The Jacksonville Strangler was a serial killer terrorizing young
women in the early 2000s, and the scariest part was police had
no idea for years. He was killing right under their
noses and getting away with it every single time.
Outlaw. So today's video is going to be
another solved true crime case. Today we're going to be talking
about the Jacksonville Strangler.
Now before we get into it, I do just want to give my usual
disclaimer that I mean absolutely no disrespect to
anyone that I talk about in this video.
This video is for educational purposes and everything that I'm
about to say is just information that I have found on the
Internet and I'm compiling into one video.
Today's case takes place in Jacksonville, FL of course, and
that is where 19 year old Nokia Chanel Kilpatrick Live.
Nokia was a single mother to two children.
And like I said, she was really, really young.
She was 19, but she had her life together like she was like super
mum. She had her own place, like she
lived with her two kids. She did everything for them.
She was an amazing mother. But on January 1st, New Year's
Day of 2003, Nokia's family realized that they hadn't heard
from her in a while, which was really unlike her.
She was the kind to stay in touch with her family, even if
it was just like a call or a text every day she she was
usually in contact. And it was even weirder as soon
as it hit New Year's Day and none of her family got like a
happy New year text from her. This just wasn't like her at
all. So now they were worried.
This told them that something wasn't right with Nokia.
And so that night at 10:00 PM they drove to her house to go
and check on her. Her house from the outside
seemed eerily quiet. There were no lights on, didn't
seem to be any movement or anything.
It was just lifeless. Her parents went over to the
front door. They knocked, waited, and no one
came. And they couldn't hear any noise
inside either. So they're knocking again.
They're waiting, still nothing. They knock on the windows,
they're knocking on the door. They're making a bit of racket
outside. And it alerts Nickia's neighbor,
who comes out to go and speak to the parents.
This neighbor was more like a best friend to Nickia.
She was a young woman around her age.
They got on really well, saw each of the most days.
And so when she heard her parents making this commotion
outside, this neighbor runs out and goes, I haven't heard from
her in days either. I'm worried too.
So they're all stood talking outside, kind of like discussing
when they last saw her, when they last heard from her.
And all of a sudden, they hear a noise coming from the living
room. So they walk around to where the
living room window is and they see Nokia's oldest child, who is
still a toddler, banging on the window.
And he seems distressed. So they ran over to this window
and the blinds were actually pulled down, but there were a
few gaps between a couple of the blinds.
So this neighbor tries to like peer through the gaps and she
sees that the apartment is a total mess inside.
And this just confirmed their suspicions that something was
amiss here. Something wasn't right, that
Nokia wasn't answering the door. The child was in there and the
whole place was a mess. They knew that they needed to
get inside that apartment now. So they did the only thing that
they could think to do and just kick the door in.
They just booted the door in. And as soon as they did, this
foul smell came out of the house.
The elder of the two kids came running over to his grandparents
as soon as they kicked in the door.
And shortly after the 11 month old baby, the other kid comes
crawling out of a room, like on its own.
It's just crawling around the house on its own.
And they're shouting for Nokia, but she's she's nowhere.
She's not responding to them. These two kids are just running
around the house alone. So her parents are running
around the apartment, screaming her name, getting no response.
And then they get to the hallway, and there they found
exactly what they were fearing. That putrid smell in the
apartment was their daughter, Their daughter's dead
decomposing body laying in the hallway.
And what was even worse was that Nokia had been clearly violently
murdered. She still had a telephone cord
wrapped around her neck in a Slipknot.
Her ankles were bound. Her wrists were bound.
She had like, cuts and scrapes all over her.
It seemed she'd been involved in a struggle.
And, and she was six months pregnant at the time of her
murder. And sadly, the baby died along
with her. With the smell, it seemed that
Nokia had been dead for some time, at least a few days, and
her two children had been left locked in that house with their
mother's dead body. Nokia's parents just grabbed the
two kids, ran outside with them and called the police.
And so a murder investigation began.
When police arrived at the crime scene, one of the things that
they noticed in their initial searches was that the kitchen
was an absolute mess. And the whole apartment was,
like I said, but especially the kitchen, like, the kitchen was
next level. But it wasn't a mess in the way
that it had been, like, ransacked or anything like that.
It was literally just like, food on the floor, cereal boxes
knocked over, wrappers everywhere.
And it turns out that this was Nokia's children trying to feed
themselves, like scavenging for food in the kitchen because they
had been locked in that house alone with their mother's dead
body for a few days. They had been trying to feed
themselves. They'd been trying to survive.
It absolutely breaks my heart to think how scared and confused
those two children will have been, especially the older one
who kind of more so understood what was going on.
I don't know exactly how old he was, but he was a toddler.
He will have understood that his mother was laying lifeless on
the floor. It breaks my heart.
Police genuinely believed that had they not got to this house
when they did, had they not found those kids when they did,
there was a good chance that those kids could have starved to
death in the house, especially the baby.
Luckily they were found before it got to that stage and they're
both alive and well now. But back to the search of the
crime scene. So police found it quite odd
because they couldn't find any signs of forced entry on the
House. And also remember, the door was
locked. Her family had to literally boot
it in to be able to get in there.
