Roberto Wagner Fernandes – International Serial Killer

In 2021, detectives in Florida, United States, announced that DNA connected Brazilian national Roberto Wagner Fernandes to the murders of three Miami-area sex workers in 2000 and 2001. During this investigation, authorities discovered Fernandes had also been charged with his wife’s 1996 murder and was suspected in numerous unsolved assault and homicide cases in both countries. Today, we’ll take a deep dive into Fernandes’s known crimes, the international, decade-long manhunt to bring him to justice, and the unsolved cases for which he many be responsible.

1968-1996: Londrina, Parana, Brazil

Roberto Wagner Fernandes was born in the Brazilian state of Parana in 1965. In 1989, he married Danyelle Boucas, also from Parana, when he was 24 and she was 20. They settled down together in the city of Londrina. Roberto worked as a private pilot while Danyelle studied to become a teacher. In 1991, Danyelle gave birth to a daughter, Mariella, and this aggravated a kidney problem she had. She also underwent heart surgery not too long after this, and it sounds like these health issues, though not debilitating, were enough to alter her career and family plans. She took a job at The Municipal Children’s Library in the Jardim Tropical Gardens district of Londrina teaching language arts. In 1993, Roberto began working as a commercial pilot, likely out of the Londrina-Governador Jose Richa Airport.

At this point in the early 90s, Londrina, which means “Little London,” was a large, Portugeuse-speaking, predominantly Roman Catholic city with a population of about 400,000 (more than half a million today). The climate is humid subtropical, meaning they get highs in the 70 to 80-degree Fahrenheit range, with lows in the 50s to 60s, along with about 60 inches of rain evenly spread throughout the year. The consistency of their weather is one of several reasons why agriculture dominates Londrina’s economy. The city hosts Expo Londrina, the largest ag fair in Latin America, and it’s also home to the State University of Londrina, one of the biggest Brazilian colleges, as well as many major sports clubs.

In 1996, Roberto Wagner Fernandes, 31, his 27-year-old wife, Danyelle, and their five-year-old daughter, Mariella, are living at apartment number 1.104 in the Regina Isabel Building. At about 1:30 a.m. on Monday, November 18, an upstairs neighbor described feeling vibrations, as if objects were being thrown in the Fernandes apartment. She then smelled the strong scent of alcohol and heard Danyelle say, “Beto, calm down” two or three times before hearing around four gunshots. She called the building’s doorman, who went to check on the noises. Other neighbors reported similar disturbances.

The doorman encountered Roberto Wagner Fernandes and his daughter, Mariella, leaving in a hurry. After passing them, he entered the Fernandes’s unlocked apartment to find Danyelle lying in blood on her bedroom floor, alive but severely wounded. Though emergency services arrived quickly, Danyelle died from two gunshots wounds in her chest and abdomen at approximately 1:50 a.m. Authorities on the scene that night collected Roberto’s Taurus .380 semi-automatic pistol, shell casings, two bottles of opened alcohol, and blood-soaked sheets as evidence, noting blood stains on a light switch and some objects appearing to be out of place, as if they had recently been thrown.

Of course, Roberto Wagner Fernandes is immediately charged with his wife’s murder, but he claims self-defense, that Danyelle allegedly threatened to shoot and kill him during an altercation. He says it began when she answered a phone call from a sex worker who wanted more money than what he had already paid her. Roberto says that Danyelle was out of control that night due to the influence of drugs and alcohol in combination with her anger toward him over this phone call.

Ten days after Danyelle’s murder, once Roberto’s accusations made the news, the sex worker came forward to confirm that she had made the phone call, but also shared that Roberto Wagner Fernandes had viciously attacked and almost killed her. She claimed that while they were on a date at a local motel, Roberto abused cocaine and whisky, then beat her in the head with a liquor bottle, punched her, kicked her, and attempted to drown her in a hot tub. She was able to defend herself and get away long enough to open the door to their room, at which point she says Roberto calmed down, redressed, and left, while she sought medical care for her injuries. Roberto didn’t deny the attack but insisted he did it after the sex worker demanded a higher fee than what they originally agreed upon.

