Jerry Frank Townsend

The Crime

On Sept. 5, 1979, police in Miami, Florida arrested 27-year-old Jerry Frank Townsend for a sexual assault on the street near 7th Street and North Miami Avenue in a downtown skid row area known as “The Pits.”

At the time, Mr. Townsend listed his address as the Boatwright Hotel. He was intellectually disabled with the mental capacity of an eight-year-old. 

The Investigation

Two days later, police announced that Mr. Townsend was also charged with the rape and murders of five women — one in Miami and four in Fort Lauderdale near Dillard High School.

The police said Mr. Townsend had confessed and led them to the sites of the rape-murders. The police said Mr. Townsend confessed to the crimes as he was being questioned about the Sept. 2, 1979, rape and murder of 43-year-old Wanda Virga, whose body had been found in Miami not far from where Townsend had been arrested for the rape on Sept. 5.

During further questioning, the police said Mr. Townsend admitted to four other murders in Fort Lauderdale in the prior two months.

On July 9, the body of 23-year-old Earnestine German was found in a field a few blocks south of Dillard High School.

On July 27, the body of 13-year-old Sonja Marion was found in a football field scorer’s tower on the Dillard High School grounds. 

On Aug. 7, 21-year-old Terry Jean Cummings was found in an abandoned home near the high school.

On Aug. 24, the body of 24-year-old Cathy Moore was found on the shore of a small lake a few blocks from the high school.

The murders had prompted a wave of public outrage in the school’s neighborhood. On at least two occasions, two men suspected of being involved were attacked and beaten.

Days after Mr. Townsend confessed, the police discovered that his timecard for July 27, the day Ms. Marion was killed, showed that he punched into work at 8:09 a.m. at Hollywood Ford, where he worked as a car washer. Ms. Marion had been attacked and killed between 8:45 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. that day. Mr. Townsend didn’t own a car and got to work by bicycle. Police conceded that Mr. Townsend claimed he had killed her the night before her body was found. Ms. Marion’s mother said she spent the night at home and left for school about 7:30 a.m. on the morning she was killed.

By the end of September 1979, the police said Mr. Townsend had admitted to the murders of 13 women, two of them in Tampa and California when he was working for a traveling carnival in 1976 and 1977.

These included:

• On June 29, 1973, the body of Thelma Jean Bell was found in a field near the Madison Apartments west of Fort Lauderdale.
• On July 20, 1973, the body of 15-year-old Nahomie Gamble had been found northwest of Fort Lauderdale. 
• On Aug. 26, 1973, the body of 21-year-old Barbara Ann Brown, a friend of Ms. Gamble, was found in a hallway of the Madison Apartments. 
• On June 25, 1977, the body of 17-year-old Dorothy Gibson was found behind the Dolphin Hotel in Miami. 

Mr. Townsend was declared competent to stand trial, despite findings, following four months of psychiatric examinations, that his IQ was between 55 and 68, below the level considered for intellectual disability. 

Ultimately, Mr. Townsend went to trial in Broward County Circuit Court for the sexual assault and murders of Ms. Gibson, Ms. Brown, and Ms. Bell. The prosecution’s case relied primarily on Mr. Townsend’s confessions. The defense contended the confessions were false and were the product of Townsend’s desire to please authorities; to tell them what he thought they wanted to hear.

On July 30, 1980, Mr. Townsend was convicted of the murders of Ms. Gamble and Ms. Brown. The jury acquitted him of the murder of Ms. Bell. He was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years. 

In 1982, Mr. Townsend pled guilty to second-degree murder in the deaths of Ms. Gibson and Ms. Virag in Miami-Dade County. He also pled no contest to the murders of Ms. Moore and Ms. Cummings in Broward County. He was again sentenced to life in prison. At the same time, prosecutors dropped the murder charges in the death of Ms. German and  Ms. Marion. 

He also pled guilty to the rape for which he had been first arrested in September 1979.

The Exoneration

In 1998, Ms. Marion’s mother sought a review of the case involving her daughter. In 2000, prompted by a testing request from the Innocence Project, DNA testing of a semen sample on the child’s shorts excluded Mr. Townsend and implicated Eddie Lee Mosley.

The test results also cast substantial doubt on the accuracy of all of Mr. Townsend’s confessions

On April 27, 2001, Broward County Sheriff Ken Jenne said that DNA testing showed that Mr. Townsend was not involved in the deaths of Ms. Gamble or Mr. Cummings. The DNA results linked both crimes to Mr. Mosley. Sheriff Jenne stated that there was either insufficient or no genetic material to test in the cases of Ms. Bell, Ms. Brown, Ms. German, and Ms. Moore. 

On April 30, 2001, the convictions for the murders of Ms. Gamble and Ms. Cummings were vacated and dismissed. On May 15, 2001, Mr. Townsend’s convictions in the cases of Ms. Brown and Ms. Moore also were vacated and dismissed. 

After these exonerations, officials in Miami-Dade moved to undo Mr. Townsend’s convictions. Mr. Townsend’s convictions in the murders of Ms. Virga and Ms. Gibson and the sexual battery for which he was initially arrested were vacated on June 15, 2001. The next day, Mr. Townsend was released from prison. He was 49 years old and had been in prison for nearly 22 years.

A civil rights lawsuit later was filed on Mr. Townsend’s behalf and the city of Miami and Broward County settled for $4.2 million.