When Jovanna Jefferson, seventeen, did not come home in early 2003, her aunt called her cell phone, and a man answered. He said he was a cab driver and would have Jovanna back soon. She was last seen getting into a cab driven by a man her family knew only as "D." Her mother went to the cab company to ask who he was. The driver was Paul Durousseau, of Gator City Taxi and Shuttle Service, and by then he was already the leading suspect in the killings of young women in Jacksonville.
Five women were strangled in the city between December 2002 and February 2003. Nicole L. Williams, eighteen, was found in December 2002 beside a railroad crossing, wrapped in a blanket. Nikia Kilpatrick, nineteen and six months pregnant, was strangled with coaxial cable in her own apartment in the last days of 2002 while her two small children were there. Shawanda Denise McCalister, twenty, also pregnant, died in January 2003. Jovanna Jefferson and Surita Cohen, nineteen, were the last. Prosecutors would later say Durousseau had come to know several of them, Jefferson and Cohen among them, through his job driving a cab.
The Kilpatrick apartment held the turning point. There was no forced entry and nothing had been taken, and her two-year-old son was found at the window three days later. Detectives went to the telephone records, and the calls to Nicole Williams's phone in the days before she vanished, sixteen of them, began to tie the cases together.
Durousseau was born in Beaumont, Texas, on August 11, 1970, according to Florida corrections records; some earlier reporting says Louisiana. He served in the Army, including a posting to Germany, where, according to later reporting, German authorities suspected him of killing several women in the early 1990s. On January 6, 1997, Tracy Habersham, twenty-six, was killed at Fort Benning, Georgia, the post beside Columbus, while he was stationed there; reporting after his arrest refers to a single Georgia murder. From 1999 he lived in Jacksonville. That year Tyresa Mack, twenty-four, was raped and strangled in her apartment on the city's Eastside, and his DNA was later matched to evidence from her body.
His record in Jacksonville should have drawn attention sooner. According to a timeline compiled by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office and the State Attorney's Office, he served a month in jail and was put on two years' probation for the June 2001 rape of a Jacksonville woman, spent another month and a half in jail after an arrest in August 2001 for beating his wife, and was arrested for burglary in April 2002 and later acquitted. None of it kept him from work: in August 2001 he drove a school bus for several weeks and took other temporary jobs, among them animal control. He had also been arrested on rape allegations in Georgia that went nowhere.
He was arrested on June 17, 2003, and indicted on five counts of first-degree murder for the Jacksonville killings; some accounts put his arrest in February. The parents of three of the women sued Gator City Taxi, arguing that it had hired him without an adequate background check. State Attorney Harry Shorstein said he would seek the death penalty but would not bring charges for the unborn children, which he said would inject an ancillary issue that could damage the case.
Prosecutors took one case to trial: Tyresa Mack's. Evidence from two of the other killings was used in it. In June 2007 a Duval County jury convicted him of first-degree murder and voted ten to two for death. The following week prosecutors dropped the other five cases after meeting with the families and their lawyers; all but one family agreed. An assistant state attorney explained that an acquittal in any of those cases could imperil the Mack conviction. On December 13, 2007, Circuit Judge Jack Schemer sentenced him to death, finding four aggravating factors, among them a prior violent felony, a killing during a robbery or sexual battery, and a murder that was especially heinous, atrocious or cruel. The Florida Supreme Court upheld the sentence on direct appeal.
The law then moved underneath it. In 2016 the United States Supreme Court held in Hurst v. Florida that the state's capital sentencing procedure violated the right to a jury trial, and in January 2017 the Florida Supreme Court threw out his death sentence, ruling that with a ten-to-two recommendation the error could not be called harmless. A second penalty jury was seated in Duval County in December 2021 and also divided ten to two, and on December 10, 2021, he was resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The other killings attributed to him have never been tried, and with the charges dropped they are unlikely to be. In May 2023, at fifty-two and held at the Walton Correctional Institution in DeFuniak Springs, he spoke to a reporter against Florida's new law allowing a death sentence on the votes of eight jurors, a threshold both of his juries had passed. "Eight jurors isn't enough," he said. "They need to keep it at 12."