1976 kidnapping and murder of Lisa Berry, an 8-year-old girl from Hollywood.

But Gifford said she is grateful for the death penalty because, although it has been 40 years since Sochor was sentenced, at the time he was convicted he could have been eligible for parole after 25 years.

“The death penalty guaranteed he would never go free,” Gifford said. “Imagine how many more he would have killed.”

Sochor should be grateful he got to live 40 years after his sentence, Gifford said.

“Even with the death penalty, he lived twice as long on death row as Patty ever lived at all,” she said.

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