Shockingly, Roberto Wagner Fernandes was acquitted of his wife’s murder. His self-defense claims held up due to lack of evidence and lack of witnesses to the contrary. Essentially, there was no proof that Danyelle didn’t threaten or attempt to kill Roberto, just his word that she did, and that was enough to uphold his self-defense justification for her murder. The sex worker’s credibility was also a major issue, even though hospital records supported her testimony. It’s important to note that her credibility as a sex worker weighed more heavily than his admitted infidelity and assault. Obviously unhappy with the acquittal, Danyelle’s family was rumored to have hired a hitman to assassinate Fernandes. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, but the man who murdered Danyelle was walking away free.

1996-2001: Miami Metro Area, Florida, United States

Whether he was escaping his in-laws or for other reasons, Roberto Wagner Fernandes did flee to the United States around this time. Using his commercial pilot’s license, Fernandes began making numerous trips between the US and Brazil starting in 1996. By 1999, Miami International Airport had hired him as a flight attendant and tour driver.

The Miami Metro Area of South Florida where Fernandes relocated is in the southeastern most portion of North America, about a 12-hour flight from Londrina. This narrow strip of densely populated land is also referred to as Greater Miami, the Tri-County Area, or the Gold Coast, and it’s bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east, the Everglades to the west, and the Florida Keys to the south. Although the physical area of this landmass is a little smaller than Londrina, its population of over five million in the late 90s was more than 12 times Londrina’s. That means there were about 4,407 people per square mile, or 1,702 people per square kilometer.

About one-third of Miami Metro Area residents are foreign-born, and about one-half of them speak a language other than English at home, mostly Spanish. The climate is tropical, with average temperatures similar to Londrina, but with marked wet, dry, and hurricane seasons. Education, health care, and social work are the dominant economic industries, followed by other professional and commercial services. It boasts two major universities – Florida International University and the University of Miami – along with several college and pro sports teams.  

Kimberly Dietz, born in 1965 like Roberto Wagner Fernandes, was living and working in the Miami area in 2000. Dietz was struggling with drug addiction, seeking treatment at no less than five recovery centers between 1998 and 2000. She started taking rehabilitation seriously around the time she met her husband, Michael Livesey, and the two had a daughter, Victoria, in 1999. Dietz was a GNC health store manager at one point, but drug relapses kept returning her to sex work and street life. “Her addiction led her to do those things,” a friend once said. “When she was clean, she was a vibrant, wonderful woman, not only because of her external beauty, but for her spirit.”

Seeking to provide a more stable life for their year-and-a-half-old daughter, Livesey separated from Dietz and served her divorce papers on May 23, 2000. On June 7, an undercover officer arrested Dietz on prostitution charges. After her release, Dietz contacted Livesey to facilitate a visit with her daughter, asking him to meet her at the Little River Club, the recovery treatment center into which she’d been released. Dietz wasn’t there at the agreed upon time on June 20, so Livesey returned home. He never heard from Dietz again. She was last seen alive near Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, working the streets.

Around 8:00 a.m. on Thursday, June 22, 2000, a couple driving along Flamingo Road in Cooper City noticed a large brown suitcase discarded in a grassy area just a few feet off the roadway. They doubled back and parked near the suitcase to investigate, discovering Kimberly Dietz’s body curled up in a fetal position inside, naked and bloodied. Investigators would later learn that the suitcase had been stolen from the Miami International Airport.

A medical examination determined that Dietz had died 24-36 hours prior to her discovery from multiple blunt force trauma on the right side of her head, behind her right ear and her eye, as well as a two-and-a-half-inch laceration on the top of her skull with swelling on the right side. They found bruising on her buttocks, left leg, and the left side of her neck area, as well as petechiae (signs of bleeding under the surface) in her left eye. Severe vaginal and anal trauma in addition to these injuries indicated sexual assault, and Dietz’s feet were also covered in green grass stains.

Inside the suitcase, detectives located Dietz’s blood-soaked skort and blouse underneath her body. The skort’s top button was missing and had been replaced with a safety pin. Livesey identified his 35-year-old soon-to-be-ex wife by the description of her tattoos in news reports. He was initially suspected in her murder until a search of his home and forensic evidence cleared him. Investigators and local news outlets quickly linked Dietz’s murder to a string of unsolved sex worker homicides in the area since 1997 due to their similar fact patterns, and we’ll examine the details of those cases shortly.

