On the day after Christmas 2005, a man from Michigan named Leroy Vaughn stopped on Beach Street in Daytona Beach, Florida, looking for a restroom. In a narrow, garbage-strewn gap between an auto parts store and a mostly empty utility building, he found the body of a woman lying face down. His wife urged him to leave and call the authorities, and they did. The woman was Laquetta Gunther, 45. She had been shot in the back of the head.
Over the next nine weeks two more women were found the same way, nude, face down and shot in the head, on dirt roads at the edge of the city. Then the killings stopped, and the case went cold for ten years. It was reopened by DNA from a fourth woman, strangled and left beside a highway in Palm Beach County in 2016, and by a genealogy search that led detectives to a West Palm Beach cook who, as a college senior in Daytona Beach, had once been questioned and let go. His name was Robert Tyrone Hayes.
Little about Hayes's early life appears in the public record beyond what his defense presented at his sentencing. His lawyers told the jury he was born into poverty and grew up without a father, whose murder they raised as part of his history. They said he had been a gifted student, that he had been physically and sexually abused as a child and bullied because of his weight, and that he had a brain condition affecting his judgment. Those were defense claims made in mitigation; prosecutors disputed the medical part of them, and the jury's findings on each point were not published.
Hayes was at Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach from 2000 to 2006, according to a classmate. He majored in criminal justice, played in the college band and performed as a cheerleader. He lived on Jefferson Street, in the same part of the city where the three women were last seen. He was 23 when the killings began, and he graduated in 2006, the year the last of the three was found.
He later moved to Palm Beach County and worked as a cook and chef. By 2019 he lived in an apartment in the Pinewood Park neighborhood of West Palm Beach with a woman and their toddler daughter. Daytona Beach police said he had no criminal history other than traffic infractions. A neighbor told the Associated Press, "He was always friendly with me."
On November 17, 2005, Hayes put a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson VE pistol on layaway at Buck's Gun Rack in Daytona Beach. He paid it off on December 2, 2005, taking home the gun and 50 rounds of American Eagle ammunition, for $288. The store's owner, Forrest Buckwald, testified about the sale at trial. Under cross-examination he said the model was popular because of its price, and that the caliber had been in demand since the FBI adopted it. Three weeks after Hayes collected the pistol, Laquetta Gunther was dead.
Laquetta Mae Gunther was 45 and a mother. Her eldest daughter, Guyette Luster, spoke for the family at the sentencing in 2022. She said she had struggled for sixteen years to find closure, that thoughts of "what ifs" followed her into her sleep, and that she and her siblings had lost the chance to grow old with their mother. "My mom mattered," she said.
Gunther's body was found in the alley off Beach Street. The Daytona Beach News-Journal's trial coverage dates the discovery to Christmas Day 2005; Leroy Vaughn testified that he found her on December 26, and most wire reports use that date. Law&Crime reported that prosecutors described her as found kneeling between the two buildings. She had been shot once in the back of the head. Her clothes were not on her, and no identification was found.
Julie Ann Green was 34, by most accounts, though the News-Journal gave her age as 35. Her sister, Rhonda Iwanski, testified at the sentencing that part of her had died when Julie was killed. Green's body was found on January 14, 2006, at the edge of a construction zone off LPGA Boulevard, on land that has since become the Bayberry Lakes subdivision. She lay in a ditch beside a single-lane dirt road. She had been shot in the back of the head.
Investigators found a tire impression on the dirt road beside her. A tip led them to a junkyard in DeLand, the DeLand U-Pull-It, where the lead detective interviewed the owner and took a DNA swab from him. The owner was a person of interest for a time and was cleared. A substance found on Green's feet was never tested; the detective said at trial that it appeared to be dirt.
Iwana Patton was 35. She had come to Daytona Beach from Buffalo, New York, to help her niece, Aneesah Farris, who was a student at Bethune-Cookman and struggling with a young son. Patton had come down with Farris's mother for a graduation, seen how hard things were and decided to stay. "She put her life on hold," Farris told the Daytona Times in 2019.
