Rory Enrique Conde confessed in June 1995 to strangling six people who sold sex along the Tamiami Trail, the stretch of Southwest 8th Street that runs west from Miami. The killings ran from September 1994 to January 1995 and had been the subject of a Metro-Dade police task force, an FBI profile and a public hunt for the man the press called the Tamiami Trail strangler. He was found not through that hunt but through a separate case: in June 1995 fire rescue workers entered his apartment and found a woman being held there. Within days he was in custody, and on the day after his arrest he confessed.
He was indicted on six counts of first-degree murder. The counts were tried separately, and only one ever went before a jury. In October 1999 a Dade County jury convicted him of murdering Rhonda Dunn, and in March 2000 Circuit Judge Jerald Bagley sentenced him to death after a jury recommendation of nine votes to three. In April 2001 he was sentenced to life on the other five murder counts. The Florida Supreme Court upheld the conviction and death sentence in 2003 and rejected his postconviction claims in 2010, and that year he filed a federal habeas corpus petition in Miami.
Florida's Commission on Capital Cases records his date of birth as June 14, 1965. His upbringing was argued over at his penalty phase, in the mitigation the defense offered and in the trial judge's findings on it.
The trial court found that he had been brought to the United States to live with his father and that his grandmothers had helped raise him. The defense presented relatives and friends who described his family background and claimed he had suffered physical, emotional and sexual abuse as a child; a psychotherapist, Olga Hervis, testified that he had told her of abuse in childhood. The trial judge rejected those claims of abuse, an unsafe home and abandonment by his father. The judge relied in part on his stepmother, whom the court found "quite credible" and who said he had never been abused, and on evidence that he had grown up in a clean and loving home.
The judge did accept some of the defense's picture. Conde was found to have done well despite adversity: the factors folded into that finding were that he had been a good student and a well-behaved child, a positive role model for his family, his children and his friends, and a good provider. He had a good employment record and was holding two jobs at the time of the Dunn killing. He had two small children and a positive relationship with them. Testing put his IQ at 109, and a personality test showed no clinical depression.
His marriage broke down before the killings. The Florida Supreme Court said the breakup came after his wife learned he was using prostitutes, and that the killings began afterward. The trial court accepted that he had been having difficulties in his marriage but found that this did not amount to extreme emotional disturbance.
The Florida Supreme Court's 2003 opinion names the six people in the order in which they died: Lazaro Comesana, on September 16, 1994; Elisa Martinez, on October 8, 1994; Charity Nava, on November 20, 1994; Wanda Crawford, on November 25, 1994; Necole Schneider, on December 17, 1994; and Rhonda Dunn, on January 13, 1995.
The court described each of them as a prostitute who worked in a limited area along the Trail. When police announced the arrest in June 1995, United Press International reported that five of the six were women who sold sex to pay for drugs, and that the first, Lazaro Comesana, was a man who dressed as a woman and also worked as a prostitute on the strip.
Rhonda Dunn is the one victim whose last days the trial record describes. A detective testified that he had warned her about the killings about three times and had told her to stay with other women while she worked. About 36 hours before her body was found, he saw her working alone and again urged her to work alongside others. He testified that each time she laughed and smiled.
Conde's own account, given to detectives in June 1995 and summarized by the Florida Supreme Court, followed one pattern each time. He picked up a person on the Trail late at night, took that person to his apartment, and strangled them there. He blamed the victims for the troubles in his marriage, the court recorded. Each body was later found near the Trail. His apartment was two blocks from the Trail, inside the area where the bodies were found.
The first body was found on September 17, 1994, according to UPI. The court gives the date of death as September 16.
After the third killing, that of Charity Nava in November 1994, the killer left a written message challenging police to catch him. The Florida Supreme Court later treated that message as evidence of premeditated intent, and the State relied on it as one of the links tying the six killings together.
The last victim was Rhonda Dunn. According to the court, he picked her up on January 13, 1995, and took her to his apartment, where he strangled her. She died of asphyxiation. UPI, reporting the police account in June 1995, said the last body had been found on January 12; the Commission on Capital Cases gives the span of the offenses as September 16, 1994, to January 10, 1995. The Florida Supreme Court's date of January 13 is the one used in the judgment.
