Manuel Pardo junior was born in Cuba on September 24, 1956 and raised in Miami. He served in the Navy, joined the Florida Highway Patrol in 1978 and was dismissed in 1979 for falsifying dozens of traffic tickets, then joined the Sweetwater police department, where he was fired in 1985 for testifying falsely and after an internal investigation into brutality complaints. The Florida press called him the Death Row Cop.
Between January and April 1986, with an accomplice, Rolando Garcia, he robbed and murdered nine people connected to the local cocaine trade, six men and three women, at houses around Miami. He photographed some of the bodies and kept a diary and a scrapbook.
He was arrested in April 1986 after a car connected to one of the killings was traced. At trial in 1988 he dismissed his lawyer's insanity strategy, took over his own defence, admitted each of the nine killings in detail, and told the jury that the victims were parasites and vermin and that he had performed a service and would do it again. He then asked them to sentence him to death.
He was convicted on all nine counts and sentenced to death. He spent twenty-four years on Florida's death row writing prolifically, and was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on December 11, 2012. He is one of a very small number of American police officers convicted of serial murder.