A friend said Dietz was, “brutally honest, whether you wanted to hear it or not. She helped a lot of people that are still clean and sober as a direct result of what she talked about. And she’s going to help some people with her death. They’ll see that if they stay on that road, this is where they could end up.”

Just a little over a week after Dietz’s body was discovered, Sia Demas, born in 1978, was released from prison after an undercover prostitution bust. On July 2, 2000, she was staying at a motel in Dania Beach, although her mother, Pamela Saiger-Sansone, was trying to help her find more permanent housing. She lost contact with the 22-year-old Demas after she boarded a bus to Miami from the Broward terminal to meet a man named David Britt. Britt last saw Demas on Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, attempting to sell sexual services. This was the same area Dietz was last seen, and both women were engaged in prostitution activity at the time.

At about 7:00 a.m. on Wednesday, August 9, 2000, a woman walking her dog along Southwest 31st Avenue in Fort Lauderdale noticed a large duffel bag covered in a white, plastic trash bag in a grassy area about fifteen feet off the road. Demas’s body was stuffed inside and partially wrapped in more trash bag material. She was nude except for some jewelry and a pink Minnie Mouse hair tie on one of her wrists. Blood stuck some of the plastic bag to the skin of Demas’s torso and feet, trapping fibers for evidence. Authorities identified Demas by matching her fingerprints and tattoos to her arrest records. The trash bags also yielded the fingerprints of Demas’s killer, while the duffel bag straps contained the killer’s DNA. They first compared the fingerprints and DNA to David Britt, who last saw Demas alive, but he was not a match.

Further testing of the DNA on February 1, 2001, did turn up a match – the DNA from Kimberly Dietz’s killer. This was a confirmation more than a surprise: due to several similarities between the two women and the circumstances of their murders, authorities had already linked Dietz to Demas’s killing shortly after the latter woman’s body was discovered. Like Dietz, Demas died of multiple blunt force trauma to her head, with two large vertical lacerations on the upper right rear portion of her head, and one just behind her right ear. There was also trauma to the underlying tissue in the back of her neck and fractures on the inside base of her skull. Vaginal and anal trauma indicated a sexual assault had occurred, and there was a small laceration to her left big toe where the nail was missing.

By August 29, 2001, police and area residents understood that forensic evidence connected two of the still unsolved sex worker murders, confirming for many the suspicion that there was an active serial killer on the loose. Perhaps that’s why Jessica Good decided to call her boyfriend at about 3:00 a.m. that morning to report her bad feelings about the “white Latino guy” with whom she was on a date. The man picked up Good, a sex worker, in his Liccia Tours van, and the two were going to spend the night at his place in Miami. Her boyfriend calmed Good’s nerves and encouraged her to continue with the date, getting her to provide the man’s address, the tour company’s phone number from the side of his van, and telling her to call him back as soon as she got to his house.

Good never called back, and on August 30, her body turned up in Miami’s Biscayne Bay. She died as a result of stab wounds, but the information she provided to her boyfriend led police straight to her suspected killer. Liccia Tours only had one van with a phone number on it, and Roberto Wagner Fernandes was the only driver of that van. They searched his apartment and van, collecting DNA samples from a pair of his underwear and fingerprints from the exterior driver’s door handle of his work van. Fernandes, who lived alone, was nowhere to be found.

Since Good’s body turned up in Miami-Dade County, while Dietz’s and Demas’s were found in neighboring Broward County, their cases were handled by separate investigative teams, and the killer’s DNA and fingerprints weren’t cross-compared. There wasn’t as much publicity I could find from the time about Good’s murder compared to the others, and that might be because in her case we have a completely different method of killing and discarding the body. Instead of blunt force trauma and disposing the body in a travel bag along the roadway, Good was stabbed and dumped in the water. Although Miami-Dade County detectives entered Fernandes’s DNA into CODIS, it didn’t yield any matches of known offenders, and the same goes for his fingerprints in AFIS. For the time being, another area sex worker’s homicide case would go cold.

