On the morning of July 26, 1999, Tyresa Mack went looking for work. She was 24, the mother of three young children, and from about half past nine until one o’clock she and a friend made the rounds of businesses in Jacksonville, Florida, filling out applications. At about 1:25 p.m. she spoke with a friend by telephone. When the friend called back at about ten minutes to three, nobody answered. That afternoon she did not collect her children from daycare, and she missed a three o’clock doctor’s appointment she had made for the youngest. By evening she was dead.
Her killing went unsolved for four years. When it was finally charged, it came attached to five more. In June 2003 a Duval County grand jury indicted a 32-year-old former soldier named Paul Durousseau for the deaths of five young Black women who had been killed in Jacksonville over seven weeks that winter, a stretch during which he had briefly driven a cab. Two of the women were pregnant. The youngest was 17. Within weeks detectives had matched him by DNA to Tyresa Mack as well, and Jacksonville television gave him the name that stuck: the Cabbie Killer.
He has been convicted of one murder. The other five Jacksonville charges were dropped without a trial, a charge filed in Georgia has no reported outcome, and suspicions raised in Germany were never brought to court. How a case that began with six indictments ended with one conviction, two death-penalty juries and a life sentence is the story of a prosecution built carefully around its strongest count, and of a legal ground that shifted beneath it.
Paul Durousseau was born on August 11, 1970, according to the records of the Florida Commission on Capital Cases. His early years were laid out by his lawyers when his life was at stake, in evidence later summarized in his appeal brief. His parents never married. His father, by that account, was controlling and abusive, and the boy did not meet him until he was about 13 or 14. His mother’s partner, a Vietnam veteran, was violent, and the family moved often and lived poor in South Central Los Angeles, near Watts.
He was diagnosed as a slow learner in elementary school and spent his schooling in special education. Held back, he was almost 19 when he graduated from Reseda High School in 1989; he had been bused there, according to the defense, after a gang attack at his neighborhood school. Testing later put his reading at about a sixth-grade level.
He enlisted in the Army in October 1992 and was stationed in Germany, where, according to the defense brief, he met the woman he married in 1995. The trial judge later credited him with about six years of military service. How that service ended is described two ways. The defense brief records a bad conduct discharge. WJXT, the Jacksonville station known as News4Jax, reported in June 2003 that he had been court-martialed in 1997 while stationed with the Army at Columbus, Georgia, home of Fort Benning; he faced several charges, among them kidnapping, was acquitted of everything except receiving stolen property, and was dishonorably discharged.
By the summer of 1999 he was living in Jacksonville, married, a father, and working for a truck tire service company whose employees wore navy uniforms. He drove a red Mazda. His children, the Florida Supreme Court later noted, attended the same small daycare as Tyresa Mack’s.
Tyresa Mack’s last day comes down to a few fixed points, and they are enough to show a young mother trying to put her life in order: a morning spent applying for jobs, a phone call with a friend, two children waiting at daycare, an appointment for the baby. When she failed to appear, her sister and stepfather went looking for her at about seven that evening. The medical examiner found that she had died of asphyxia. A television was missing from the living room, along with a necklace and bracelet set she always wore.
"It really hurts me when I have to look at her kids because they can’t really understand where their mom is," her aunt told Channel 4 after the killing.
Two witnesses would eventually place a man at her apartment between noon and two o’clock that afternoon, and one would testify that she watched him carry out a television and put it in his car. Both described him in a navy blue uniform. A co-worker from the tire company testified that every employee was required to wear navy. Durousseau’s lunch break that day, the court found, ran from noon to half past one. None of that came together until 2003. For four years the case sat open.
Between December 19, 2002, and February 5, 2003, five young women were killed in Jacksonville. They were 17 to 20 years old. News4Jax reported that all five were strangled and that two of them were pregnant.
Nichole Williams was 18. Her body was found in December 2002. Her grandmother, speaking to Channel 4 after the arrest, held on to fond memories of her. "He took my grand baby away," she said. "Why should he live?"
