In 2001 a woman in Jacksonville, Florida was raped in her own home. Paul Durousseau was arrested for it. He spent thirty days in jail and was given two years' probation. According to the compiled academic record of the case, the agreement also kept his DNA out of the police database. That term appears in no contemporary news report this archive has been able to find, and it should be read as what one source records rather than as an established fact. Over the fifteen months that followed, five young women were murdered in the same city.
Durousseau was born on August 11, 1970. He served in the United States Army, was stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia, and afterwards settled in Jacksonville, where he drove a taxi for Gator City Taxi and Shuttle Service. He was married with children. The Florida press called him the Jacksonville Serial Killer, and later the Jacksonville Strangler.
The women were young. Five of the seven were between seventeen and twenty. Two were pregnant, and Nikia Kilpatrick had two small children at home. That is worth stating before the procedural history, because the procedural history is what this case is mostly remembered for, and it has a way of displacing them.
Seven women are named in the record. Tracy Habersham, twenty-six, killed at Fort Benning in 1997. Tyresa Mack, twenty-four, raped and strangled in her Jacksonville apartment in 1999, with signs that the flat had also been robbed. Nicole L. Williams, eighteen, reported missing in December 2002 and found two days later, strangled, wrapped in a blanket. Nikia Kilpatrick, nineteen and six months pregnant, strangled with coaxial cable in her own flat in the last days of 2002. Shawanda Denise McCalister, twenty, also pregnant, killed in January 2003. Jovanna Jefferson, seventeen, and Surita Cohen, nineteen, whose bodies were found within days of each other in a ditch beside a construction site on New Kings Road.
Two of the women were pregnant. The archive records their unborn children among the dead.
Before Jacksonville there was Georgia. Tracy Habersham was killed in 1997 at Fort Benning, the post adjoining Columbus, while he was stationed there. She is the one Georgia death named in this archive’s record of the case, and the reporting that followed his arrest refers to a murder in Georgia in the singular. Reporting on the case has also linked him to killings in Germany during his earlier Army service. No charge was ever brought there, and this archive records it as a line of inquiry rather than a finding. What can be said plainly is that he left the Army, moved to Florida, and that the deaths continued.
His employment in those years is worth a line. He drove a taxi, and for part of one month he drove a school bus.
The Kilpatrick scene is where the investigation turned. There was no forced entry and nothing was taken. Her two-year-old son was found at the window three days later, in the flat, with his mother's body. Detectives went to the telephone records, and it was the call pattern that began to draw the separate cases into one: sixteen calls to Nicole Williams's phone in the days before she disappeared.
The taxi mattered. He was driving for a company, on shifts, with a radio and a log, which is to say his movements were recorded by his employer in a way that few killers' are. Witnesses reported having seen the last two women with a taxi driver on the nights they disappeared. Cellphone records placed him where the investigators needed him placed. The evidence that eventually built the case against him was the ordinary administrative exhaust of the job he did.
He was arrested in February 2003 on a violation of the probation he had been given for the 2001 rape. In June 2003 a grand jury charged him with five of the Jacksonville murders.
None of those five was ever tried. The case that went to a jury was the older one. In 2007 he was convicted of the first degree murder of Tyresa Mack, killed in 1999, and sentenced to death. Prosecutors then decided not to try him for the rest.
The trial evidence in the Mack case included DNA, fibre analysis from clothing, and the telephone records. It was, by the standards of a case assembled from seven scenes across two states over six years, a straightforward prosecution: one apartment, one body, one man who had been in the flat.
That decision is the one this archive keeps meeting. Derrick Todd Lee was charged with seven murders in Louisiana and tried on two, and the remaining families chose not to continue once the death sentence was in place. Sean Vincent Gillis admitted eight and could not be charged with all of them, so the uncharged killings were put before a court as evidence at a sentencing hearing. Glen Rogers was never tried in Mississippi or Louisiana at all, because Florida already had a death sentence. In each case the reasoning is administratively sound and the result is the same: a conviction that covers one death and leaves the others with no verdict attached to them.
In Durousseau's case the reasoning did not hold, because the sentence it rested on did not either.
The jury that recommended death in 2007 had split ten to two. In 2016 the United States Supreme Court's decision on Florida's capital sentencing procedure made a non-unanimous recommendation unlawful, and the state courts applied it to cases already decided. Durousseau's death sentence was overturned. A new jury was empanelled in December 2021 to hear the evidence again and decide the sentence afresh. It returned ten to two once more, which was again not unanimous, and on December 10, 2021 he was resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Because it was a capital case, the resentencing was not a formality. A new jury was selected and the evidence was put before it again, in effect a second trial with only the sentence at stake. So the material relating to the other killings was heard once more in a Jacksonville courtroom, eighteen years after the women died, by twelve people who were being asked to decide nothing about it.
So the calculation that closed the other five cases turned out to be wrong. Prosecutors declined to try them because a death sentence made further trials redundant, and fourteen years later the death sentence was gone. The five remain uncharged. The families of Nicole Williams, Nikia Kilpatrick, Shawanda McCalister, Jovanna Jefferson and Surita Cohen have had neither a trial nor a verdict, and the reason they have not is a sentence that no longer exists.
There is a defence of the original decision, and it deserves stating. A trial is not free. Each of the five would have required witnesses, forensic work and the families of the dead sitting through weeks of evidence, and at the end of it the man would have been under the same sentence he was already under. Prosecutors weigh that, and in 2007 the answer was defensible on the information they had.
What the answer did not allow for was that the sentence might not survive. Florida's capital procedure was found wanting nine years later, by a court applying a constitutional rule to a system that had been running for decades, and every sentence resting on a split recommendation went with it. A decision not to prosecute is permanent in a way that a sentence is not, and that asymmetry is the lesson of this case for any prosecutor making the same calculation now.
Go back to the 2001 plea agreement and the shape of the case is plain. He had come to police attention repeatedly: a rape arrest in Jacksonville, a domestic battery arrest, a burglary charge he was acquitted of, and a wife who had asked the police how to obtain a restraining order against him. The rape charge, the one that would have mattered most, was resolved by a deal that gave him thirty days and, on the same account, kept his profile out of the database.
Louisiana drew the obvious conclusion from a comparable failure. After Derrick Todd Lee was identified, the state expanded its DNA database by legislation, precisely so that a man with a record of burglary, stalking and voyeurism would already be in it when a sample came off a body. Durousseau's record was worse than that, and if the case record is accurate the instrument that would have caught him was a database his own plea agreement had excluded him from.
It is worth being exact about the database rather than sweeping with it, and exact about the fact that this rests on a single source. It could not have prevented the 2001 rape, which is what put him in front of a court in the first place. What it governs is the interval afterwards: whether a sample recovered from a body in December 2002 returns a name in days, or whether the case is built instead out of witnesses, cell sites and a taxi company’s shift records over the following months. Habersham died in 1997 and Mack in 1999. The other five women all died after the plea agreement of 2001.
He is in custody in Florida. He has one murder conviction, for Tyresa Mack. Seven deaths are attributed to him and two of the women were carrying children. Six of the seven cases have never been before a jury.
There is no mystery at the centre of this case and no ingenuity to admire in it. A man with a rape arrest, a domestic battery arrest and a wife enquiring about a restraining order was given probation and, on the one detailed account of the plea, kept out of a database. He then drove a taxi around a city for fifteen months, and the women who got into it were seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, nineteen and twenty. He was stopped by a probation violation, charged with five murders, tried for a sixth, and sentenced twice for that one alone.