By the time of the arrest, a police task force had been working the case since November 1994, and a tip line had run around the clock. Investigators began circulating a composite sketch in December. The FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime prepared a psychological profile that suggested the killer was a family man who lived near the area where the bodies were being left, UPI reported. When the arrest came, Metro-Dade Police Chief John Farrell thanked that FBI unit in particular.
Before the arrest, investigators had collected the physical evidence that would later be matched to him. The State's list of links between the killings, set out in the Florida Supreme Court's opinion, included matching fibers, tire tracks and DNA found on many of the bodies, as well as the small area of the Trail where each victim worked, the small radius around his home in which the bodies were found, and the late hour at which each was strangled.
The break in the case came in June 1995. Fire rescue workers found a woman being held in an apartment that Conde rented, and the police kidnapping investigation that followed led to him. UPI reported that the woman had been attacked on June 19 and that DNA taken in that case matched evidence from some of the murder victims.
Detectives found Conde at his grandmother's home. A detective later testified that when officers entered, he appeared to be kneeling and trying to hide under a large bed. The prosecutor told the jury this showed he knew he had been caught. On appeal the Florida Supreme Court held that the testimony should not have been admitted, because the conduct could just as easily have related to the June 1995 kidnapping as to a killing six months earlier, but it found the error harmless.
Conde later argued that his confession had been coerced, and the Florida Supreme Court set out the questioning in detail.
He was arrested about noon on Saturday, June 24, 1995. He was read his Miranda rights and signed a waiver, and he consented to searches of his apartment and his car. About two hours later he consented to giving blood and saliva samples. Detectives then questioned him for about twelve hours. He denied any involvement. The session ended at 2:30 a.m., and he was held until about 2 p.m. the next day.
The next day he was brought back to the homicide bureau, read his rights again and signed a second waiver. After about two hours and fifteen minutes he asked to make a telephone call. He spoke for about 45 minutes with his grandmother, his wife and his children, and told them he was sorry for everything. He then admitted the six killings. He went on to give a recorded statement, taken down by a stenographer, that ran to 175 pages. That session ended at 2:50 a.m. after about thirteen hours.
The court noted that no more than two of the three detectives were in the room at any time, that he was given food and drink, restroom breaks and a jacket, and that he spent at least eleven hours in a holding facility between sessions. He waived his rights three times. When he was told he had a public defender on another charge, he said he did not want to talk to any lawyer.
A detective had told him the DNA evidence against him was stronger than it was; at that point there was only a preliminary match. The court found this misstatement minor, noting that he had given the blood samples voluntarily. He also argued that police never told him he could contact the Colombian consulate, as the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations requires. The court held that throwing out a confession is not a remedy for a breach of that treaty, even if one occurred.
Evidence found after the arrest added to the case. The court listed a beeper taken from one of the earlier victims, Rhonda Dunn's blood in his apartment, fibers from his carpet that matched fibers on the victims, and tire treads that matched prints found near the bodies.
On Monday, June 26, 1995, Metro-Dade police announced that he had been charged with six counts of first-degree murder. He was indicted on all six counts on July 12, 1995, in Eleventh Judicial Circuit case 95-19816.
He also faced a separate case. According to the Florida Supreme Court, in April 1995 he had broken into a woman's home, sexually assaulted her and stolen property. The Commission on Capital Cases lists the offenses in that case, dated April 18, 1995, as burglary, sexual battery, robbery and kidnapping. He was convicted and, on February 13, 1998, sentenced to 18 years and 10 months. That conviction later served as the prior violent felony at his capital sentencing.
On July 26, 1995, the count charging the murder of Rhonda Dunn was severed from the other five. The procedural fight that followed took four years.
