The DNA had been on file for twenty years before it had a name. In 2009 Francisco Acevedo, serving time in a New York state prison for his fourth drunk-driving offense, applied for parole and gave a sample of his DNA with the application. The state database matched it to semen recovered from three women strangled in Yonkers in 1989, 1991 and 1996, a profile detectives had long known belonged to one man. Some reports describe the sample as voluntary; Detective John Geiss said giving it was one of the conditions of the parole application. Either way, Geiss said, when detectives came for him in prison, "He wasn't very happy to see us."
Maria Ramos, twenty-six, of the Bronx, was the first. Her body was found on February 5, 1989, at 78 Fernbrook Street in Yonkers, naked, with her hands bound, posed face up. The killer had taken her driver's license, and it was several days before she was identified. Investigators kept a vaginal swab, an empty beer bottle and cigarette butts. The swab was analyzed at a private laboratory, but the national DNA index was not yet running, and there was nothing to compare the profile with. Her daughter, Shulisha, was three years old.
Tawana Hodges, also of the Bronx, was killed on March 28, 1991, and left near the Ludlow Street bridge in south Yonkers. Her first name appears in some reports as Tawanda, and her age is given as twenty-eight in most accounts and thirty-eight in the Associated Press report of the sentencing. Kimberly Moore, thirty, of Greenburgh, who had been an all-county gymnast at Woodlands High School, was found on May 24, 1996, in a room at the Trade Winds Motel at 1141 Yonkers Avenue. All three had been beaten and strangled, and all three were left naked, bound at the hands and facing upward. Police said Ramos and Hodges had worked as prostitutes in the north Bronx.
Acevedo, known as Artie or Frank, had come out of a Connecticut prison eight months before Maria Ramos died. On July 3, 1986, he picked up a woman in his company truck in Meriden, drove her to a secluded place, bound her hands, blindfolded her and sexually assaulted her. When the truck got stuck he went on foot to nearby Berlin and assaulted her again, and she escaped after he fell asleep. He pleaded guilty to first-degree sexual assault and second-degree larceny, was sentenced to ten years, and was released in June 1988.
In the years between the killings he married a woman he met while working at New Way Kitchen, and they had two sons. He lived at various times in Yonkers, Mount Vernon, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Florida and Long Island. In November 1997 he was charged in Yonkers with third-degree assault on his wife, a charge later dismissed. In August 1998 he broke her nose with a punch, was convicted of a misdemeanor and served nine months in jail. None of it brought him to the attention of the detectives working the murders.
The three killings had been linked by the way the bodies were left and then by the DNA. Geiss, of the Yonkers cold case squad, worked the case with the Westchester County forensic laboratory for nine years and looked at more than a hundred potential suspects. Acevedo was never one of them. What put him in reach was his arrest in Suffolk County on January 26, 2009, for driving while intoxicated, and the parole application that followed. He was charged with the three murders in April 2010.
He pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers, Tamika Ann Coverdale and Janet Ann Gandolfo, tried to have the DNA evidence thrown out. The trial opened in October 2011 in Westchester County Court before Judge Barbara Zambelli. A DNA expert testified that the chance of the semen from all three women belonging to anyone else was about one in six billion, and a motel clerk said he had seen Acevedo with Kimberly Moore and later found her dead in her bed. Acevedo acknowledged having sex with all three women and denied raping or killing any of them. On November 14, 2011, after less than five hours of deliberation, the jury convicted him of all three murders and acquitted him of the three counts of rape.
Relatives of each of the women spoke at the sentencing on January 17, 2012. Shulisha Ramos told him she hoped he would suffer every day of his everlasting life. Devon Hodges, Tawana's mother, called him a filthy little animal; she had told a reporter that when Geiss came to her home to tell her they had him, she was happy. Acevedo told the judge he was innocent and had prayed for the women and their families. Zambelli called the killings monstrous crimes by a cruel and inhuman individual and combined the maximum sentence on each count, for a total of seventy-five years to life.
Weeks before the sentencing, Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed extending New York's DNA databank to people convicted of many more crimes, drunk driving among them. After the arrest, police in the places Acevedo had lived began reviewing their own unsolved cases against him. No further charges have been reported.