Francisco Del Junco was born in 1958 and came to Miami from Cuba in the Mariel boat lift of 1980. He was a dishwasher at Dan Marino's American Sports Bar and Grill in Coconut Grove, described as a loner who was well liked at work and kept his distance from the few relatives he had in the city.
Between August 1995 and March 1996 he killed four women: Vida Hicks, forty-three, Diane Helms, forty-four, Cheryl Lee Ray, thirty-seven, and Janice Cox, thirty-seven. They were beaten to death and their bodies were set on fire, and were found partly clothed in or near the inner city. All four were black women with crack addictions. He said the killings were not racially motivated.
He was found because of a woman who lived. She had been beaten about the head by him nine months earlier, and when she saw him again in the street she flagged down a patrol car. That is what put him in custody.
The interrogation is unusual enough to record. Officers simply talked to him, about his childhood in Cuba and about his likes and dislikes. The conversation went on across a weekend and at one point they drove him out to Key Biscayne, and it was there, looking across Biscayne Bay, that he confessed to killing and burning four women. He then took police to each of the four scenes and acted out the details of what he had done.
More than five hundred people were interviewed during the investigation. A good deal of the effort before his arrest went into trying to find a man known only as Dread, after his dreadlocks. After Del Junco was charged the police were still looking for that man, who they thought might have witnessed one of the killings.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2002, six years after the confession. Nothing in the accessible reporting explains the delay, and this entry does not speculate about it.