The defense had first asked for separate trials. When the trial court ruled that the State could present evidence of the other five killings at the Dunn trial anyway, under Florida's Williams rule on similar crimes, the defense reversed course and asked to have all six counts tried together. The trial court agreed. The State appealed, and in 1999 the Third District Court of Appeal held that putting the counts back together was an abuse of discretion, because the murders were not connected closely enough in time, place or manner to be tried jointly. The appeals court said the offenses, though similar, were separate episodes that required separate trials (State v. Conde, 743 So. 2d 78).
The trial on the Dunn count began in October 1999 before Judge Jerald Bagley, with Jeffrey Fink and J. Rafael Rodriguez, appointed as special assistant public defenders, defending him.
The jury heard about all six killings. The State argued that the other five were needed to prove identity, intent and premeditation, because the defense contested premeditation. The State's list of similarities included that each victim worked in a small area as a prostitute, was strangled late at night, and was found within a small radius of his home; that physical evidence tied many of the bodies to him; and that a message had been left with the third victim. At oral argument on appeal the State said it had kept that evidence narrow, with few witnesses and few or no graphic photographs.
The evidence on the Dunn count itself included DNA, fiber, tire and shoe evidence, medical testimony and the confession. The State used the medical examiner's evidence to argue that the killing took time and was premeditated.
The defense told the jury the killing was an unplanned outburst of emotion. The opinion describes the defense theory as an "instantaneous combustion of unexpected and unplanned emotions." On October 19, 1999, the jury found him guilty of first-degree murder.
On December 14, 1999, the jury recommended death by nine votes to three. After a further hearing before the judge, Bagley sentenced him to death on March 7, 2000.
The judge found three aggravating factors: the prior violent felony from the April 1995 case; that the killing was especially atrocious or cruel; and that it was cold, calculated and premeditated. Over a defense offer to stipulate to the prior conviction, a detective described the April 1995 offense to the jury, and the Florida Supreme Court later held that the details were relevant.
Against those factors the judge weighed one statutory mitigating factor, that he had no significant prior criminal history, which was given moderate weight, and five others: his positive influence on his family despite adversity, his good employment record and his relationship with his children, all given moderate weight; and his mental and emotional problems and good behavior as an inmate, given little weight. The judge rejected the claims that he had acted under extreme emotional disturbance or that his capacity to obey the law had been substantially impaired.
A jail chaplain, Dan Bazaro, would have testified that Conde had told him after his arrest that he had been sexually abused as a child, which the defense offered to rebut the State's claim that the abuse account was recent. The trial judge kept the chaplain from testifying before the jury because the defense had disclosed him late. The chaplain's account was later heard by the judge at the hearing held after the jury's recommendation.
On April 3, 2001, Conde was sentenced to life imprisonment on the remaining five counts of first-degree murder, according to the Commission on Capital Cases. The postconviction opinion of 2010 refers to an earlier plea offer of a life sentence that had been withdrawn; Conde later claimed that its withdrawal had hurt his defense, because potential mitigation witnesses lost interest once the offer was gone.
Benjamin Waxman, a Miami lawyer appointed as special assistant public defender, filed the appeal to the Florida Supreme Court on April 10, 2000. He argued that the trial had become a trial of Conde's character, that the evidence of the other five killings had become a feature of the trial, that the confession should have been suppressed, and that several jurors should have been excused. Assistant Attorney General Debra Rescigno argued for the State.
On September 4, 2003, the court affirmed the conviction and sentence in an unsigned opinion (Conde v. State, 860 So. 2d 930). It held that the evidence of the other killings was relevant to identity, intent and premeditation and had not become an improper feature of the trial. It held that his confession was direct evidence of premeditation and, together with the medical testimony and the pattern of the earlier killings, showed he had time to reflect. It found the confession voluntary. It found errors in admitting the detective's warnings to Dunn and the testimony about the arrest, and in excluding the chaplain, but held each harmless. It upheld the aggravating factors and the judge's treatment of the mitigation and found the death sentence proportionate. It rejected his claim under Ring v. Arizona, the 2002 U.S. Supreme Court case requiring juries to find the facts that make a defendant eligible for death.