Nikia Kilpatrick was 20 and the mother of two young children, and she was pregnant. She was found dead on January 1, 2003. The state’s appeal brief says telephone records showed many calls from Durousseau to her during December 2002, the last at 9:03 p.m. on December 29, and that friends and a relative had seen the two of them together. The state’s brief says his DNA linked him to her.
Shawanda McCallister was also 20, and also pregnant. She was killed on the evening of January 9, 2003, and found shortly after midnight. That day, according to the state’s brief, Durousseau had been on a training shift with a local cab company and had picked her up as a fare; he later admitted as much. A cab from the same company was seen near her home that night, and a witness saw a man hurry back to it and drive off. The state’s brief says his DNA was found at the scene. The next morning a 911 operator took a call from a pay phone. The caller said he had information about "that incident in Arlington last night" and blamed the young woman’s boyfriend, then refused to speak to a homicide detective. A detective who later interviewed Durousseau listened to the recording and identified the voice as his, according to the same filing.
Jovanna Jefferson was 17. Surita Cohen was 19. They were the last two of the five, and their bodies were found on February 5, 2003. An aunt of one of the young women told Channel 4 that her niece had been sweet and fun-loving, the person who always made everyone laugh. "She was my best friend," she said.
Durousseau’s time behind the wheel of a cab was short. According to his own testimony, as summarized in the defense brief, he moved furniture in December 2002 and began taxi training on January 8 or 9, 2003, the day he received his cab. News4Jax reported that he drove for the company from January 9 to January 27, a period that overlapped some of the killings. The company’s cabs carried cameras that photographed drivers and passengers and GPS units that tracked them. "Any of the GPS data for his cab has been turned over to authorities," a company spokesman said in June 2003, adding that the firm was now looking harder at its drivers' backgrounds.
When the killings began, Durousseau was already well known to the courts. He was on probation, most recently for aggravated assault, and the state’s brief later recorded a 2003 conviction for that offense. News4Jax reported that his probation also covered a 2001 case. He was not complying. The station listed four violations: he had no job, had not paid money he owed the Department of Corrections, had moved without telling his probation officer, and had not completed court-ordered counseling. His probation had been extended twice.
"He had violated twice, but courts decided to keep him on the streets," Sterling Ivy, a Department of Corrections spokesman, told the station. Police said Durousseau had stayed in contact with his probation officer through the weeks of the killings and had spoken with the officer three days before his arrest. "It’s difficult to say if we could have stopped anything before February because we didn’t have evidence," Ivy said. A Jacksonville bail bondsman said the number of violations surprised him.
There was another job that drew attention once his name became public. In August 2001 First Student, one of four contractors that had taken over busing for more than 100,000 Duval County students on short notice, hired him as a school bus driver. Dozens of drivers whose background checks were incomplete were used in the first weeks of that school year. Durousseau was hired on August 15, completed 40 hours of training and drove a route. He was fired on August 30, when his criminal background check came back showing a record of aggravated battery. "He shouldn’t have been hired as a bus driver," a First Student vice president, Mike Murray, told News4Jax. "The system did work."
The probation violations were what put him in a cell. Durousseau was arrested on February 6, 2003, the day after the last two women were found. He stayed in jail on the violation while detectives built the murder case, and on June 17, 2003, he was formally charged with all five deaths. A Duval County grand jury returned an indictment on five counts of first-degree murder. The court records date it June 23; News4Jax reported the grand jury’s action on June 19. The grand jury also indicted him on two counts of child abuse involving two young children connected with one of the deaths.
State Attorney Harry Shorstein said the case had gone "very smoothly before the grand jury" and gave the credit to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. "We think the sheriff’s office did a good job investigating the case, and that did make it easier for us," he said. An indictment was required if the state was to seek the death penalty, and Shorstein said it would. The evidence, according to News4Jax, included DNA matches with the victims, matching fibers and cellular telephone records.
The families spoke of relief tangled with grief. Relatives told Channel 4 the arrest brought some comfort but that a void would always remain. "I just don’t understand how he could kill the girls like that," Nichole Williams’s grandmother said.
