When Miami police picked up Francisco Del Junco for questioning on Friday, May 31, 1996, he had a container of gasoline and a box of wooden matches with him. A woman had just told a task force how she had escaped a man who went for her with a blunt object, and her description led detectives to him. They let him go that day while the crime lab finished its tests. The tests matched the size and sole pattern of his combat boots to prints found at one of the scenes, and on Monday, June 3, he was arrested and charged with four murders. The police said afterward that he had been about to kill again.
Four women had died in ten months. Vida Hicks, forty-three, Diane Nelms, forty-four, Cheryl Lee Ray, thirty-seven, and Janice Cox, thirty-seven, were found between August 1995 and March 1996 in or near Allapattah, an inner-city neighborhood north of downtown Miami, beaten, partly clothed, and burned. All four were Black and used crack cocaine, and some, Lieutenant Bill Schwartz said, supported the habit through prostitution. The killer had lured them with the promise of free drugs and sex, beaten them with metal pipes and set fire to their upper bodies with gasoline. The second woman's surname appears as Nelms in some accounts and Helms in the Associated Press report of the arrest.
The investigators did not confront him with the boots. They talked to him instead, about his childhood in Cuba and what he liked and disliked, over the course of a weekend; the police said they befriended him and "got into his head." He confessed to all four killings, then took detectives to each of the scenes and acted out what he had done, giving details that, the prosecution said, only the killer could have known. "He said voices told him to do it," Assistant Police Chief John Brooks said. More than five hundred people had been interviewed, and much of the effort had gone into finding a man known only as Dread, for his dreadlocks. The confession cleared him.
Del Junco was thirty-eight, born in Cuba on August 3, 1957, the first child of a family with a history of mental illness. He took medication for epilepsy from the age of three, was rejected by other children and ignored by his father, and remembered trips to the beach with his mother as the happiest part of his childhood. At sixteen he began hearing voices and seeing priestesses performing black magic, and grew convinced someone was out to kill him. He came to Miami in the Mariel boatlift of 1980 and settled near relatives.
In Miami he saw a psychiatrist regularly and was admitted to the Miami Mental Health Clinic three times, in 1987, 1988 and 1992. Between 1987 and 1995 he was arrested for assaulting an officer, burglary, loitering and theft. He missed a final psychiatric appointment and was still given a guarded prognosis and judged no threat to anyone. At the time of the killings he washed dishes at Dan Marino's American Sports Bar and Grill in Coconut Grove, where co-workers found him quiet, dependable and well liked.
The case took seven years to reach a verdict. At trial in 2003 his lawyers argued that he was mentally ill and had acted on the orders of a Santería priestess. A Miami-Dade jury convicted him of four counts of first-degree murder. The judge ruled that his mental illness made him ineligible for the death penalty and sentenced him to four life terms without parole in June 2003; accounts differ on whether they run concurrently or consecutively. Jeanine Hicks, Vida Hicks's daughter, spoke at the sentencing about her mother.
Reporting in 2026 placed him at the Tomoka Correctional Institution in Daytona Beach.