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Francisco Del Junco Gets Four Consecutive Life Terms for Killing Four Homeless Women in Miami

Seven years after his arrest, the former dishwasher was sentenced for the four killings. He blamed hallucinations of a Santeria priestess.

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Illustration of a gavel and reading glasses on a judge's bench in an empty Florida courtroom. Not an actual scene from the case.

Francisco Del Junco confessed in 1996 to killing four homeless women in Miami. It took seven years for his fate to be settled, and on June 4, 2003, a judge sentenced him to four consecutive life terms.

Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Alex Ferrer imposed the sentences in a 20-minute hearing for the first-degree murders of Vida Hicks, Diane Nelms, Cheryl Ray and Janice Cox. Del Junco, 45, had waived a jury, and Ferrer had found him guilty after a trial the week before; under an agreement between the two sides, he could not be sentenced to death. His lawyer, Jeffrey Fink, asked for concurrent terms so that Del Junco might one day be treated and released, saying he had never been properly treated. The prosecutor read a letter from Hicks's daughter, who described her mother as "a very loved woman" and asked that he spend his life in prison rather than be executed.

The women were beaten to death and their bodies burned. Del Junco, a Cuban immigrant who came to Miami in the Mariel boatlift and worked as a dishwasher, claimed that hallucinations of a Santeria priestess drove him to the attacks. He was arrested on June 3, 1996, after a woman who escaped an attack described her attacker to investigators. He began talking freely about the killings, and a police lieutenant said he "told us things only the murderer could know."

Florida prison records date the four killings from July 30, 1995, to March 27, 1996, while news reports gave the span as August 1995 to March or April 1996.

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