Eddie Lee Mosley was never convicted of killing anyone. He was charged with murder in 1987, found incompetent to stand trial and committed to a state psychiatric hospital, where he remained until his death in 2020. Yet his name sits at the center of two of Florida's best-known wrongful convictions. DNA testing in 2000 and 2001 linked him to killings of Black women and girls in northwest Fort Lauderdale for which two other men had been sent to prison. One of them, Jerry Frank Townsend, served about 22 years before he was freed. The other, Frank Lee Smith, died of cancer on death row eleven months before the test that cleared him.
Police and the lawyers who sued on Townsend's behalf came to attribute 17 murders and other attacks to Mosley between 1973 and 1987, according to Florida Bulldog. None of those killings was ever tried against him.
Mosley lived in northwest Fort Lauderdale, a mostly African American part of the city. A court-appointed psychiatrist, quoted in a 2009 Bulldog profile, called him "a shark." The same profile reported that he had been arrested ten times and had been released again and again after being found incompetent to stand trial and treated in hospitals.
According to the FRONTLINE documentary "Requiem for Frank Lee Smith" (PBS, 2002), Mosley was charged in two cases in 1973, with other charges. He was declared incompetent and sent to the state hospital for the criminally insane at Chattahoochee, Florida. Doug Evans, a Fort Lauderdale detective who then headed a squad investigating attacks on women, told FRONTLINE that the squad had close to 300 cases at the time and that Mosley was identified in 41 of them. "He never confessed, not one time, to any case," Evans said.
Mosley was a cousin of the mother of eight-year-old Shandra Whitehead, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, the Innocence Project and FRONTLINE. That family tie would later matter in the case against Frank Lee Smith.
Doug Evans was one of the first Black officers hired by the Fort Lauderdale Police Department, in 1963, and spent 20 years there, mostly on homicides, according to the 2009 Bulldog profile. He believed early that Mosley was responsible for a series of attacks and killings in the city's northwest neighborhoods.
FRONTLINE reported that about five years after the 1973 incompetency finding, new attacks and killings began. Captain McKinley Smith recalled Evans telling him, "Mack, he's out." In the summer of 1979 several women and girls were found dead in northwest Fort Lauderdale, according to the Innocence Project's case page for Townsend: Ernestine German on July 9, Sonja Marion, 13, on July 27, Terry Jean Cummings on August 7 and Cathy Moore on August 24. The National Registry of Exonerations gives Cummings's age as 21; Florida Bulldog in 2020 gave it as 20.
About three weeks before September 5, 1979, Evans named Mosley as the prime suspect in the killings within Fort Lauderdale's jurisdiction, Florida Bulldog reported. His case rested on eyewitness accounts from women who had survived attacks and on a distinctive shoeprint found where Terry Jean Cummings died. Broward Sheriff's Office detectives did not follow his lead. Detective Anthony Fantigrassi later testified that he had checked Mosley during the 1979 investigations and discarded him as a suspect.
On September 5, 1979, Miami police arrested Jerry Frank Townsend, then 27, after a woman reported an assault, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Townsend had an IQ the Registry gives as 58; the Innocence Project describes him as having the mental capacity of an eight-year-old. From September 6 to 10, Miami officers and two Broward Sheriff's detectives, Anthony Fantigrassi and Mark Schlein, questioned him. The Registry says officers stopped the tape at times, took him to crime scenes and showed him photographs. He implicated himself in about 20 killings, many of which prosecutors never pursued because the evidence showed he could not have committed them. No physical evidence linked him to any of the crimes.
Townsend's arrest, Florida Bulldog wrote in 2012, ended the public search for a killer and rapist who had frightened a mostly Black neighborhood in northwest Fort Lauderdale. Mosley stayed free.