Farris, now a chiropractor in Holly Hill and a mother of five, described her aunt as nurturing and sociable, a woman who had helped raise both her and her brother. Patton worked two jobs as a caregiver. She was a nurse's aide and held a certification as a medical technician assistant. The day before she was found, she had worked a double shift and was keeping Farris's son. She said she was going home to get some clothes and would be back. "In less than 24 hours, we get the call that she had been killed," Farris said.
Patton's body was found on February 24, 2006, near Mason and Williamson avenues, then a wooded, undeveloped tract. The site is now an entrance to the headquarters of the Daytona Beach Police Department. Unlike the other two women, she had been shot in the face.
Police and prosecutors described all three women as having engaged in prostitution. Farris has rejected that description of her aunt. "My aunt was not a drug addict; she was not a prostitute," she said. She also pointed out that early profiles had described the killer as a white man, which turned out to be wrong.
The three killings came within about nine weeks, and they frightened women who worked the streets of Daytona Beach. Some began memorizing license plates and descriptions of cars and passing them to detectives. A local ministry handed out flyers and hygiene kits and urged women not to walk alone at night.
Detectives believed each woman had willingly got into a car with her killer and been taken to a secluded place. Lead detective Tammy Pera Marcum later testified that a shell casing found at Green's scene was linked ballistically to one at Patton's, and that male DNA recovered from Gunther matched male DNA recovered from Patton. The killer's DNA profile was on file. It matched no one in the criminal databases.
Detectives worked through everyone in the area who had recently bought a .40-caliber handgun. Hayes was one of hundreds of people questioned. He was interviewed twice. He told detectives he had given his pistol to his mother. He was not arrested. Later in 2006 he reported a .40-caliber gun stolen from his vehicle in Riviera Beach, in Palm Beach County. At his trial years later his mother testified that she did not recall his ever giving her a gun.
One other man was held in the early investigation. According to a case summary compiled for a forensic genealogy research database, a homeless man, David Lindsay, was arrested on June 10, 2006, and held about ten days until DNA testing cleared him. That account has not been confirmed in news reporting.
In January 2008 the body of another woman, Stacey Gage, 30, was found in Daytona Beach. Her death resembled the others closely enough that police examined it as part of the same series, and in 2019 police said all four women had been found within one to two miles of each other in Daytona Beach and Holly Hill. But Gage's body had decomposed too far for DNA to be recovered, and no physical evidence connected it to anyone. Hayes has never been charged with her death, and the State Attorney said in 2019 that her case remained open. Daytona Beach police began asking people they arrested to give DNA samples voluntarily in February 2008, a policy civil liberties lawyers objected to, according to the same research database's summary of contemporary Orlando Sentinel reporting. It did not produce a match.
Rachel Elizabeth Bey was 32 and lived in Riviera Beach. She had once worked as a certified nursing assistant. Her brother, Aliahu Bey, described her in 2016 as a "loving and caring girl" who had fallen in with the wrong crowd as a teenager, and whose drug use had pulled her onto the streets. In their last phone call, he said, she told him that life was hard, but that she was trying.
A friend last saw her walking along a highway at about 2 a.m. on March 7, 2016. About six hours later a road crew found her body beside the Beeline Highway, about a mile north of Indiantown Road and west of Jupiter, roughly 50 feet off the roadway. She was nude and face down in the dirt. Her clothes and cellphone were missing. She had been strangled, and her jaw and several teeth were broken; she had defensive injuries. Investigators believed she had been killed somewhere else and left there.
The method was different from the Daytona Beach killings. The DNA was not. Lab workers obtained a complete male DNA profile from Bey's rape examination, and in December 2016 the national CODIS database linked it to the profile from the Daytona Beach cases. A ten-year-old cold case and a new one now had the same unknown suspect.
The profile still matched no named person. In 2018 the Florida Department of Law Enforcement started a genetic genealogy program, led by Lori Napolitano, which uploaded crime-scene DNA profiles to the two genealogy services that allowed police access, GEDmatch and Family Tree DNA, and studied the lists of relatives that came back. A case summary in the research database credits Napolitano and CeCe Moore of Parabon NanoLabs with the work on this case.