Chief Justice Anstead agreed with the conviction but dissented in part. He wrote that because the judge alone had found the two aggravating factors he called two of the most serious, the death sentence violated Ring.
Rehearing was denied and the mandate issued on November 5, 2003. The U.S. Supreme Court denied review on April 5, 2004.
On March 24, 2005, Conde filed a motion for postconviction relief in the circuit court. He claimed his trial lawyers had been ineffective for failing to object to parts of the prosecutor's closing argument, failing to find the chaplain and family members in Colombia, and failing to explain how the withdrawn plea offer had damaged his mitigation case. He also challenged Florida's death penalty law and methods of execution. Judge Bagley held an evidentiary hearing on September 7, 2006, and denied the motion on September 29, 2006.
The Florida Supreme Court heard argument on September 2, 2009, and on February 11, 2010, affirmed the denial. It held that the closing remarks did not undermine confidence in the verdict; that because the chaplain's exclusion had already been found harmless, Conde could not show that failing to find him earlier had changed anything; and that he had never identified the witnesses he said were lost after the plea offer was withdrawn, or what they would have said. The court noted that co-workers and neighbors had in fact testified for him at trial. It rejected the Ring claim again, noting that a prior violent felony conviction satisfies Ring. Rehearing was denied on May 20, 2010, and the mandate issued on June 7, 2010.
The same day, June 7, 2010, he filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida (case 10-21848). The petition was still pending in July 2010.
In July 2010 he was under sentence of death for Rhonda Dunn's murder, with his federal habeas corpus petition pending, and was serving the life sentences on the other five murder counts and the sentence in the April 1995 case. No later ruling on the habeas petition has been reported.
Proven by final judgment: the first-degree murder of Rhonda Dunn (jury verdict, October 19, 1999, affirmed 2003). He was sentenced to life on five further first-degree murder counts in April 2001. He confessed to all six killings.
Dates: the Florida Supreme Court dates the six deaths from September 16, 1994, to January 13, 1995. UPI, reporting the police account in June 1995, said the first body was found on September 17 and the last on January 12, a day before the court's date for Dunn's death. The Commission on Capital Cases gives the offense span as ending January 10, 1995.
June 14, 1965: Rory Enrique Conde is born (Commission on Capital Cases).
September 16, 1994: Lazaro Comesana dies; the body is found the next day, west of Miami.
October 8, 1994: Elisa Martinez dies.
November 1994: a police task force forms.
November 20, 1994: Charity Nava dies; a message is left on her body.
November 25, 1994: Wanda Crawford dies.
December 1994: police circulate a composite sketch.
December 17, 1994: Necole Schneider dies.
January 13, 1995: Rhonda Dunn dies (court date; UPI reports the last body found January 12).
April 18, 1995: burglary, sexual battery, robbery and kidnapping in a separate case.
June 1995: fire rescue workers find a woman held in his apartment; UPI dates the attack June 19.
June 24, 1995: arrested about noon at his grandmother's home; questioned for about twelve hours.
The next day: after a phone call to his family, he confesses to six killings; a 175-page statement follows.
June 26, 1995: police announce six first-degree murder charges.
July 12, 1995: indicted on six counts of first-degree murder.
July 26, 1995: the Dunn count is severed.
February 13, 1998: sentenced to 18 years and 10 months in the April 1995 case.
1999: the Third District Court of Appeal reverses an order trying all six counts together.
October 19, 1999: convicted of the first-degree murder of Rhonda Dunn.
December 14, 1999: the jury recommends death, 9 to 3.
March 7, 2000: sentenced to death by Judge Jerald Bagley.
April 3, 2001: sentenced to life on the other five murder counts.
September 4, 2003: the Florida Supreme Court affirms.
April 5, 2004: the U.S. Supreme Court denies review.
March 24, 2005: postconviction motion filed.
September 7 and 29, 2006: evidentiary hearing; motion denied.
September 2, 2009: oral argument in the Florida Supreme Court.
February 11, 2010: the Florida Supreme Court affirms the denial.
June 7, 2010: federal habeas petition filed in Miami.