2011-2021: International investigation

In 2011, Broward and Miami-Dade detectives finally cross-pollinated and discovered through further DNA testing and one-to-one fingerprint comparison that the same man killed Kimberly Dietz, Sia Demas, and Jessica Good, and that man was Roberto Wagner Fernandes. Investigation revealed that Fernandes fled the United States for Brazil immediately after murdering Good, realizing that he would be identified quickly, probably on September 1, 2001.

Although the Brazilian National Police’s (BNP) laws prevented them from collecting Fernandes’s DNA at that point, they did send along the fingerprints they collected as part of his wife’s murder investigation. These were a match to fingerprints connecting Roberto Wagner Fernandes to Dietz’s, Demas’s, and Good’s murders.

On August 2, 2011, in light of the DNA conclusively connecting the three Miami-area murders to each other, and the new fingerprint match of Fernandes to those Miami-area murders, police issued an arrest warrant for first degree murder for Fernandes. The BNP coordinated with the FBI and local police in Florida to locate the serial killer. They extended their search to Paraguay, just west over the border, after learning that Fernandes had fled there to avoid a 2003 sexual assault charge in Brazil. At the time, he was working as a freelance pilot, and it appears he continued his crime spree after he returned to his home country.

The nature of this manhunt changed when investigators learned that on December 13, 2005, at the age of 40, Roberto Wagner Fernandes lost control of a twin-engine Cessna 310 plane, crashing it into a large wetland in Misiones, Argentina. Although he was believed to have died in the crash, authorities weren’t so certain. For one thing, no one officially identified Fernandes’s body prior to his burial. In addition, the caretaker of the cemetery where he was buried insisted that Fernandes’s grave was empty. Combining these factors with, one, Fernandes’s history of fleeing responsibility for his crimes, and, two, needing to make a conclusive DNA match in order to solve three open homicide cases, international authorities agreed to exhume Fernandes’s grave.

There was indeed a body in the grave, and in December 2020, the DNA extracted from it was found to be a male parental match to Mariella Fernandes, Roberto and Danyelle’s daughter. In February 2021, investigators took the next step of matching Fernandes’s exhumed DNA to the profile of Dietz’s, Demas’s, and Good’s killer. With that confirmed, the women’s family members were located and notified, and the Broward County Sheriff’s Office (BSO) made a public statement to announce that the cold cases were solved; Roberto Wagner Fernandes was posthumously convicted of their murders.

At the press release, BSO Detective Zach Scott shared that “knowing his last minutes on earth were probably full of terror makes me feel a little better, but at least today we can provide answers to the families as far as what happened to their loved ones and the person who was responsible.” While there is certainly some relief that Roberto Wagner Fernandes died back in 2005, putting an end to his serial raping and killing, he was never held accountable for his crimes in his lifetime. Like Danyelle’s family, who felt Fernandes’s acquittal for her murder was an injustice, there is a sense that closure and justice was denied for these victims and their families as well.

1997-2000: Unsolved and related serial killings

Given the nature of his offenses, authorities believe Roberto Wagner Fernandes is responsible for other unsolved murders in South Florida and numerous violent crimes against sex workers in Brazil in the late 1990s. We found at least seven unsolved murders of sex workers from when Fernandes first started visiting the Miami area on a regular basis, shortly after he was acquitted of his wife’s November 1996 murder, until he fled the area after Jessica Good’s murder on September 1, 2001. There are four in 1997 alone, and many were linked in newspaper accounts not just to each other, but also to the cases of Fernandes’s known murder victims during those subsequent investigations.

The 1997 homicides are similar in that all the victims’ bodies were found in public retail shopping areas, just off major highways. This is an important connection to Fernandes because of his employment at the time, especially driving the tour guide van. He traveled between the large airport hubs at Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach, requiring him to become extremely familiar with these routes at various times of the day. This would familiarize him with the area roadways much more quickly and intimately than simply living in Miami alone would have. Except for Jessica Good, who was found floating in Biscayne Bay, all of these body disposal locations were along routes Fernandes would have traveled between airports as part of his job. You can view our map that pinpoints the locations where the bodies of Fernandes’s known victims and the following unsolved murders were discovered.

The first body that turns up in the string of unsolved homicides is at 8:05 p.m. on Tuesday, February 25, 1997, behind the parking lot of Follies adult bookstore in West Palm Beach. The adult theatre clerk found 32-year-old Sandra Walters’s nude, strangled body about 100 feet from the store building, and he had checked the lot and not seen her body less than an hour earlier. Walters was a known sex worker whose last arrest by an undercover cop was only a month prior to her murder.

