Paul Durousseau

Victims

7 attributed - 1 conviction, for the murder of Tyresa Mack, for which he was sentenced to death; the other six are linked to him by investigators and have not been tried

Years active

1997 - 2003

Location

Florida/Georgia, USA

Method

Strangulation

Status

Convicted in 2007 of the first-degree murder of Tyresa Mack and sentenced to death in Duval County on December 13, 2007. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the conviction in 2010 but VACATED the death sentence in 2016 under Hurst v. Florida, which held that Florida’s capital sentencing scheme was unconstitutional because a judge rather than a jury made the findings necessary for death. He was resentenced to death in November 2017 after a new penalty-phase proceeding in which the jury voted unanimously. He remains under sentence of death in Florida. The other six killings attributed to him by investigators have not been prosecuted.

Paul Durousseau was born in Louisiana in 1970, served in the United States Army in Germany, and settled in Jacksonville, Florida, where he drove a taxi. He was married with children.

The women named in the record are Tracy Habersham, twenty-six; Tyresa Mack, twenty-four; Nicole L. Williams, eighteen; Nikia Kilpatrick, nineteen, who was six months pregnant; Shawanda Denise McCalister, twenty, also pregnant; Jovanna Jefferson, seventeen; and Surita Cohen, nineteen. The Florida press called him the Jacksonville Serial Killer.

Tracy Habersham was killed in 1997 at Fort Benning, the post adjoining Columbus, Georgia, while he was stationed there. She is the only Georgia death named in this entry, and the reporting after his arrest refers to a Georgia murder in the singular; an earlier version of this entry asserted two Columbus murders while naming one, and the count was never reconciled. From 1999 he was in Jacksonville, and between 1999 and January 2003 a series of young women were strangled there: Tyresa Mack, twenty-four, in 1999; Nicole Williams, eighteen, in December 2002, whose body was found beside a railway crossing wrapped in a blanket; Nikia Kilpatrick, nineteen, and pregnant, strangled with coaxial cable in her own flat on the last days of 2002 while her two small children were in the apartment; Shawanda McCalister, twenty, in January 2003.

The Kilpatrick scene held the investigative point of the case. There was no forced entry, nothing was taken, and her two-year-old son was found at the window three days later. Detectives went to the telephone records, and the pattern of calls to Nicole Williams's phone in the days before she disappeared, sixteen of them, was what began to draw the cases together.

He had a history that should have caught him earlier. He had been arrested for rape more than once in Georgia and Florida, and the charges had gone nowhere.

He was arrested in 2003. He was convicted in 2007 of the murder of Tyresa Mack, whose flat he had been in, and sentenced to death. Investigators have linked him to at least seven killings across the two states. His sentence has been through the Florida resentencing litigation that followed the United States Supreme Court's decision on the state's capital procedure, and he remains in custody.