On September 8, 1973, two teenagers crossing a field outside Perinton, New York, near Rochester, found a man lying dead. Beside him were a gun, a partly finished bottle of whiskey and a Spanish-language Bible, and tucked between the pages of the Bible was a letter. The dead man was Carmello DeJesus, a Puerto Rican fugitive who had been wanted in New Jersey for murder for two years and had just become the only suspect in another. He had shot himself once in the chest, and the bullet had passed through his lungs.
The letter was addressed to his mother and his brothers and sisters in Puerto Rico. In it he said he was sorry for what he had done and that he was ending his life so that he would not kill anyone else. He confessed to four killings. Three of the women he named, with the time and date of each death. The fourth he mentioned without saying who she was, where she died or when.
Little is recorded about his early life. He was born in Puerto Rico in 1934, moved to the mainland at some point afterward, and became known as a gambler and a career criminal with a short temper. The FBI's record on him went back to 1960 and showed convictions in New Jersey and Florida for burglary, gambling, possession of stolen property and assault, and two escapes from prison.
The first killing he admitted took place on September 17, 1971, in Bridgeton, New Jersey. He broke into the home of a girlfriend, Octavia Lloyd, and when she tried to drive him out, he pulled a gun in the struggle and shot her through the chest. Neighbors found her body on the back porch. By then he had driven away; he abandoned the car near Woodstown, stole another and was gone. Within days a grand jury indicted him in his absence for her murder and for offenses connected with the break-in.
State police and the FBI chased tips that placed him in Pennsylvania, New York, Florida, Mexico and Puerto Rico, and never caught up with him. He was in fact sweeping floors at the Comstock Canning Company in Egypt, a hamlet within the town of Perinton. No killing or other violent crime has been tied to him in 1972.
On January 5, 1973, he was staying at a motel in Delray Beach, Florida, in the company of Sandra Lee Postell, a thirty-year-old woman also known as Sandy Lee Barbery. The two argued, for reasons that were never established, and he cut her throat with a knife and fled.
He went back to New Jersey, to Camden, where he got to know Milagros Inez Pena, a forty-year-old single mother of two who shared an apartment with her twenty-three-year-old son. On September 1, with her son away visiting friends for the weekend, an argument between them turned violent. She seemed to be trying to get out of the apartment when he shot her once through the heart; the bullet entered her upper right chest and left through her back, and the coroner could not say what caliber it was. Her daughter found her body two days later. The next day a warrant was issued for DeJesus as the only suspect, and before it could be served, word came from Perinton that he was dead.
After his death, investigators in New York, New Jersey and Florida went back through unsolved cases looking for the fourth woman in the letter. A 1968 murder in Miami had once been charged against him, but the charge had been dropped for reasons that were never made public. None of it produced a name. He was never tried for any of the four killings he confessed to, and the only one that ever produced an indictment was Octavia Lloyd's.