Lisa McVey was seventeen and riding her bicycle home from work at a Tampa doughnut shop in the early hours of November 3, 1984, when a man knocked her off the bike and forced her into his car. For the next twenty-six hours he held her in his apartment and raped her repeatedly. She had decided that if she lived she would help the police catch him, and while she was with him she took in everything she could about the man, the car and the place, and left traces of herself behind. He let her go on November 4. "He knew what he was doing," she told a television reporter afterward. "I could have been in a ditch somewhere."
The man was Robert Joseph Long, known as Bobby Joe, a thirty-one-year-old X-ray technologist who had already killed at least eight women around Tampa Bay that year. He killed twice more in the days after he released her. Her description of him and his car was the evidence that ended it.
He was born on October 14, 1953, in Kenova, West Virginia. His parents, Joe and Louella, divorced when he was small, and he spent most of his childhood moving between West Virginia and Florida with his mother. He suffered several head injuries as a child. In 1974 he married his high school girlfriend, Cynthia Bartlett, and joined the Army; they had two children, and she filed for divorce in 1980, citing domestic and sexual abuse. He moved to the Tampa Bay area in 1983 and was on probation for assault when the killing began. While in the service he was badly injured in a motorcycle crash, and his lawyers later argued that the head trauma from that crash changed him. A claim that he was born with an extra X chromosome has been repeated in many popular accounts; no medical record confirming it has been made public.
Before he killed anyone he was a rapist, and a prolific one. In the early 1980s, in Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Ocala and later around Tampa, he answered classified newspaper advertisements placed by people selling furniture or houses, arranged to come by during the day while husbands were at work, and raped the women he found at home, often tying them up and robbing them. The press called the unknown attacker the Classified Ad Rapist. Estimates of how many women he raped run to around fifty; he was never tried for most of them. Linda Nuttall, thirty-three, and her husband placed an ad in 1984 to sell some furniture. When Long came to their house, she said, he raped her while her two young children were inside.
The killings began that spring. The first was Artiss Ann Wick, twenty, who had reportedly hitchhiked to Tampa from Gas City, Indiana, and was engaged to be married; she was raped and strangled around March 27, 1984, and her skeletal remains were not found until November 22, in rural southern Hillsborough County, after his arrest. Ngeun Thi Long, a dancer at the Sly Fox Lounge on Nebraska Avenue whom friends called Lana, was found in a field on May 13, nude and bound, with a cord around her neck and a knotted white scarf beneath her. Her age is given as nineteen or twenty. Michelle Denise Simms, twenty-two, a former beauty contestant, was found nude and bound off an Interstate 4 overpass on May 27, her throat cut. Elizabeth Loudenback, twenty-two, was killed in June, Vicky Marie Elliott, twenty-one, in September, and Chanel Devoun Williams, eighteen, in early October; Williams was shot in the neck. Karen Beth Dinsfriend, twenty-eight, was found on October 14, and Kimberly Kyle Hopps, twenty-two, on the side of U.S. 301 on October 31, too decomposed to be identified at once. After McVey's release came two more: the skeletal remains of Virginia Lee Johnson, eighteen, were found in Pasco County on November 6, a ligature cord beside them, and Kim Marie Swann, twenty-one, who had also danced at the Sly Fox and had a young son, was found with ligature marks on her neck and wrists on November 12. Johnson had last been seen around the middle of October; November 6 is the day she was found, not the day she died, though some accounts give it as her date of death.
His account of the night before Michelle Simms was killed, as a detective later described it to a jury, shows the method. He said he had put some rope and a weapon in his car that evening and gone driving, looking for a woman. The medical examiner said Simms had been beaten, stabbed and strangled, and that she was alive when some of her injuries were inflicted. Most of the women were strangled; some had their throats cut or were beaten, and Chanel Williams was shot. Several were women working as prostitutes or dancers on the Tampa strip. He left their bodies in fields and along rural roads outside the city, several of them bound. Juries also heard about the rapes that came before. In March 1984, in Pasco County, he had knocked at a house with a for-sale sign, said he was interested in buying, pulled a gun once he was inside and raped the woman who lived there.