A few weeks later, about noon on Sunday, March 16, 1997, a group of boys came across Ellen Stowe’s strangled body in the bushes behind an Eckard Pharmacy in Coral Springs. She was found nude from the waist up and was determined to have been killed eight to 12 hours prior to her discovery. Stowe was a former exotic dancer and model who achieved semi-major success after appearing as Playboy’s February 1977 centerfold, but she struggled with drug and alcohol abuse. She had moved to the area with her son in an attempt to clean up, but unfortunately, she never achieved full sobriety. She racked up several drug and prostitution-related arrests while living in the area, and she was last seen working Southwest Fourth Avenue in Fort Lauderdale on March 14, two days before she turned up dead, and just 5 days shy of her 41st birthday.

Two more sex workers are killed around the Thanksgiving holiday in November 1997. The first is 41-year-old Theresa Kettner, who turns up in a grassy area behind a Coral Springs Wal-Mart on Friday, November 21, 1997. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find many more details about her life or murder.

The second is Tammy Strunk, discovered in a Plantation shopping center trash bin by an employee about noon on Black Friday, the major shopping holiday the day after Thanksgiving, November 29, 1997. Strunk is clothed but barefoot, and investigators believe she was killed 12 to 24 hours prior to her discovery. She had been working as a waitress for four years but quit about a month prior to her murder. On November 11, she was arrested for using a stolen credit card to purchase items from a local Walgreen’s and return them for a cash refund. She was last seen at the Salvation Army earlier in the week that she died.

Three more unsolved area murders occurred in the months leading up to Fernandes’s known crimes, starting with Crystal Martin in Fort Lauderdale. The 38-year-old’s strangled body was discovered in her room at the Lonely Guest House motel on Tuesday, February 9, 1999, by her landlord. Then there’s 30-year-old Melissa Ljames, whose body turned up in a Lauderhill canal in June 2000, the same month Kimberly Dietz’s body was found in suitcase in Cooper City. There is extremely little detail on Ljames, as I could only find her mentioned in connection with the other unsolved murders.

About noon on Sunday, May 16, 1999, a store employee in Hollywood found Delia Mendez’s body in a parking lot dumpster off North Federal Highway. The 34-year-old left behind three children – two daughters and a son – who were living with her ex-husband at the time. Very different from the other victims, Mendez had been cut in half at the waist by what authorities believed could have been a “heavy, powerful piece of machinery.” Mendez was wearing a blood-drenched tube top, and her car was found parked a few blocks away from the dumpster where her body was found. She too had prior drug and prostitution-related arrests. Her boyfriend last saw her just before midnight the day before her dead body was discovered, but he isn’t a current suspect in her murder, nor is her ex-husband.

Shelia Griffin’s murder in January 1999 was originally believed to be connected to these unsolved homicides, as well as Fernandes’s first two known victims, Kimberly Dietz and Sia Demas. She was a former nursing student with a two-year-old daughter who was struggling with drug addiction and had turned to sex work to afford her habit. She was 45 years old when her raped and strangled body was discovered in a vacant lot on Northwest Second Street in Fort Lauderdale. Two years later, in 2001, DNA collected at Griffin’s crime scene would reveal her killer to be Joel Tiller, a 49-year-old serial rapist and murderer who had just been arrested during a burglary in Miami.

Tiller’s DNA also matched a 2001 unnamed Orlando victim’s rape kit. His criminal record stretches back to Atlanta, Georgia in 1968, where he murdered a woman at the age of 16. After his release, Tiller moved to San Diego, California, where he was imprisoned for a brief time after raping a woman in 1996. He moved to Fort Lauderdale in 1999 and wasted no time murdering Griffin in January of that same year. It’s possible that Tiller is responsible for one or more of the three unsolved murders between 1999 and 2000, but it’s important to note that he didn’t necessarily target sex workers the way that Roberto Wagner Fernandes did – Tiller’s known victims were aged 19 to 88 and were from varying socioeconomic classes and lifestyles.