In July 1980 a Broward jury convicted Townsend of first-degree murder in the 1973 deaths of Naomi Gamble, 15, and Barbara Ann Brown, 21, and acquitted him in the death of Thelma Jean Bell, 20. He received two consecutive life sentences. In October 1982 he pleaded no contest to the murders of Cathy Moore and Terry Jean Cummings, and prosecutors dropped the charges in the deaths of Ernestine German and Sonja Marion. The Marion case had been dropped after an alibi showed Townsend clocked in at work that morning, Florida Bulldog and the Innocence Project reported. In December 1982 he pleaded guilty in Miami-Dade County to two more murders and a further offense. In all, he stood convicted of six murders and a further offense.
At Townsend's trial, Evans testified for the defense, and the 2009 Bulldog profile reported that the prosecutor and judge cut his testimony short. Fantigrassi told the court that Evans had an "irrational vengeance" against Mosley.
Ten women and children died in the years between Townsend's arrest in 1979 and Mosley's confinement in 1987, Florida Bulldog reported in October 2009, and each death was "later linked to Mosley by DNA testing or other means." The lawsuit filed on Townsend's behalf made the same link. The Bulldog listed them by date:
Susan Boyton, December 24, 1979
Arnette Tukes, February 22, 1980
Cynthia Maxwell, March 10, 1980
Letha Williams, March 25, 1980
Geraldine Barfield, December 19, 1983
Emma Cook, December 24, 1983
Loretta Brown, November 26, 1984
Theresa Giles, December 18, 1984
Shandra Whitehead, April 15, 1985
Santrail Lowe, February 24, 1987
None of these deaths was tried against Mosley. Some details of the women's lives are known. Arnette Tukes was 20 and had a son who was three when she died; years later he named his own daughter Arnette in her honor, the Bulldog reported in 2012. Her mother was a cousin of Doug Evans. "My daughter would still be alive if they hadn't arrested the wrong man," her mother told the Bulldog. Geraldine Barfield was 35, according to the Bulldog, or 36, according to Broward-Palm Beach New Times; she was found on December 19, 1983. She left a daughter and an older brother, who both called for an inquiry in 2012. Emma Cook was 54 and was killed on Christmas Eve 1983. Her granddaughter was 11 when she died. Detective John Curcio, speaking to FRONTLINE in 2000, also named Vetta Turner, in 1973, and Teresa Giles, in 1984, among Mosley's suspected victims.
FRONTLINE reported that Mosley was in and out of prison between 1980 and 1987, and that two officers had noticed a pattern between local killings and his releases from prison or mental hospitals. Detective Kevin Allen, who later took up the case, described that pattern to FRONTLINE: from 1973 through 1987, he said, there were no unsolved killings of that kind of Black women in northwest Fort Lauderdale while Mosley was locked up, and "immediately upon his release, within 30 days, we find a black female."
Broward-Palm Beach New Times, in an undated article titled "A Devilish Deal," traced the court record of those years. After two women reported attacks in the spring of 1980, a jury convicted Mosley in 1981 in one of the cases and he was sentenced to 15 years. An appeal court overturned the conviction because his private lawyer had wrongly abandoned an insanity defense, and the case went back for retrial. In 1983 prosecutors agreed to reduce the pending charges, which could have carried life in prison, in exchange for a guilty plea and a five-year sentence. With credit for jail time and gain time, Mosley was released on November 16, 1983. Geraldine Barfield was found dead on December 19, 1983, and Emma Cook was killed on December 24. About six months after his release Mosley was charged again in another case, and a jury acquitted him on October 25, 1984, according to the same article.
Shandra Whitehead was eight years old. Just before midnight on Sunday, April 14, 1985, she was attacked in Fort Lauderdale, and she died about a week later, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Florida Bulldog and the Innocence Project of Florida give the date as April 15, 1985. Three witnesses helped the Broward Sheriff's Office prepare a composite sketch: the girl's mother, a young man and a young woman who was a family friend.