The search led to a woman with three half-brothers, and from her to Hayes, according to what prosecutors told the jury. Investigators then put him under surveillance. They collected a cigarette butt he discarded after riding a bus, and a beer can he threw away. The DNA on them matched the profile from Bey and from the Daytona Beach cases. A later sample taken directly from Hayes matched as well; the Associated Press reported the odds that the DNA belonged to someone else at 700 billion to one.
Detectives found more that pointed toward him. In March 2016 Hayes lived about a mile from where Bey was last seen. Her phone stayed sporadically active after her death, and the cell tower handling most of that activity also served Hayes's home. Prosecutors later said his own phone had traveled to the area where her body was left on the night before she was found.
Palm Beach County sheriff's deputies arrested Hayes, then 37, at his home in West Palm Beach on Sunday, September 15, 2019, and charged him with first-degree murder in Bey's death. In an interview that day, which jurors later heard, he denied knowing her, and a detective testified that Hayes gave him a phone number that was not his own. On Monday a judge denied him bail.
At a news conference that day, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said, "We have been able to take what we believe is a serial killer off the streets," and added that without the arrest Hayes would have killed again. State Attorney Dave Aronberg said, "This is all about Rachel Bey." Her two brothers attended and declined to speak. Daytona Beach Police Chief Craig Capri said DNA had linked Hayes to three of his city's victims, and Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood, who had been the Daytona Beach police chief during the investigation, said solving the killings was the one thing left undone when he left that post. He said he had told one victim's family, and that they "didn't think they'd be alive to see this day come." Capri said the department would keep looking at whether Hayes was tied to Stacey Gage's death.
On November 21, 2019, outside the courthouse in DeLand, State Attorney R.J. Larizza of the Seventh Judicial Circuit announced that a Volusia County grand jury had indicted Hayes on three counts of first-degree murder with a firearm, for Gunther, Green and Patton. "We will be filing our notice of intent to seek the death penalty today," he said. Prosecutors in Palm Beach County also said they would seek death in the Bey case.
Larizza said that a woman who had survived an attack by Hayes at about the same time had come forward, and that she and a witness who could corroborate her account had been interviewed. He did not name her and said she had suffered "significant trauma and threats." He also said agencies in other places where Hayes had lived had been asked to check their unsolved cases, and that untested evidence could now be compared against a known profile. No charge has been reported from either of those lines of inquiry, and the survivor's account was not described in the trial coverage.
Hayes was moved to Volusia County to face the older charges first. The case was slowed by the COVID-19 pandemic, when he appeared in court by Zoom from jail, and by a delay granted so the defense could have his brain scanned. The trial judge, Circuit Judge Raul Zambrano, ruled that evidence from the Palm Beach County killing could be heard by the Daytona Beach jury, though not all of it.
The state's notice of intent to seek death listed as aggravating factors that the killings were committed during a sexual battery, that they were committed to avoid arrest, and that they were especially cruel, the factor Florida law calls HAC.
The trial opened on February 11, 2022, at the S. James Foxman Justice Center in Daytona Beach, before a panel of sixteen, including four alternates. The twelve who decided the case were eight women and four men. Assistant State Attorneys Andrew Urbanak and Jason Lewis prosecuted. Hayes was defended by Francis Shea and Christopher Anderson.
Urbanak told jurors the evidence would show Hayes killed "not once, not twice, but three times here in Volusia County." He walked them through a timeline and stressed how alike the killings were: women of similar height, weight and age, each naked, without identification, showing no sign of a struggle, each shot in the head and left in a remote place. "Each of these murders were basically on a script," he said later.
Witnesses included Leroy Vaughn, testifying by Zoom about finding Gunther; retired officers who had recovered the bodies and bullets; Buckwald, about the gun sale; and Marcum, the former lead detective, about the DNA and ballistic links. Jurors handled the bullet said to have killed Gunther, sealed in a bag and mounted on a board, and a casing and bullet from Green's scene. Projectiles and casings from the scenes were consistent with the type of pistol and the brand of ammunition Hayes had bought. Prosecutors put in evidence that Hayes's mother had said he had a van at some point, though Urbanak said years later that the state never claimed it had to be the van used in the killings.