When the charges were announced, police also linked Durousseau to the death of Tracy Habersham, 27, a woman in Georgia. Later in June 2003, Georgia authorities charged him with murder in the 1997 killing of a woman in Columbus, where he had been stationed. In December 2007 News4Jax reported that Habersham’s body had been found on September 7, 1997, that police believed she was killed shortly after a party on the post, and that he was expected to stand trial in Georgia. No Georgia trial or verdict has been reported.
After the June indictment, the Sheriff’s Office went back through its files looking for homicides with similar characteristics, the state’s brief says. DNA led detectives to Tyresa Mack. A re-investigation concluded that she was the sixth Jacksonville victim, and an arrest warrant followed. On August 26, 2003, Durousseau was arrested for her murder. When Detective Rodney McKean told him in the booking area that he was being charged, Durousseau answered, "I don’t know no Mack." Told where she had been killed, he said, "I don’t know that girl." A grand jury indicted him for her murder on September 4, 2003. Sheriff John Rutherford announced the charge.
Investigators were looking further afield. In August 2003 News4Jax reported that they were examining unsolved killings in Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, Alabama, California and Germany, places Durousseau had lived over the previous decade, and that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement was comparing DNA from cold cases with his. No charges from that review have been reported. In 2017 the station reported that German authorities suspected he might have killed several local women while he was stationed there with the Army in the early 1990s. He has not been charged with any killing in Germany.
The state had six Jacksonville murder indictments and chose to try one. The Mack case was the oldest and, in the prosecution’s view, the cleanest: a DNA match, eyewitnesses who placed him at the apartment, a missing television, and a defendant who had told police he did not know her. But on its own it was thin in places, and the state wanted the jury to see a pattern.
Under Florida’s Williams rule, evidence of other crimes may be admitted to prove a fact such as identity, provided it is not offered simply to show bad character. Prosecutors asked to put two of the 2003 deaths, those of Nikia Kilpatrick and Shawanda McCallister, before the Mack jury. They limited the request to two of the five, the Florida Supreme Court later noted, to keep the trial manageable and to stop the collateral evidence from becoming its centerpiece. After a hearing on June 28, 2006, the trial judge ruled the evidence admissible.
The state’s case for the pattern was specific. All three women were young, Black and of similar build, the state argued; each died of asphyxiation; and his DNA was found on or near each of them. His fingerprints were found at none of the scenes. The defense answered that the similarities were general rather than distinctive, and that the state had not proved by clear and convincing evidence that he had killed either of the other two women.
Jury selection began on May 22, 2007, and the trial began the next day. The prosecution rested on May 31. Over roughly three weeks, by the Supreme Court’s count, the jury heard dozens of witnesses.
On June 7 Durousseau took the stand in his own defense. He admitted that he had had sex with Tyresa Mack, Nikia Kilpatrick and Shawanda McCallister shortly before each of them died, and he denied killing any of them. He said he had met Mack in April 1999 and seen her often for about three months, that he had visited her on July 26, and that she was alive when he left. The television, he said, she had sold him because it was broken; several of her friends testified that it had been working that week. He had not gone to the police after her death, he said, because he had nothing to tell them. He said he had been at McCallister’s apartment the night she died, had left, and had come back to find her dead. "When I got to the door, I knocked on it and it was cracked," he testified. He conceded that he had lied to detectives when he first said he did not know any of the women.
On cross-examination the prosecutor put it to him bluntly: "Your sex life keeps getting interrupted, doesn’t it?"
"It all depends on what you mean," Durousseau said.
Pressed on the fact that three women had died after being with him, he answered, "There was also other people showing up." Asked again whether his sex life kept getting interrupted, he said, "Correct."
The jury began deliberating at about 11:30 a.m. on Friday, June 8, 2007. That night, after more than ten hours by the News4Jax count, it found him guilty of first-degree murder. The defense brief puts the deliberations at about nine and a half hours.
"It’s devastating," said Mack’s sister, who was raising her three children. "It’s very devastating that we had to wait this long." She said the verdict brought closure to her and her family.
