Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd held a news conference Wednesday to detail the arrest of a 21-year-old man charged in the violent killing of his mother inside her Eagle Lake home.
Gibson Nash was formally charged with first-degree murder in the death of 56-year-old Margaret Chu Dufour. Nash also faces two counts of leaving the scene of a crash involving injury following a sequence of collisions along US 27 on July 21.
Dufour was a registered nurse who had recently moved from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Polk County. She had been living in a new home on Wilder Way for about a month and worked on the surgery floor at Bartow Regional Hospital.
“She was a registered nurse and she helped a lot of people along the way in her profession,” Judd said, holding up a photograph of Dufour receiving an award. “I want you to see a nurse, a helper, a mother who never gave up on her son, and it cost her her life.”
According to investigators, deputies first interacted with Dufour when helping her move into her home after a dispute with moving contractors.
On the morning of July 21, around 7:00 a.m., deputies responded to a hit-and-run collision involving a 2022 BMW SUV registered to Dufour. The BMW collided with multiple vehicles on US 27 North before crossing the center line and striking another vehicle.
Nash was found unconscious at the scene and transported to Lakeland Regional Health as a trauma alert. Emergency personnel noted blood on Nash’s hands and shoes that did not appear consistent with the mechanics of the vehicle crash. Hospital evaluations later revealed Nash was suffering from liver failure, which investigators attributed to an overdose of Tylenol taken prior to the crash.
“We don’t know if he thought it would kill him or he thought it would get him sympathy,” Judd said. “It got him neither. It didn’t kill him and it didn’t get him any sympathy.”
When deputies went to Dufour’s home to investigate the registered owner of the BMW, they received no response at the door. After checking with her employer and learning she was not scheduled to work, deputies checked the perimeter of the house, found a key hidden under a floor mat, and entered.
Deputies discovered Dufour deceased in a front bedroom. The medical examiner determined her cause of death was blunt force trauma and strangulation.
“As our deputies enter the front door of the house, they look immediately to the left in a bedroom which is set up as an office, and there’s Margaret stomped into a bloody puddle in the middle of the floor, obviously deceased,” Judd said. “We have photographs of progressive bruising on Gibson’s hands and feet—remarkable bruising on his knuckles and on his feet from where he kicked and kicked and stomped and beat his mother.”
Laboratory testing later confirmed that blood recovered from Nash’s boots matched Dufour’s DNA. No weapons were recovered from the residence; investigators determined Nash used his hands and feet during the attack.
Family members informed detectives that Nash had diagnoses of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and possibly autism, alongside a history of violent behavior. Knoxville authorities had responded to multiple domestic calls involving Nash and Dufour. In April, Nash was arrested in Tennessee after threatening Dufour with a knife. Dufour later bonded Nash out of jail and brought him to Florida in an attempt to secure better mental health treatment for him.
“She would not give up on him even after he’d threatened to kill her, threatened to kill her, pulled knives on her, hit her, and attacked her,” Judd said. “This was her last-ditch hope to get him help and get him away from the environment he was in, and it got her murdered.”
Nash was transferred between medical facilities, including Tampa General Hospital, due to his liver condition. On August 3, after his health improved, he was extubated and taken into custody. He remains under the sheriff’s office’s supervision at the hospital pending transfer to the Polk County Jail.
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