In April 1986, in Miami, Manuel Pardo shot Daisy Ricard once and his Ruger pistol jammed. He beat her to death with the gun, and the jammed round went off into his own foot. He was arrested in a hospital in New York City with the wound, and the bullet in his foot matched those in his last victims. She was the ninth person he had killed in four months.
Manuel Pardo Jr. was born in New York on September 24, 1956. A former Boy Scout and Marine Corps veteran, he graduated valedictorian of the Florida Highway Patrol academy, and the patrol fired him in 1979 for falsifying traffic tickets. He was hired by the police department in Sweetwater, in Miami-Dade County, and was dismissed after incidents that included lying to investigators. He went into the drug trade.
In January 1986 he killed Mario Amador and Roberto Alonso with a .22 Ruger during a robbery. Later that month his former Sweetwater partner, Rolando Garcia, lured Michael Millot, a Haitian gunsmith and anti-Duvalier activist who had supplied Pardo with silencers and whom Pardo believed to be an informant, into a car belonging to Pardo's wife, where Pardo waited in the back seat and shot him in the head with a 9mm pistol. The car was later reupholstered. In February he killed Luis Robledo and Ulpiano Ledo in a robbery at their home. Two months later he killed Fara Quintero and Sara Musa over a pawned ring worth fifty dollars and their refusal to buy him a VCR with stolen credit cards; he later said he believed Quintero had marked him for death by paging him with the number 8. Then he killed Ramon Alvero, who had failed to turn up for several drug deals, and his girlfriend, Daisy Ricard.
In his home police found a collection of Nazi memorabilia, and prosecutors presented evidence that he admired Hitler and held racist and antisemitic views. Against his lawyers' advice he testified in his own defense. He acknowledged killing all nine and said they were drug dealers who had no right to live and that he had done society a favor. "I am a soldier," he told the jury. "I accomplished my mission and I humbly ask you to give me the glory of ending my life and not send me to spend the rest of my days in state prison." The prosecutor, David Waxman, called him a cold-blooded killer and argued that Pardo and Garcia were drug dealers eliminating the competition. He was convicted of nine counts of first-degree murder in 1988 and sentenced to death.
Garcia, whom Pardo said had no part in the killings, was convicted of four murders and sentenced to death, won a new trial, pleaded guilty to four counts of second-degree murder, received twenty-five years and was released on September 5, 2002. Pardo spent twenty-six years on Florida's death row. His last meal was rice, red beans, roast pork, plantains, avocado, tomatoes with olive oil, pumpkin pie, eggnog and Cuban coffee. He was executed by lethal injection on December 11, 2012, and pronounced dead at 7:47 in the evening. He was fifty-six.