Mosley was born in 1947 and lived in the northwest section of Fort Lauderdale. He had an intellectual disability and a record of sexual assault from the 1970s. In the neighbourhood he was known and feared, and the local name for him was the Rape Man.
Between 1973 and 1987 women and girls in that part of the city were raped and strangled. The number attributed to him runs from eight to sixteen and none of it has been tested in a court, because he was found incompetent to stand trial and committed to a state psychiatric institution in 1988. He has been held ever since. He has no murder conviction.
The women and girls named in the record are Emma Cook, fifty-four; Teresa Giles, twenty-two; Sonja Marion, thirteen; Vetta Turner, thirty-four; Shandra Whitehead, eight; Terry Jean Cummings, twenty-one; Naomi Gamble, fifteen; and Loretta Young Brown, twenty-nine.
What makes this one of the most serious entries in the archive is what happened to two other men.
Jerry Frank Townsend, a man with the intellectual capacity of a young child, confessed in 1979 to a series of killings after police questioning and was convicted of six murders. He served twenty-two years. DNA testing in 2000 and 2001 excluded him and matched Mosley, and he was released and exonerated in 2001.
Frank Lee Smith was convicted in 1986 of the rape and murder of eight-year-old Shandra Whitehead and sentenced to death, on eyewitness identification. He spent fourteen years on death row maintaining his innocence, was refused DNA testing while alive, and died there of cancer in January 2000. The testing was carried out after his death. It excluded him and matched Mosley. He is the first person in the United States shown by DNA to have been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death after already dying in custody.
So the count in this entry is not the point. The point is that a man the neighbourhood had identified for years was never charged with a murder, while two men who had nothing to do with it were convicted, one of them condemned. Broward County prosecutors moved to vacate Townsend's convictions in 2001, and the Smith case produced a Frontline documentary and a formal apology.
This entry is marked as a miscarriage of justice and as one in which nobody was convicted of the killings.