Lorraine Dawe was eighty-seven and lived in a mobile home in Spring Hill, close to the house of Edwin Kaprat's sister. A few days after she was found dead, an anonymous caller told detectives to look at Kaprat, a convicted felon who had been charged with murder two years earlier. His fingerprints matched prints on her garage window.
It was not enough to arrest him on, so they watched him around the clock. An undercover officer gave him a ride to his parents' house, and on the way Kaprat complained that his girlfriend was furious about a strange bite mark on his neck. With that, and cigarette butts recovered from the crime scenes, detectives obtained warrants on October 8, 1993 for his home, his car and samples of his hair, and arrested him near his parents' home that day. The next morning he confessed. Of Lorraine Dawe he said he thought she was having a heart attack after he raped her, and that he stamped on her to put her out of her misery.
Edwin Bernard Kaprat III was born in New York City on September 21, 1964, one of two children of Edwin Kaprat Jr., known as Skip, a refrigeration mechanic, and his wife Ruth, a real estate agent. The family moved to the Great Meadows section of Independence Township, New Jersey, and neighbors thought them upstanding people. The family called him Mike. He was bright and read constantly, and he was also a bully who went for smaller children, to the point where teachers gave him stuffed toys to punch and kick instead. He was drinking by twelve and in and out of juvenile treatment centers and juvenile court.
He dropped out of Hackettstown High School after turning sixteen, and in November 1982 married his pregnant girlfriend, Nora Niederhaus. They had two sons. He kept drinking and smoking marijuana. His relatives liked him in spite of the temper, and knew him for his interest in the Middle Ages and Dungeons & Dragons. In October 1990 he and his wife moved with the children into his parents' home in Spring Hill, Florida, to start again.
On February 22, 1991 a sunbather found the body of Lee Anthony Bugay III, twenty-seven, in the mangroves by the Courtney Campbell Causeway in Tampa. He had been reported missing the morning before, and he had been beaten to death about the head with a tire iron or a pipe. Hours after the body was found, someone used his credit card to buy gasoline at a Texaco store. Detectives traced the purchase to Kaprat, who had gone back to New Jersey. He called a Hackettstown police detective when he heard there was a warrant for him, surrendered on March 9, and was returned to Florida charged with first-degree murder, armed robbery and forgery.
At trial his confession was found not to be reliable, and the jury convicted him only of forgery and dealing in stolen property. He was put under house arrest at his parents' home in Hernando County, violated it, and was in prison until May 7, 1993. By then his wife had divorced him over his temper and his treatment of their sons, which she believed repeated abuse he had suffered as a child, and he had dropped out of Hillsborough Community College. He went to work as a machinist at the Padgett-Swann Machinery Company, commuting between Hudson and Spring Hill.
Sophia Frances Garrity was eighty, a retired public relations worker from New Jersey who lived alone in Spring Hill and whom her neighbors called the Cookie Lady. She died when her house caught fire on August 7, 1993. The fire was traced to her bedroom, blamed on an electrical fault spread by a fan, and her death was ruled an accident.
Ten days later a neighbor heard William Whitney screaming and a smoke alarm going off. Bill Whitney, eighty-four, and his wife Alice, eighty-three, had been beaten in their Spring Hill home, and a fire set inside had failed to spread. Both went to hospital in St. Petersburg, but he was too badly hurt, and she too far into Alzheimer's disease, to tell anyone who had done it. He never recovered. He died of pneumonia at his son's home in Hancock County, Mississippi, on November 19, 1993, and prosecutors considered charging Kaprat with his murder.
The next day a fire destroyed the mobile home of Ruth Goldsmith, seventy, in Brookridge, a retiree who had moved down from Havertown, Pennsylvania, two years before. It was put down to an electrical short in the bedroom and closed as an accident. In the weeks afterward elderly women in the area began getting harassing telephone calls, apparently from the same man.
On September 2 there was another mobile home fire in Brookridge. Lydia Riddell, seventy-nine, a retired food store manager from Media, Pennsylvania, and a friend of Ruth Goldsmith's, was found inside, bound with duct tape and sexually assaulted. Her name also appears as Ridell. Her death was ruled a homicide, and the Goldsmith fire was reopened.
Lorraine Dawe, known as Alice, a retired athlete, was found on September 26. She had been sexually assaulted and beaten to death, her neck stamped on repeatedly, and her body buried under bedding and pillows that had been set alight and had failed to catch. The FBI was brought in. People in the county put new locks on their doors and bought guns.
He was charged with four counts of murder, two of attempted murder, four of sexual battery, six of residential burglary with battery, five of arson and one of robbery; another account gives twenty counts returned by a grand jury on October 27, 1993. He pleaded not guilty. On the eve of his first trial he slashed one of his wrists.
The Riddell trial came first, in January 1995, watched closely by a county that called the crimes the worst in its history. He was found sober and sane at the time of the killings. The state played his recorded interview, in which he asked again and again for it to stop so that he could smoke, and a detective shouted at him and called him a liar. His lawyers said that amounted to coercion; the prosecutors said the detective was calling out lies. After ten days of evidence the jury took about eight hours and convicted him on January 12, and recommended death.
The Dawe trial followed at once, and on January 20 that jury convicted him too and recommended death. He showed no interest in either trial and spent most of them reading a book. His family pleaded with the second jury to spare him, telling it he had asked detectives to shoot him. On February 28 the court imposed both sentences.
He was on death row for seven weeks. On April 19, 1995, in a common area at Florida State Prison, two other condemned prisoners, Mario Lara and Rigoberto Sanchez-Velasco, stabbed him to death, and killed Charles Street, condemned for the 1988 murders of two Metro-Dade police officers, at the same time. They were the first killings ever on Florida's death row. Both men were convicted of third-degree murder. Sanchez-Velasco, under sentence for the 1986 murder of eleven-year-old Katixa Ecanarro, dropped his appeals and was executed in 2002; Lara's death sentence was later reduced to life.
The victims' families said he had got what he deserved, and sent their condolences to his. His father said his son had died a free man, and that he was glad he had gone without handcuffs or restraints. The remaining charges were dropped and the cases closed, so the deaths of Lee Bugay, Sophia Garrity, Bill Whitney and Ruth Goldsmith were never tried against him, and none of the appeals in his own case was ever heard.