Mosley was back on the streets at that time, FRONTLINE reported, and his mug shot closely resembled the police sketch. The Registry reports that Detective Richard Scheff had named him as a possible suspect, and that the state later argued that Mosley's method did not fit the crime because none of his known victims had been children.
Police arrested Frank Lee Smith on April 29, 1985. He was 37 and had a long record: at 13 he had killed a boy in a fight, and about five years later he was convicted of murder in a robbery, according to the Registry. He had been released from prison in 1981 and was living with an aunt in Broward County. His interrogation was not recorded and the detectives took no notes. No physical or forensic evidence linked him to the crime, and he offered no alibi. Two witnesses identified him from photographs and a third from a lineup.
On January 31, 1986, a Broward jury convicted Smith of first-degree murder, with other charges. The jury recommended death, and Judge Robert Tyson imposed the sentence on May 6, 1986. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and sentence on direct appeal in 1987 (Smith v. State, 515 So. 2d 182).
In 1989 a defense investigator, Jeff Walsh, showed Mosley's photograph to the young woman who had been a key witness at Smith's trial. She said she recognized him as the man she had seen that night and signed a sworn affidavit in December 1989, according to the Registry and FRONTLINE. Walsh told FRONTLINE the composite and Mosley's photograph were "just identical."
Florida's governor had signed a death warrant for Smith in 1989, and in January 1990 he received a stay, the Innocence Project of Florida reported. The Florida Supreme Court ordered an evidentiary hearing on the witness's affidavit. At that hearing, which the Registry dates to March 1990 and FRONTLINE to 1991, Detective Scheff testified that Mosley's photograph had been in a third array the witness viewed and that she had not picked him out. The witness testified that Mosley had not been in any array she saw. The trial court found her recantation not credible and let the conviction stand.
The prosecutor, Joel Silvershein, argued that Mosley was "kind of a creature of habit" who "was not into kids." He told the court, as FRONTLINE recorded, "You can blame a lot things on Eddie Lee Mosley, but this homicide is not one of them." FRONTLINE reported that the Broward Sheriff's Office never investigated Mosley as a possible suspect in the Whitehead case, even after the witness named him.
In January 1998 the Florida Supreme Court found that Judge Tyson had held improper conversations with a prosecutor, one of which led to an order being reworded, and sent the case back to the circuit court. In October 1998 Judge Mark Speiser denied DNA testing and a new hearing, finding the recantation and the identification of Mosley not credible, according to the Registry.
Smith was taken to a hospital on January 1, 2000, and diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He died on January 30, 2000, at 52, still on death row.
By the late 1980s a younger Fort Lauderdale homicide detective, Kevin Allen, had taken up the case after a killing in the northwest part of the city in 1987, according to the 2009 Bulldog profile. He consulted Evans, investigated on his own, and after hours of questioning obtained a confession from Mosley in 1987.
Mosley was charged with murder. Florida Bulldog reported that he was declared incompetent to stand trial for the December 1983 killing of Emma Cook and confined to a state mental hospital for the criminally insane in 1987. Broward-Palm Beach New Times reported that he was charged with two of the killings that followed his 1983 release. The 2009 Bulldog profile said he was indicted on two counts of first-degree murder and ruled incompetent. The National Registry of Exonerations dates his involuntary commitment to a Florida psychiatric hospital to 1988. He was never brought to trial.
In 1998 Sonja Marion's mother asked for a fresh look at her daughter's case, and Fort Lauderdale Detective John Curcio reopened it, according to the Registry and the Innocence Project. In 2000 DNA testing of evidence from the girl's clothing excluded Townsend and was consistent with Mosley. "Biologically, I think we're proving pretty much what Doug Evans has said for years is factual," Curcio told FRONTLINE in October 2000.
In July 2000 Smith's lawyers and the state agreed to DNA testing in the Whitehead case. On December 11, 2000, the FBI laboratory reported that Smith was not the source of the evidence, and on December 15 it reported that the genetic material was consistent with Mosley's. Smith's convictions were vacated and the charges dismissed that day, eleven months after his death, the Registry and the Innocence Project reported.
