Francisco Acevedo was born in Meriden, Connecticut on September 2, 1968, one of three children. He was known as Artie or Frank.
In 1986 he sexually assaulted a woman in Connecticut. When his truck became stuck he walked from Meriden to Berlin and assaulted her again, and she got away after he fell asleep. He pleaded guilty to first-degree sexual assault and second-degree larceny and was sentenced to ten years. He was released eight months before the first of the Yonkers murders.
Maria Ramos, twenty-six, of the Bronx, was found on February 5, 1989 at 78 Fernbrook Street in Yonkers, naked, with her hands bound. The killer had taken her driving licence, which delayed her identification by several days. Investigators recovered semen on a vaginal swab, an empty beer bottle and cigarette ends. The swab was analysed at a private laboratory, but the national DNA index was not yet in operation and there was nothing to compare it with.
Tawana Hodges, twenty-eight, also of the Bronx, was killed on March 28, 1991 and left near the Ludlow Street bridge. Kimberly Moore, thirty, of Greenburgh, was found on May 24, 1996 at the Trade Winds Motel on Yonkers Avenue. All three were beaten and strangled, all three were left naked and bound at the hands and facing upward, and all three had been posed.
Police said Ramos and Hodges had worked as prostitutes in the north Bronx. Moore had been an all-county gymnast at her high school in Greenburgh.
The three cases were connected almost from the start: the same DNA was recovered from each of the women. What nobody had was a name to attach to it. Detective John Geiss of the Yonkers cold case squad worked the case for nine years and examined, by his own account, well over a hundred possible suspects. Acevedo was not among them.
He was arrested at Brentwood on January 26, 2009 for drink-driving, his fourth such offence. While serving that sentence he applied for parole and, as an optional part of the application, gave a sample of his DNA. It matched all three killings, twenty years after the first of them. When detectives came for him in prison, Geiss said afterwards, he was not very happy to see them.
He was tried from October 2011 in Westchester County Court before Judge Barbara Zambelli. A DNA expert put the chance of the semen from all three women belonging to anyone else at about one in six billion. A motel clerk gave evidence that he had seen Acevedo check in with Kimberly Moore and had later found her dead. His lawyers had tried to have the DNA excluded.
On November 14, 2011 he was convicted of all three murders. He was acquitted of the three counts of rape. The district attorney, Janet DiFiore, said the DNA evidence had allowed the three victims to point at the man who killed them. He was sentenced on January 17, 2012 to seventy-five years to life.
After his arrest, police forces in the other places he had lived, in Westchester, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Florida and Suffolk County, began looking at him in connection with unsolved cases of their own. Nothing further has been charged.
Two points on the record. The acquittal on the rape counts was not previously recorded here and matters: he stands convicted of murder alone. And Tawana Hodges appears in some reporting as Tawanda and her age as thirty-eight rather than twenty-eight.