In the summer of 1979 police in Broward County, Florida, arrested Jerry Frank Townsend, a man with an intellectual disability, for rape and murder. After long questioning he confessed to a series of killings, and a year later he was convicted of six murders and sentenced to life. He served twenty-two years. In 2000 and 2001 DNA testing excluded him from the killings and matched another man, Eddie Lee Mosley, whom the Black neighborhoods of northwest Fort Lauderdale had known and feared for years as the Rape Man. Townsend was freed in 2001, and the sheriff apologized.
Frank Lee Smith fared worse. He was convicted in 1986 of the rape and murder of eight-year-old Shandra Whitehead and sentenced to death on the strength of an eyewitness identification. He insisted he was innocent, was refused DNA testing, and died of cancer on death row in January 2000 after some fourteen years in prison. The testing that was finally done excluded him and matched Mosley. Smith had a violent record of his own: at thirteen, in 1960, he had killed another boy, and he later pleaded guilty to a 1966 murder committed in a robbery. None of it made him Shandra Whitehead's killer.
Mosley was born in Fort Lauderdale on March 31, 1947, the third of ten children of Robert Lee and Willie Mae Mosley. He had a learning disability and could not finish public school, and later went through the Job Corps. From the 1970s he was repeatedly charged with sexual assault. Between 1973 and 1987 women and girls in northwest Fort Lauderdale, a predominantly African American part of the city, were raped and strangled. The police eventually came to believe he was responsible for forty-one rapes and seventeen murders of Black women and children in those years. The women and girls whose deaths are attributed to him include 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.
He was arrested on May 17, 1987, for a 1983 rape and murder, found incompetent to stand trial, and sent to a state hospital for the criminally insane; accounts date the incompetence finding to 1987 and to 1988. That confinement, not a verdict, is what ended the killings. After the DNA results he was charged again in 2001 but was again found incompetent, and he was never tried for any murder.
The consequences have been argued over ever since. A civil rights suit filed for Townsend by the Fort Lauderdale attorney Barbara Heyer alleged that he had been framed, and that the worst of it was that the framing had left Mosley free to go on raping and killing. In 2012 relatives of his victims, among them Clarice Tukes, whose daughter was raped and murdered in 1977, and Calvin Sapp, whose sister was killed, called for an official inquiry into how the Fort Lauderdale police had handled tips pointing to Mosley. Townsend and Smith are both listed as exonerations.
Eddie Lee Mosley died on May 28, 2020, at seventy-three, in a hospital in North Florida while still in state custody. His family's obituary remembered a man with "a servant's heart." A relative of one of his victims answered in the comments that her family had been among the people he hurt.