On April 27, 2001, Broward Sheriff Ken Jenne announced that DNA tests linked the deaths of Naomi Gamble and Terry Jean Cummings to Mosley and excluded Townsend. Testing in the Bell, Brown, German and Moore cases was impossible or inconclusive. Prosecutors conceded that Townsend was entitled to new trials because his supposed role in the Marion death had been used to convict him in the other cases. A judge vacated the Gamble and Cummings convictions on April 30, 2001, and the Brown and Moore convictions on May 15. Miami-Dade prosecutors moved to vacate his convictions there as well, and they were set aside on June 15, 2001. Townsend was released the next day, at 49. Sheriff Jenne apologized to him.
Emma Cook's case was also tested. DNA from trace evidence was matched to Mosley about two decades after her death, the Bulldog reported in 2012.
The Registry summarizes the DNA picture this way: Mosley's DNA had been linked to seven Fort Lauderdale murders between 1973 and 1987, including Shandra Whitehead's. The 2009 Bulldog profile gave a different tally, reporting that he was linked to at least 19 documented killings and other attacks of women and girls in Fort Lauderdale, Miami and Lakeland. FRONTLINE, in 2002, described him as connected to 17 murders and other attacks. None of these figures rests on a verdict.
Townsend's lawyer, Barbara Heyer of Fort Lauderdale, filed civil rights suits on his behalf. The suits alleged that detectives fabricated evidence, hid evidence that would have helped him, tampered with witnesses and coerced his confessions, and that they framed him to advance their careers, according to Florida Bulldog. Heyer wrote that the police knew the real killer was still at large and "did nothing." The Broward Sheriff's Office argued in court that its detectives had acted in good faith.
The City of Miami paid $2.2 million in 2008 to settle a federal suit, and in 2009 the Broward Sheriff's Office agreed to pay $2 million over five years to settle a state suit, the Bulldog reported. Taxpayers spent at least $1 million more on lawyers for the officers. The Registry gives the combined settlement as $4.2 million. Fantigrassi, who was promoted from captain to major in 2001 and retired in 2005 as head of the sheriff's Criminal Investigations Unit, said he never lied to convict Townsend. Schlein declined to discuss his testimony.
For Smith, a relief bill filed in the Florida House in 2001 proposed paying $3.5 million to his estate as compensation for "a miscarriage of justice." In 2013 Smith's family reached a $340,000 settlement with the Broward Sheriff's Office, according to the Registry and the Innocence Project.
In July 2012 relatives of three women linked to Mosley called on Broward State Attorney Michael Satz to investigate the detectives whose testimony had convicted Townsend, Florida Bulldog reported. They were Arnette Tukes's mother, Geraldine Barfield's daughter and brother, and Emma Cook's daughter and granddaughter. Barfield's daughter said, "I want this reopened." An assistant state attorney told the Bulldog that prosecutors had reviewed the Townsend case before the DNA tests and found insufficient evidence of perjury. Broward's public defender, Howard Finkelstein, called the case "the best example" of police crimes going unpunished in the county.
Doug Evans did not live to see an inquiry. He died in January 2011, disappointed that the police conduct had never been investigated, the Bulldog reported. A former colleague said Evans "always pushed for an investigation."
The Broward Sheriff's Office changed its policy in 2003 to require full audio or video recording of interviews with arrested people and most victims and witnesses, and in 2019 the State Attorney's Office created a Conviction Review Unit, the Bulldog reported in 2015 and 2020.
Mosley died in 2020, at 73, at a hospital in North Florida, Florida Bulldog reported on June 4, 2020, saying he had died the week before. He had remained in state custody since his commitment in the late 1980s, and he was never tried for any killing. At the time of his death Townsend was 69 and living in Atlanta with his daughter, the Bulldog reported.
