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Jury Convicts Robert Hayes of Murdering Three Women in Daytona Beach in 2005 and 2006

A former Bethune-Cookman student, he was linked by DNA more than a decade later to Laquetta Gunther, Julie Green and Iwana Patton.

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Illustration: news cameras on tripods outside a county courthouse

Over nine weeks in the winter of 2005 and 2006, three women were found dead in Daytona Beach, each of them nude, face down and shot in the head. Laquetta Gunther, 45, was found around Christmas 2005 in a gap between an auto parts store and a mostly empty utility building. Julie Green, 34, was found on January 14, 2006, on a dirt road at a construction site. Iwana Patton, 35, was found on February 24 along another dirt road. The killings set off a panic among sex workers in the city, some of whom began memorizing license plates and descriptions of cars for investigators.

On Tuesday evening, February 22, 2022, more than sixteen years later, a Volusia County jury found Robert Hayes guilty of murdering all three. Jurors had deliberated for more than eight hours. Hayes, 39, showed no reaction as the clerk read the verdict.

He had been a student at Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach at the time, a criminal justice major and a cheerleader, and he graduated in 2006, the year the last of the three women was found. Investigators looking at everyone in the area who had recently bought a .40-caliber handgun of the kind used in the killings questioned him twice in those years but did not arrest him. Police said he had bought such a gun in 2005, shortly before the first victim was killed.

The case broke a decade later, in another county. Rachel Bey, 32, was found strangled near Jupiter in Palm Beach County on March 7, 2016. Investigators put Hayes, by then a chef, under surveillance and secretly collected a beer can and a cigarette butt he threw away, and prosecutors said the DNA matched the killer's. He was arrested at his home in West Palm Beach in 2019.

At trial, his defense argued that the evidence showed only that he had had sex with the women, that nothing proved he was holding a gun when they died, and that bullets of the same caliber were circumstantial evidence. The jury convicted him on all three counts of first-degree murder.

Patton's niece, Annesah Farris, had described her aunt to reporters after the arrest as a college graduate who moved to Daytona Beach and worked two jobs. "Looking at her friends, her acquaintances and the company that she kept, she never would have associated with him," she said.

Prosecutors said they would seek the death penalty when the sentencing phase began the following week.

What came next, and what this verdict did not decide. On March 2, 2022, at the end of the penalty phase, Hayes was sentenced to life in prison without parole rather than death. The verdict covered only the three Daytona Beach killings. He was separately charged with first-degree murder in the death of Rachel Bey in Palm Beach County, a case this jury did not decide.

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