The defense did not dispute that Hayes's DNA was on the women. It conceded that he had had sex with them and argued that this proved nothing more. Shea told jurors that "the state has not presented any evidence that the defendant was the person who shot Ms. Gunther." He noted that her body was badly decomposed, that investigators had never fixed the time she was shot, and that no one had seen her killed. A .40-caliber Smith & Wesson round, he said, could be fired from any .40-caliber pistol, and the matching bullets were circumstantial. He pressed Marcum on the tire track that had led to the junkyard in DeLand and on the substance on Green's feet, suggesting it might be grease from somewhere else; she said it appeared to be dirt and had never been tested.
Closing arguments were heard on February 21. The jury began deliberating the next morning and returned its verdict that evening, Tuesday, February 22, 2022, after more than eight hours. It found Hayes guilty of three counts of first-degree premeditated murder. He was 39. He showed no reaction as the clerk read the verdicts.
The penalty phase began on February 28. Under Florida law at the time, a death sentence required a unanimous recommendation from all twelve jurors. The state relied on two aggravating factors: that Hayes had been convicted of another capital felony, which the three verdicts established, and that the killings were cold, calculated and premeditated.
Families and friends of the three women spoke about who they had been. Guyette Luster spoke for her mother, and Rhonda Iwanski for her sister. Patton's niece, Aneesah Farris, read statements from her family.
The defense called people who had known Hayes all his life. A cousin, Denise Williams, said he was a cook who always brought food to her house. Jason Caldwell, his best friend since college, choked up as he described how Hayes had helped him settle in at Bethune-Cookman and lent him clothes. "When I say best friend, I mean that is someone I can depend on at any time or day," he said. Another friend, Latisha Cornelius, said the killings were out of character. Asked whether they had seen signs of mental illness in him, nearly all of the character witnesses said no. The News-Journal reported that Hayes became visibly upset, clenching his fist, when a photograph of his daughter was shown in court.
The main defense expert was Dr. Joseph Wu, who testified that brain scans showed Hayes was autistic and had suffered a traumatic brain injury. Experts for the state said autism cannot be diagnosed from brain scans and that they saw no sign of brain injury.
In closing, Lewis walked to the defense table again and again and pointed at Hayes. "They are no longer with us. They are dead, because of this guy right here," he said. He argued that Hayes had chosen women he believed would go with him to a lonely place and would not be missed, that he took their identification, and that he changed the places he left them to avoid detection, from a downtown alley to a building site to woods. Of the defense's evidence that Hayes baked for people and gave blood, he said it did not outweigh "taking those pints and pints of blood from Ms. Green, Ms. Gunther and Ms. Patton." He noted that Hayes had been in the band and on the cheer squad, which he said cut against the claim of autism.
Anderson told jurors that the killings were not cold or calculated but done in a frenzy. A criminology student who planned murders, he argued, would have used a condom rather than leave his DNA behind. He said Hayes had been 23, had no significant criminal record, and had been under extreme emotional disturbance. "Folks, life in prison without parole is forever," he said.
The jury began deliberating at 1:23 p.m. on March 2, 2022, and finished at about 8:44 p.m. It did not unanimously recommend death. As the clerk read the result, Hayes appeared to exhale. Judge Zambrano then sentenced him to three consecutive terms of life in prison without parole.
"While the death penalty was not imposed, Hayes will no longer prey on the unsuspecting and vulnerable," Larizza said in a statement. "He will die in our State Prison System. There is justice in that."
Hayes later asked for a new trial, arguing that Shea and Anderson had been ineffective. He said they failed to call two witnesses who would have testified that he had no vehicle and so could not have driven the women anywhere: a woman he met at Bethune-Cookman and his female roommate from 2004 to 2006. "I immediately began writing letters explaining not only trial strategy ... but also repeatedly saying I did not have a vehicle," he told the court. His new lawyer, Tony Tomas, argued that the witnesses might have produced an acquittal.
