Long was born in Kenova, West Virginia, on October 14, 1953, and grew up in Florida. He served briefly in the army, was seriously injured in a motorcycle crash in 1974, and worked as an X-ray technician. From 1980 he committed a long series of rapes of women he found through classified advertisements, entering their houses when they answered his call about furniture for sale; the number is put at around fifty and he was never tried for most of them.
Between March and November 1984 he killed at least ten women in the Tampa Bay area. Most were strangled or asphyxiated; one was shot and one had her throat cut. The bodies were left in fields and orange groves outside the city, and the press called the case the Classified Ad Rapist and then the Tampa serial murders.
The women named in the record are Ngeun Thi Long, twenty; Michelle Denise Simms, twenty-two; Elizabeth B. Loudenback, twenty-two; Chanel Devon Williams, eighteen; Karen Beth Dinsfriend, twenty-eight; Kimberly Kyle Hopps, twenty-two; Virginia Lee Johnson, eighteen; Kim Marie Swann, twenty-one; and Vicki Elliott.
On November 3, 1984 he abducted seventeen-year-old Lisa McVey, held her for twenty-six hours, and let her go. Blindfolded throughout, she had made herself remember everything she could: the layout of the flat, the sound of the road, the make of the car, the pull of a cord. Her account is what identified him, and he was arrested on November 16, 1984.
He was convicted in eight cases and sentenced on July 25, 1986 to death, twenty-eight life sentences and terms totalling four hundred and one years; after appeals the death sentence stood on the murder of Michelle Simms, who was twenty-two. The defence argued that a head injury had changed his character, and an early claim that he had an extra X chromosome circulated widely and was not established. He was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on May 23, 2019, aged sixty-five.
Lisa McVey became a sheriff's deputy in Hillsborough County and has spoken about the case for years. She sat in the front row at his execution. She had wanted to look him in the eye, and said afterwards that he kept them closed. She has also said she would thank him for choosing her, because it was her account that stopped him.