The bodies had one thing in common that the killer did not know about: red carpet fibers, found at the scenes of Loudenback, Dinsfriend and Swann among others. McVey's account gave detectives the rest: she had been blindfolded, but had pressed her fingerprints onto every surface she could and left a barrette in the apartment, and she had heard him stop at a bank machine. They pulled the list of 1978 Dodge Magnum owners in Hillsborough County and subpoenaed the records of bank machines in north Tampa; only one Magnum owner had used a machine at three in the morning on November 4. They watched him for a day and arrested him outside a movie theater near his home on November 16, 1984, for McVey's kidnapping and rape. The red fibers matched the carpet in his car. In interrogation he confessed first to McVey and then to the murders.
Pasco County tried him first, for Virginia Johnson's murder. A jury convicted him and recommended death, and he was sentenced on May 3, 1985. In 1987 the Florida Supreme Court reversed the conviction: during his interrogation he had made an equivocal request for a lawyer, and the officers had kept questioning him without clarifying it, so the confession had to be suppressed. He was retried and convicted again, and in March 1997 the court threw the case out for the third time. Because the Hillsborough plea agreement barred the state from using those eight convictions against him, the evidence left in the Johnson case was too thin to prove his guilt, and the court ordered that he be acquitted.
The Hillsborough cases were resolved by agreement. On September 23, 1985, by the date in most accounts (some give September 24), Long pleaded guilty to eight counts of first degree murder, eight counts of kidnapping and seven counts of sexual battery, and to the kidnapping and sexual battery of Lisa McVey. He agreed not to contest the admissibility of his confessions or the physical evidence. In return, the state agreed to life sentences on every charge except the murder of Michelle Simms, where it kept the right to seek death before a jury, and it agreed not to use the convictions from the plea in later proceedings. He later tried more than once to set the plea aside, arguing that its consequences had not been explained to him. With the rapes he had committed as the Classified Ad Rapist, the pleas brought him twenty-eight life sentences. He was never convicted in the death of Artiss Wick.
The Simms penalty jury recommended death by eleven to one, and he was sentenced on July 25, 1986. The judge found that for some time before the murder Long had had serious mental or emotional problems, and wrote that his history showed "with stark clarity the effect that parental actions and physical trauma to the brain" can have on a person's later actions, but held that the aggravating circumstances far outweighed them. In 1988 the Florida Supreme Court upheld the guilty pleas but vacated the death sentence, because the prosecution had used the Pasco murder conviction, since reversed, as an aggravating factor. At the new penalty trial the defense did not dispute that he had killed Simms and argued that he was severely mentally ill. The new jury recommended death unanimously, and the sentence was affirmed in 1992. He spent more than thirty years on death row while the appeals ran.
On April 23, 2019, Governor Ron DeSantis signed his death warrant, the first of his administration. McVey, by then Lisa Noland and a master deputy with the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, had joined the family of Vicky Elliott in pressing for it. She said beforehand that she would thank him for choosing her, because she had helped stop him. By then she had written about the abduction, and a 2018 television film, Believe Me: The Abduction of Lisa McVey, had told her story.
Long was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison in Raiford on May 23, 2019, and pronounced dead at 6:55 p.m. He was sixty-five. He had no visitors that day and made no final statement; his last meal was roast beef, bacon, French fries and soda. Noland sat in the front row. "I wanted to be the first person he saw," she said. "Unfortunately, he didn't open his eyes." Linda Nuttall was there too and called it "surreal." A witness wore a shirt printed with photographs of all ten women and the words "The Ones That Matter." Afterward Noland read the victims' names aloud outside the prison and then spoke to him directly. "Bobby Joe Long, thank you," she said. She said she had forgiven him, because otherwise she would have been living in a prison of her own. "I chose not to become a victim," she said. "I chose to live."