The penalty phase ran from June 26 to June 28. The defense called two mental health experts and 17 lay witnesses. Dr. Jonathan Pincus, a neurologist, testified to diffuse brain damage, particularly frontal lobe impairment. Dr. Dorothy Lewis, a psychiatrist who worked with the neuropsychologist Dr. Katherine Yeager, diagnosed bipolar mood disorder and schizoaffective disorder along with brain damage, and testing put his overall IQ at 82, in the borderline range. His lawyers argued that brain damage and mental illness had impaired him. Prosecutors said he was well aware of what he did. The jury recommended death by a vote of 10 to 2.
Circuit Judge Jack Schemer imposed the sentence on December 13, 2007. He found four aggravating circumstances: that the murder was especially atrocious or cruel; that it was committed during a robbery and a sexual battery; that it was committed for financial gain; and that Durousseau had a prior conviction for a violent felony. He rejected both statutory mental health mitigators the defense had sought, preferring the lay witnesses' accounts to Dr. Lewis’s conclusions. He found 16 of 17 proposed nonstatutory mitigators, among them a broken and impoverished childhood, physical discipline, about six years of Army service, steady work, support for his children, care for his mother and the saving of relatives' lives, and gave most of them little weight.
"This was a consciously hideous crime," Schemer said from the bench. He called Durousseau "manipulative, devious and crafty," and said the brutality of the killing was among his reasons for following the jury.
Mack’s family had waited eight years. "Thank God it’s all over with," her sister said. "We have a closure."
In November 2007 the State Attorney’s Office dropped the five remaining Duval County murder charges. In the language of the court record the counts were nolle prossed. News4Jax reported the reasoning: prosecutors feared that an acquittal in any one of the Jacksonville cases could put the Mack conviction at risk, and that if the Mack conviction were ever overturned, it could cause problems for the remaining cases. Durousseau has not been tried for the deaths of Nichole Williams, Nikia Kilpatrick, Shawanda McCallister, Jovanna Jefferson or Surita Cohen. Two of those cases had been argued in front of the Mack jury as evidence of identity; the other three have not been heard by a jury at all.
The appeal went to the Florida Supreme Court in January 2008. His lawyers from the public defender’s office raised five issues: the admission of the Kilpatrick and McCallister evidence, the financial-gain aggravator, the judge’s rejection of the expert mental health testimony, the sufficiency of the evidence, and a constitutional challenge to Florida’s sentencing scheme under Ring v. Arizona.
On December 9, 2010, the court affirmed both the conviction and the death sentence. The majority held that the trial judge had acted within his discretion in admitting the collateral-crime evidence, which was relevant to identity and premeditation; that the similarities were distinctive enough; that the gap of about three and a half years between Mack’s death and the later killings did not undermine the evidence; and that it had not become a feature of the trial. The court rejected the argument that the robbery was an afterthought, upheld the financial-gain finding, found the evidence sufficient and the sentence proportionate.
Two justices disagreed. Justice Pariente, joined by Justice Quince, wrote that without the other crimes the evidence that Durousseau had killed Mack was limited: he had been with her, he had been seen near her apartment, and he had denied knowing her, but no other physical evidence tied him to her death. The trial court, she wrote, never found by clear and convincing evidence that he had committed the collateral crimes; it had leaned instead on the similarity between them, a form of reasoning she called "bootstrapping." In her view the McCallister evidence, which included an eyewitness identification, DNA and the 911 call, was strong enough to stand. The Kilpatrick evidence was not, and because the state’s closing argument had relied on the pattern of similar deaths, she would not call the error harmless. The court denied rehearing on February 21, 2011, and its mandate issued on March 9.
The conviction held. The sentence did not.
In October 2012 Durousseau filed a motion for postconviction relief, arguing that his trial lawyer had been ineffective in jury selection. A two-day evidentiary hearing began on April 9, 2015, and the motion was denied. While his appeal of that ruling was pending, the law changed underneath it. In January 2016, in Hurst v. Florida, the United States Supreme Court held that Florida’s capital sentencing procedure violated the right to trial by jury.