In 1997, Kevin Johnson murdered at least two West Palm Beach area prostitutes and was convicted of the attempted first-degree murder of a third. Victims Debbie Montgomery, 37, and Latoia Williams, 21, were both connected to the other unsolved sex worker homicides before Johnson was arrested in the summer of 1998. Montgomery’s partially clothed body was found on Wednesday, January 29, 1997 in a grassy area between a wall and a vacant building on Tamarind Avenue. She had been raped and her neck was broken from strangling. Williams was discovered amongst strewn garbage behind a concrete barrier wall of the Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard overpass at Henrietta Street on Wednesday, May 28, 1997. She was three months pregnant at the time.

With the information we have available, I think it’s possible that Kevin Johnson was responsible for Sandra Walters’s unsolved murder in February 1997 as well. The most obvious connection is the location – Montgomery, Williams, and Walters are the only victims at the time found in West Palm Beach, which is markedly north of the other dump sites. West Palm Beach is still part of the greater Miami Metro Area, but it’s a little bit separated from Miami and Fort Lauderdale. For example, the radio and television stations in the area split the region into two markets: one is Miami-Fort Lauderdale, where Roberto Wagner Fernandes lived and worked, and where his known victims and the majority of the unsolved victims’ bodies were found, and the other is West Palm Beach, where Johnson committed his crimes.

Another thing that stands out to me that could connect Johnson to Walters is the fact that Montgomery and Williams were found on Wednesdays during the day, presumably after having been killed sometime the night before. Walters was discovered on a Tuesday night because it was a parking lot routinely checked by store employees. If her body had been concealed more or placed in a less-frequented area like Montgomery and Williams later were, Walters likely wouldn’t have been found until Wednesday daytime too.

I can’t find any information about Johnson’s routine, but it makes me wonder if he maybe worked a job that made him more available on Tuesday nights. Perhaps he lived with someone or was dating someone who was busy with someone on Tuesday nights, giving him more free time then. Fernandes’s known victims also turned up on weekdays – Sia Demas was even discovered on a Wednesday morning – so this could also be coincidence and opportunity rather than an actual clue.

While it’s possible that Johnson was responsible for more of the unsolved 1997 murders, he’s not implicated in any of the later ones because he was arrested in August 1998 and convicted of attempted first-degree murder. This arrest stems from an incident that took place on Friday, January 3, 1997, when he was smoking crack under a Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard overpass with 37-year-old Venecia Kinsey. I couldn’t determine if this is the exact same overpass where one of his murder victim’s bodies was discovered almost five months later, but it’s frightening to imagine that it could have been.

In this instance, Johnson began beating Kinsey, a known sex worker, because she refused to pay her share of the drugs they were using. She was left disfigured, blind in one eye, with brain damage, muscle damage, and slurred speech. It’s not abundantly clear why Johnson was arrested a year and a half after the incident, but during this investigation, someone the police only refer to as “a reluctant witness” informed them of Johnson’s involvement in Debbie Montgomery’s and Latoia Williams’s murders. To my knowledge, he was never forensically linked to those cases.

Currently, it’s only Roberto Wagner Fernandes – not Joel Tiller or Kevin Johnson – who authorities publicly link to the late 1990s unsolved homicides in the area, but they don’t list the specific cases to which they’re referring. They advise that if you do have any information about Fernandes and these unsolved crimes, you can contact Detective Zach Scott at the BSO directly, and anonymously, if you prefer, at 954-321-4214. You can also submit tips via Broward Crime Stoppers at 954-493-8477 or online at browardcrimestoppers.org. Please keep in mind that no piece of information is too small. We have no idea what information police already have and what clue, no matter how trivial it may seem to you, could break a case wide open.

Lingering considerations

As I was researching this case, I realized that a quick Google search of “body” or “murder” along with the towns where these women’s bodies were discovered turns up dozens of news articles of similar deaths before and since Roberto Wagner Fernandes prowled the area, even as recently as within the last few months. Researching “drugs” and “prostitution” in the same area reveals a long history of undercover busts without much evidence that these efforts are improving the situation. I recalled my Criminal Justice courses in college when we talked about the high recidivism rates for crimes like these and the United States system’s punitive versus rehabilitative approach. I don’t have all the answers, but I think this leads us to part of a greater conversation – certainly in the United States, but perhaps everywhere – about policing and public safety.

