Angela Hommell went to the police in 1976. She was twenty, and she told them that Fred Waterfield and his cousin David Gore had raped her at gunpoint near Vero Beach. She knew Waterfield. He worked on her car. The cousins said the sex had been consensual and no charge was brought.
Five years later the first of the women was dead. Four years after that Hommell was called as a prosecution witness at Waterfield's murder trial, where she was told that the statute of limitations had run out on what had been done to her.
Waterfield was born in New Jersey on September 29, 1952 and grew up in Florida. He played high school football and by every account of him he was popular. Gore, born on August 21, 1953, was the strange one: fired from his first job at a filling station after his boss found a hole he had made to look into the women's restroom, later an auxiliary sheriff's deputy who used the badge to stop women, and the caretaker of a citrus grove that gave the cousins a secluded place to take them.
What the cousins had between them was not a friendship that drifted into violence. It was an arrangement. Gore found the women and secured them, and Waterfield paid him for it. Investigators and the psychologists who examined the case describe a division of labor, with money moving one way and women the other.
Six were killed in Indian River County between 1981 and 1983. Gore confessed to all six. At least four more women got away from him alive.
The first two were a mother and daughter. On February 19, 1981, Gore showed his auxiliary badge to Ying Hua Ling, seventeen, got her into his truck and drove her to her own home, where he took her mother, Hsiang Huang Ling, forty-eight, as well. By Gore's account the mother, tied to a tree, choked to death while he and Waterfield raped the daughter, and the two of them cut up the bodies and buried them in oil drums. On July 15, 1981, Gore disabled the car of Judith Kay Daley, thirty-five, a former Fort Pierce resident visiting from California, offered her a ride to a telephone and drove her to Waterfield; both men raped her, and Gore said he put her body in a swamp. A week later Gore tried to take a teenage girl with his badge, her father complained, and the badge was taken from him. Days after that police found him hiding in the back seat of a woman's car with a scanner, handcuffs and a pistol. He was sentenced to five years for armed trespassing and was paroled in March 1983.
Barbara Ann Byer and Angelica LaVallee were both fourteen, hitchhikers from Orlando whom the cousins picked up on May 20, 1983, two months after Gore's parole. They were raped, killed and dismembered, and they are the only two deaths Waterfield has ever been convicted over.
It ended on July 26, 1983, and not because of police work. That day the cousins picked up two Vero Beach High School students hitchhiking to Wabasso Beach, seventeen-year-old Lynn Elliott and fourteen-year-old Regan Martin, and took them to a house owned by Gore's parents. Waterfield soon left, rattled at having seen his sister on the drive, and Gore tied the girls up in separate rooms. Elliott got free and ran naked down the driveway. A boy cycling past saw a man chase her down and shoot her, and called the police. Martin was found alive, tied up inside. Gore was arrested that day and Waterfield within hours.
Waterfield was tried for Byer and LaVallee. The case against him rested substantially on the testimony of his cousin, who by then had nothing left to lose, and on January 21, 1985, the jury returned second-degree murder on both counts rather than first. He was given two consecutive life terms and is not eligible for parole until 2091.
He is Florida inmate 096510, received on January 31, 1985. He was held at Okeechobee Correctional Institution and has since been moved to Hardee.
Gore spent twenty-eight years on death row and was executed by lethal injection on April 12, 2012. He apologized to Lynn Elliott's family from the gurney and said he was not the man he had been.
Waterfield has said nothing of the kind. He has never admitted any of it, and the two convictions he carries came out of his cousin's mouth rather than his own.