Convictions: Mosley was never convicted of any killing. The Innocence Project of Florida's page on Frank Lee Smith calls him a convicted murderer; no other source records a murder conviction, and the 1981 conviction reported by Broward-Palm Beach New Times was overturned on appeal.
Totals: the figure of 17 murders comes from police belief and the Townsend lawsuit, as reported by Florida Bulldog. Other sources give seven DNA-linked killings (National Registry of Exonerations), at least 19 killings (Florida Bulldog, 2009) and 17 murders (FRONTLINE, 2002), each with other attacks. None was proved in court.
Incompetency date: Florida Bulldog dates his confinement to 1987; the National Registry of Exonerations dates his involuntary commitment to 1988.
Charges: Florida Bulldog names the charge as the 1983 killing of Emma Cook; Broward-Palm Beach New Times and the 2009 Bulldog profile say he was charged with two murders.
Shandra Whitehead: the attack is dated April 14, 1985 (National Registry of Exonerations, Innocence Project) and April 15, 1985 (Florida Bulldog, Innocence Project of Florida); she died about a week later. Her first name is also spelled Shaundra in some Bulldog articles.
Ages: Geraldine Barfield, 35 (Florida Bulldog) or 36 (Broward-Palm Beach New Times); Terry Jean Cummings, 20 (Florida Bulldog, 2020) or 21 (National Registry of Exonerations).
The 1990 or 1991 hearing on the eyewitness's recantation is dated differently by the Registry and FRONTLINE.
Prosecutors argued in the Smith case that Mosley did not attack children. DNA testing later linked him to the deaths of Sonja Marion, 13, Naomi Gamble, 15, and Shandra Whitehead, 8.
1973: Charged in two cases, with other charges; found incompetent and sent to the state hospital at Chattahoochee (FRONTLINE).
1973: Naomi Gamble, 15, killed; DNA later linked to Mosley (2001).
Summer 1979: Several women and girls killed in northwest Fort Lauderdale, including Sonja Marion, 13 (found July 27), and Terry Jean Cummings (found August 7).
Weeks before September 5, 1979: Detective Doug Evans names Mosley as prime suspect (about three weeks before, per Florida Bulldog).
September 5, 1979: Jerry Frank Townsend arrested in Miami.
July 1980: Townsend convicted of two Broward murders; more convictions follow in 1982.
1981: Mosley convicted by a jury in a 1980 case; conviction later overturned on appeal (New Times).
1983: Guilty plea to reduced charges; released November 16, 1983 (New Times).
December 19 and 24, 1983: Geraldine Barfield and Emma Cook killed.
October 25, 1984: Mosley acquitted by a jury in another case (New Times).
April 14 or 15, 1985: Shandra Whitehead, 8, attacked; she died about a week later.
April 29, 1985: Frank Lee Smith arrested.
January 31, 1986: Smith convicted; sentenced to death May 6, 1986.
1987: Mosley confesses to Detective Kevin Allen; charged with murder; found incompetent and confined to a state hospital (1987 or 1988).
December 1989: Key eyewitness signs affidavit naming Mosley.
January 1990: Stay of execution for Smith.
1998: Judge denies DNA testing for Smith; Detective John Curcio reopens the Marion case.
January 30, 2000: Smith dies of cancer on death row.
2000: DNA from the Marion case consistent with Mosley.
December 15, 2000: DNA consistent with Mosley in the Whitehead case; Smith exonerated.
April 27, 2001: Sheriff Ken Jenne announces DNA links Gamble and Cummings deaths to Mosley.
June 16, 2001: Townsend released.
2008 and 2009: Miami and the Broward Sheriff's Office settle Townsend's suits.
January 2011: Doug Evans dies.
July 2012: Victims' relatives ask the state attorney to investigate the detectives.
2013: Smith's family settles with the Broward Sheriff's Office.
2020: Mosley dies at 73 in a North Florida hospital.