What I do know is that I think the violent crimes of sexual assault and murder are a much greater threat to our communities than drugs and sex work. It also seems clear to me that arresting drug addicts does little to eliminate the causes of drug addiction and drug availability from which these other crimes stem. I know that police departments have been called out for labelling the case files of crimes against sex workers, even murders, as NHI, or No Human Involved. And despite the regularity of these murders in the same area over several decades, officials continue to reassure the public that they’re not in any danger, which to me sounds like they’re saying, “you’re only in danger if you’re doing dangerous things.”

Many of these murder victims were arrested by undercover cops in the days or weeks preceding their deaths who were posing as drug dealers or “johns” looking to pay for sexual services, and it was never for the first time. How much of this police activity is really an attempt to clean up the streets versus making some easy arrests and maintaining a healthy informant pool? How often did these arrests keep these women from eventually securing better jobs or housing?

Before we criticize the police too harshly, let’s check our own bias. As you listened to the background of these victims and the nature of their deaths, what went through your mind? It’s natural to want to distance ourselves from these women to feel safer from crimes of this nature. “That could never be ME or someone I love.” But is that entirely true? Many of these women were described as loving and devoted mothers who made many attempts to overcome their addiction for the sake of their children. Many relocated, held down regular jobs, and went to college to better their circumstances. It’s hard to say exactly what triggered their addictions and relapses, but it’s clear that none of them wanted to be in the situations that ultimately led to their murders.

Let’s look at it another way. They were all aware of other women like them turning up dead in the area, and that still didn’t deter them from the sex work that supported their drug habits. The money they did make on the streets usually wasn’t enough to support their basic needs, but they still turned to it to support their drug habits above all else. This is not just a late 1990s problem, and it’s not just a Miami area problem – any area of the United States today with a major city or nearby major highways has a problem with drug and sex trafficking.

We can say that these women made some bad choices in their lives, but no one really chooses to live this way, and if you are fortunate enough to not have experienced drug addiction personally, either yourself or a loved one, I would be grateful and leave it at that. Let’s not condemn these women to the point that we lose empathy for them and blame them for their own murders. The killers themselves, like Roberto Wagner Fernandes, are the only ones responsible, and these women and their families deserve as much justice as any other victim.

The grandfather of Delia Mendez, one of the 1997 unsolved murder victims, shared with a local newspaper at the time, “I feel terrible. I taught that girl to walk. I feel like I’m dying inside from the pain.” Delia’s three children would be adults now, and if she had lived, Delia might even be a grandparent herself today. These women were loved, and they deserve to be remembered as the complex people they were in life, not like the discarded remains among trash they were treated as in their final moments.

We can’t forget Danyelle Boucas either, also murdered in the prime of her life through no fault of her own other than an unlucky choice in marriage. Her daughter with Roberto Wagner Fernandes, Mariella, is now 31, four years older than Danyelle was when Roberto killed her. In 1999, the Londrina City Council named a street in Danyelle’s honor in the Jardim Tropical Gardens district where she worked. The ceremony didn’t mention Roberto at all, focusing solely on Danyelle’s academic achievements and teaching services in the community.

Perhaps that is the best way for communities to heal from such tragedies – memorializing the victim’s lives and their families’ recovery efforts. Hopefully someday we can do that for Fernandes’s remaining victims and other less than perfect victims of violent crimes.

Resources:

• November 19, 1996: Teacher is killed at home, husband is suspect (Folha de Londrina)
• June 24, 2000: Victim was fighting addictions (Sun-Sentinel)
• August 9, 2000: Crime Scene Report (police file document)
• August 9, 2000: Incident Report (police file document)
• August 10, 2000: Body of second woman found stuffed in luggage (Tampa Bay Times)
• October 3, 2002: Narrative Continuation (police file document)
• December 7, 2011: Investigative Action Report (police file document)
• March 26, 2021: Investigative Action Report (police file document)
• April 9, 2021: The first victim: Serial killer’s wife was a teacher of letters, had fragile health, and became a street name in Londrina (O Globo)
• August 31, 2021: Cold cases closed: BSO, Miami Police Detectives link three homicides to suspected serial killer (Broward Sheriff’s Office)

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