His case became one of the vehicles for deciding what Hurst meant for those already condemned. On June 9, 2016, the Florida Supreme Court heard argument on whether the 389 people then on the state’s death row should receive new sentencing hearings or have their sentences reduced to life automatically. His lawyer told the justices that his sentence could not stand.
On January 31, 2017, the court ruled. It rejected the claims about jury selection and left the conviction in place. But it held that Hurst applied to his case, that "Durousseau’s death sentence was imposed under an unconstitutional capital sentencing statute," and that the error was not harmless, since only ten of the twelve jurors had voted for death. It vacated the sentence and ordered a new penalty phase, rejecting the argument that state law required an automatic life sentence. Justice Canady, joined by Justice Polston, dissented from that part of the ruling on the ground that Hurst should not apply retroactively; Senior Justice Perry would have ordered a life sentence outright. Durousseau was 46.
He was returned to the Duval County jail in August 2019 ahead of a hearing on his resentencing. More than two years passed before a new jury was seated. At a final pretrial hearing on December 2, 2021, he said little, answering the judge in one or two words, while lawyers on both sides argued over jury instructions and a questionnaire. About 100 prospective jurors were summoned for the following Monday, December 6.
The resentencing was, in effect, a second trial in which only the punishment was at stake: a new jury would hear the evidence and decide whether to recommend death. By then Florida required a unanimous recommendation. On December 10, 2021, the jury voted 10 to 2 for death, the same split as in 2007. Because the vote was not unanimous, Durousseau was resentenced that day to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The law moved again. In 2023 Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill allowing a death sentence on the recommendation of eight of twelve jurors. That May, Durousseau, then 52 and held at Walton Correctional Institution in DeFuniak Springs, in the Florida Panhandle, spoke against the change to Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida. The new law, he said, gave "all power to the state." "Eight jurors isn’t enough," he said. "They need to keep it at 12."
Under the rules in force when he was resentenced, two jurors stood between him and death row. Tyresa Mack’s three children were raised by her sister. The families of the five young women killed in the winter of 2002 and 2003 have heard no verdict in their cases.
• August 11, 1970: Paul Durousseau is born.
• 1989: graduates from Reseda High School in Los Angeles.
• October 1992: enlists in the U.S. Army; serves in Germany.
• 1995: marries.
• 1997: court-martialed near Columbus, Georgia; acquitted of all charges except receiving stolen property (News4Jax).
• September 7, 1997: Tracy Habersham, 27, is found dead in Columbus, Georgia.
• July 26, 1999: Tyresa Mack, 24, is killed in Jacksonville.
• August 15 to 30, 2001: drives a school bus for a Duval County contractor until a background check ends the job.
• December 19, 2002, to February 5, 2003: five young women are killed in Jacksonville.
• January 9 to 27, 2003: drives a cab in Jacksonville.
• February 6, 2003: arrested for violating probation.
• June 17, 2003: charged with five murders; Georgia files a murder charge later that month.
• June 23, 2003: indicted on five counts of first-degree murder and two counts of child abuse.
• August 26, 2003: arrested for the murder of Tyresa Mack.
• September 4, 2003: indicted for the Mack murder.
• June 28, 2006: hearing on the Williams rule evidence.
• May 23, 2007: trial opens.
• June 8, 2007: found guilty of first-degree murder.
• June 28, 2007: jury recommends death, 10 to 2.
• November 2007: the five other murder charges are dropped.
• December 13, 2007: sentenced to death by Judge Jack Schemer.
• December 9, 2010: Florida Supreme Court affirms.
• October 1, 2012: postconviction motion filed.
• January 2016: Hurst v. Florida decided.
• June 9, 2016: Florida Supreme Court hears argument in his case.
• January 31, 2017: death sentence vacated; new penalty phase ordered.
• August 2019: returned to the Duval County jail.
• December 10, 2021: second jury votes 10 to 2; resentenced to life without parole.
• 2023: Florida allows death sentences on an 8 to 4 jury vote.
• May 2023: held at Walton Correctional Institution.