Judge Morgan sentenced Dylan Cody Lamb to life for killing Nadyne Marie Tillman.

Friday's order is the sentence on an August jury verdict. Keys News, citing the State Attorney's Office, reported life without parole plus two five-year terms that run together. Keys Weekly reported the verdict as second-degree murder, false imprisonment, and tampering with evidence. The Miami Herald's conviction story called one of those counts kidnapping. The judgment Keys News reported Friday used the false-imprisonment label.

Keys News reported that on Friday, Oct. 9, 2026, in Plantation Key, Circuit Judge James Morgan sentenced Dylan Cody Lamb, 35, to life in prison without parole for the murder of Nadyne Marie Tillman. The Monroe County State Attorney's Office is the source of that account. Morgan also imposed five years for false imprisonment and five years for altering, destroying, concealing, or removing physical evidence. Those terms run at the same time as the life sentence. The court ordered $22,829.13 in costs, including prosecution and investigative expenses. Keys News reported that Tillman's mother, sister, and daughters described the loss and asked for the maximum the law allows, and that five of the six jurors who convicted him attended, along with Monroe County sheriff's deputies and detectives. Chief Assistant State Attorney Joseph Mansfield said, "This defendant took a woman's life, tried to erase the evidence of what he had done and left her family with a loss they will carry forever," and that "the court ensured that he will spend the rest of his life in prison." That is the sentence. It is not a new verdict.

The investigation began April 7, 2025, after Tillman's family reported they could not reach her, Keys News reported. She was 43. Her vehicle was at the resort. Detectives found her body concealed in a closet beneath a water heater, in a room Lamb had occupied. The Miami Herald's account of the August verdict described the same hiding place as underneath an air-conditioner handler in a closet at the Amoray Dive Resort in Key Largo. Keys Weekly's verdict story used both descriptions, an AC handler and a water heater. The resort name is the Herald's and the sheriff's office's. The Friday sentencing story called it a Key Largo resort. Lamb was arrested the next day. Keys News reported Tillman's credit card was concealed in his wallet. After conflicting accounts, he admitted blocking a doorway with his body when she tried to leave and striking her during a confrontation. He later found she was not breathing. The medical examiner found she died from blunt-force trauma to the head and neck. Instead of calling 911, he tried to clean the room, hid the body, packed bloodied linens, her cellphone, and other belongings into trash bags, and moved to another room. Hotel staff later threw the bags away. Investigators could not recover them. Those are the facts the State Attorney's Office put under the sentence. They are the case the jury already decided.

The verdict was Friday, Aug. 21, 2026. Keys Weekly reported the jury found Lamb guilty of second-degree murder, false imprisonment, and altering, destroying, concealing, or removing physical evidence, after deliberating less than two hours, and that sentencing was set for Oct. 9 at 10 a.m. The Miami Herald reported the same second-degree murder conviction and the same deliberation, and it called the confinement count kidnapping rather than false imprisonment. Friday's sentence, as Keys News reported it from the State Attorney's Office, is life without parole on the murder and five years on false imprisonment. The Herald's word and the sentence's word are not the same label. Keys Weekly reported that Major Crimes Prosecutor Colleen Dunne tried the case with Assistant State Attorney Trey Evans, and that Lamb waived Miranda, gave inconsistent accounts, and then a sworn handwritten statement. NBC 6 reported at the April 2025 arrest that he had worked as a kayak tour guide and that jail records listed homicide, kidnapping-false imprisonment, and destroying evidence. Monroe County Sheriff Rick Ramsay said then that there did not appear to be anyone else involved. No co-defendant was sentenced Friday.

The guilty verdicts are the findings on those counts. Friday's order is the punishment, including the costs. Keys News did not report that Lamb has filed an appeal. An appeal, if one is filed, would ask a higher court to review the judgment. It would not by itself change the term Morgan imposed. All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.