At an earlier hearing both trial lawyers testified that Hayes had never asked them to call those witnesses about a vehicle. At a hearing on April 21, 2026, before Circuit Judge Kathryn Weston, the college acquaintance testified by Zoom that she did not know Hayes to have a car, but she said she had not met him until late January or early February 2006, after the killings had started. The roommate did not appear; Hayes said she did not want the media attention. Urbanak replied that a witness who would not come to a hearing for that reason would have been even less likely to testify at a trial.
Weston denied the motion. She found the trial lawyers had not been deficient, and she said she had read the entire trial transcript. "The evidence is overwhelming," she said. "It was overwhelming." Zambrano had by then retired. The outcome of Hayes's direct appeal of the 2022 convictions has not been reported, nor whether he has appealed Weston's ruling.
The Daytona Beach News-Journal reported on April 24, 2026, that Hayes, then 44, was serving three consecutive life sentences without parole for the murders of Laquetta Gunther, Julie Green and Iwana Patton. At the end of the April hearing Judge Weston ordered him returned to Palm Beach County, where he was being held awaiting trial on the charge of murdering Rachel Bey. If convicted as charged there, he faces a possible death sentence. No trial date or verdict in the Bey case has been reported. In mid-October 2026 the Florida Department of Corrections offender database held no record for him under the name Robert Hayes, consistent with his still being in county custody, though that alone does not establish where he is.
Proven in court: Hayes was convicted by a jury of the first-degree premeditated murders of Laquetta Gunther, Julie Green and Iwana Patton. A judge reviewing the trial in 2026 found the evidence overwhelming and found no fault with his lawyers' performance. He has continued to maintain that he could not have committed the killings.
Charged, not tried: the murder of Rachel Bey. Hayes is presumed innocent of that charge. The DNA match was admitted in part at the Daytona Beach trial, but no jury has decided whether he killed her.
Not charged: the death of Stacey Gage. Police examined it because of its similarities, but no physical evidence links Hayes to it, and prosecutors have said they have not sought an indictment. Reports differ on the year she was found, 2008 in most and 2007 in one.
Not tested in court: the account of a woman who, prosecutors said in 2019, survived an attack by Hayes. Her story has not been made public.
Claims made in mitigation: that Hayes is autistic and has a brain injury rest on one defense expert's reading of brain scans and were contradicted by the state's experts. The jury's reasons for not recommending death are not known; jurors declined to comment.
Who the women were: police and prosecutors described all four as having engaged in prostitution. Iwana Patton's family has said that was not true of her.
2000: Hayes enrolls at Bethune-Cookman University, Daytona Beach.
November 17, 2005: He puts a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol on layaway at Buck's Gun Rack.
December 2, 2005: He pays it off and takes home the gun and 50 rounds.
December 25 or 26, 2005: Laquetta Gunther, 45, is found shot in an alley off Beach Street.
January 14, 2006: Julie Green, 34, is found shot near a construction site off LPGA Boulevard.
February 24, 2006: Iwana Patton, 35, is found shot near Mason and Williamson avenues.
2006: Hayes is questioned twice as one of many .40-caliber gun buyers; he says he gave the gun to his mother. He graduates in criminal justice.
December 2006: He reports a .40-caliber gun stolen from his vehicle in Riviera Beach.
January 2, 2008: Stacey Gage, 30, is found dead in Daytona Beach; no one is charged.
March 7, 2016: Rachel Bey, 32, is found strangled beside the Beeline Highway west of Jupiter.
December 2016: CODIS links the DNA from Bey's case to the Daytona Beach cases.
2018-2019: FDLE genetic genealogy leads investigators to Hayes; DNA from a discarded cigarette butt and beer can matches.
September 15, 2019: Hayes is arrested in West Palm Beach and charged with Bey's murder.
November 21, 2019: A Volusia County grand jury indicts him on three counts of first-degree murder; the state announces it will seek death.
February 11, 2022: His trial opens in Daytona Beach before Judge Raul Zambrano.
February 22, 2022: The jury convicts him on all three counts.
March 2, 2022: The jury does not unanimously recommend death; he is sentenced to three consecutive life terms without parole.
April 21, 2026: Judge Kathryn Weston denies his motion for a new trial.
April 24, 2026 (latest report found): He is held in Palm Beach County awaiting trial for Rachel Bey's murder.