On June 19, 1995, residents of the Trail Heights Gardens apartments in Miami called the police to say they had seen a naked, bound woman inside a neighbor's apartment. Officers found Gloria Maestre, a thirty-year-old prostitute, still bound and gagged after being raped. The tenant, Rory Enrique Conde, was just coming home from a court hearing on an unrelated robbery charge, saw the police and drove away. Five days later he was arrested at his grandmother's house in Hialeah. Searches of the apartment and of his Toyota Celica produced DNA that preliminary tests linked to five of the six victims of the Tamiami Trail Strangler, and in interrogation Conde admitted the killings and said he had done it because his wife had left him.
The first body had been found on September 17, 1994, by police working the area around Flagami: Lazaro Comesana, twenty-seven, a former hairdresser who worked as a cross-dressing prostitute under the names Vanessa and Jessica, last seen the night before at the Tradewinds Motel. Conde said later that he killed him after discovering during sex that he was a man. On October 8 the body of Elisa Martinez, forty-four, a prostitute struggling with drug addiction, was found near Florida International University. On November 20 Charity Fay Nava, twenty-three, was found on a side road in West Dade, and this time the killer had written on her back and buttocks, announcing her as his third, promising to call a local television anchor and daring the police to catch him. He signed it NYR, which was later found to stand for his daughter's first name, the Spanish word for and, and his own initial.
Five days after Nava, the body of Wanda Cook Crawford, thirty-eight, was found in the parking lot of an apartment complex. She had been asphyxiated rather than strangled, and investigators at first wondered whether her death was connected. By then most of the prostitutes who worked the Trail had left the area for fear of being next. On December 19 the fully clothed body of Necole Schneider, twenty-eight, homeless and several times arrested for prostitution, was found in a residential area near the Trail, close to the shopping center where police had set up a command post for the case. Only then did investigators say publicly that one killer was responsible. On January 12, 1995, they found the last victim, Rhonda Dunn, twenty-one, whom officers had warned repeatedly the week before to stop soliciting along the Trail.
The investigation drew in the Miami-Dade Police Department and FBI profilers, looked at more than a thousand possible suspects and cost nearly $2 million, with more than a hundred officers at work, one of the most expensive in the county's history to that point, and it found nothing until the call from Trail Heights Gardens. After the arrest, neighbors said they had seen him peering into young women's bedrooms in the early morning and dragging duffel bags to his car in the middle of the night, and had never reported it. Co-workers remembered him calling the Strangler a smart guy whom the police would never catch. In February 1995 a prostitute named Cheryl Peterson had gone home with him after asking him to drive past a friend's house so she could write down his license plate; he did her no harm, grew attached to her and offered her $600 to move in.
Conde was born on June 14, 1965, in Barranquilla, Colombia. His mother died of tetanus when he was six months old, and he and his sister, Nelly, were raised by their paternal grandmother, Maria Rojas. At twelve he moved to Miami to live with his father, Gustavo, an airline worker who had remarried and whom he considered emotionally abusive. He met Carla in 1985 and married her two years later; they had a son, Rory Jr., and a daughter, Nidia. He left Miami Dade College and worked at a lumber company, and later sold building supplies for Booker & Co., where colleagues found him helpful and outgoing.
At home he was violent. He once threw Carla out of their apartment naked and heavily pregnant, and after they moved into a place of their own in 1989 he kicked, punched, choked and smothered her and threatened her with a gun. In 1991 she found a videotape of another woman in her lingerie on their bed; when she confronted him he beat her and was arrested for domestic battery. He told her he was going fishing in the Florida Keys when in fact he was peering into young women's windows, and in mid-1993 she followed him and caught him at it. Around July 1994 she left with the children. He threatened to kill her if she saw anyone else, and a month later, when he tried to force her to come back, she told him she wanted a divorce. The first killing came in September.
He was charged with six murders, two rapes and a theft. Before trial the Spanish-language paper Exito! obtained records of his confession, in which he said he had talked to the bodies and blamed them for ruining his life. His lawyers tried to have the confession thrown out on the ground that he had not been properly told of his right to counsel; prosecutors answered that detectives had given him cake, let him call his family and allowed him bathroom breaks before he chose to confess. Tried separately for Rhonda Dunn's murder beginning in October 1999, he was convicted and sentenced to death. In 2001 he pleaded guilty to the other five murders in exchange for five life terms without parole, under an agreement that barred him from ever trying to vacate them. The Florida Supreme Court rejected his appeal in 2003. In 2016 his death sentence was overturned under Hurst v. Florida, and as of March 2025 he was still awaiting resentencing for Dunn's murder.