So did this mean that Nokia knew her attacker and had let them in
voluntarily? Had they stolen her house key
and locked the door on the way out like this?
This whole situation wasn't making much sense.
But other than that, there was like no other evidence at the
crime scene at all. The killer hadn't left anything
behind, hadn't dropped anything. So Nokia Kilpatrick's body was
sent for an autopsy where it was found that she'd actually been
raped as part of her murder. Because of this, they were able
to collect a DNA sample, a semen sample from her attacker, which
of course is great news because now if they have suspects, they
can test this DNA against the suspect to be able to find a
match. But what would be even better
news would be if they could run this sample on the system and
immediately find a match. So they tried to do that, but
there was no match on the system.
It seemed that this was a first time offender, or at the at
least they hadn't been caught for any other crimes in the
past, otherwise they would have had their DNA taken.
So this was quite frustrating because had the killer committed
a crime before, in the past, they would have come straight up
and they would have had their suspect and been able to arrest
and charge them the same day. But they can't do that.
That being said, this DNA sample was going to prove useful
hopefully at some point in the investigation because when they
have suspects, they can test it. But since they can't go that
route just yet, police decided to start interviewing,
interviewing anyone and everyone that they could, Nokia's
friends, family, neighbors, to see if anyone had seen or heard
or knew anything about this. But like, no one did.
Absolutely no one, no one could give police any information.
It felt like within the first day of this investigation,
police had already reached a stand still.
They had no leads and they had no way of getting any leads
either. They just didn't know what to
do. But then about a week into the
investigation, police were shocked to be presented with
another murder case almost identical to Nokia's.
Another young woman had been found strangled to death in her
own apartment, the cord still tied around her neck when her
body was found. The way that this second victim
was found, she was actually found by her own boyfriend.
His name was Rasheed. He'd been out that day.
And then he came back home, I think it was about midnight, and
he realized that he didn't have a key on him.
The door was locked. His girlfriend had locked it
from the inside. And so he had no way of getting
in his own house. So he's, like, banging on the
door, trying to wake her up, but she's not coming to answer the
door. And so he thinks, well, what
else can I do? He decides to take one of the
windows, like, out of the frame, essentially, like, break into
his own house. And when he did, he found his
girlfriend inside, dead, murdered, with the cord still
wrapped around her neck, wrist tied, ankles tied, naked from
the waist down. This second victim's name was
Shawanda Denise McAllister. She was 20 years old, so just
one year older than Nokia. In fact, these two victims have
pretty much the exact same victim profile.
They were both young black women in Jacksonville with very
similar lifestyles. Actually, they only lived about
a mile away from each other, so really, really close
geographically. I don't know too much about the
second victim, Shawanda, but I do know that she was a medical
student and also a nursing assistant.
She was doing both at once. She was super, super
intelligent, super, super dedicated and she dreamed of
like making her way up in the medical industry career.
But sadly, that's all I really know about Shawanda.
So police start searching the crime scene and very quickly
they find a used condom laying just a few feet away from
Shawanda's body. So presumably this was what her
attacker used. And the only other clue that
they found in the whole house there was there was like nothing
else other than these two things.
And the second thing was an ATM receipt showing that Shawanda
had gone to an ATM and got some cash out, about $200 at 8:30 PM
that night, on the night of her murder.
That was the only evidence that they could get from this house.
And so Shawanda's body was sent off for an autopsy.
And the results again were almost identical to Nokia's.
She'd been bound. She'd been strangled to death
with a cord. She'd been raped before she was
killed. And what's even more
heartbreaking, Shawanda was also pregnant at the time of her
murder. And just like Nokia's baby,
Shawanda's also died along with her.
So now police are thinking, well, does this mean something
that both of these victims were pregnant?
Was was that something to do with why they were specifically
targeted? But the biggest thing that told
police that these two murders were linked, other than the fact
that they were pretty much the same victim profile, feel pretty
much the same MO. There was one very, very
intricate detail about both of these cases that was the exact
same. And that was the Slipknot on the
cord that was used to strangle these women.
It was a very specific type of Slipknot that's not very
commonly used. So these two cases are
practically identical. Police have connected them and
they think that they are looking for a double murderer.
Now, they managed to take adna swab from Shawanda's body and
they sent it for DNA testing. And again, no match came up on
the system, but you know what did a match to the sample found
in the Kia's body? So we know that it was the same
man that raped both of these women.
We don't know who that man was, not right now, but we know that
it was the same person. But this was a really scary
conclusion for police to come to because if they were looking for
a double murderer, what's to stop him becoming a triple
murderer, a serial killer? Police feared that this killer
was going to strike again if they didn't find him quick
enough, and so they threw everything they had at this
case. Looking at Shawanda's murder
specifically, there was one obvious suspect in her case,
Rasheed, her boyfriend, that had had admitted to breaking in
their house and being the one to find Shawanda's dead body.
Police thought that maybe he somehow also knew Nokia.
Maybe he was cheating on Shawanda with Nokia and that's
why he had had sex with both of them because there's no way to
prove that the main DNA that was found inside these women was
from rape. It could have been from
consensual sex. Both of these women could have
had consensual sex with the same man, but then been murdered.
You know, it doesn't necessarily mean that the rape was connected
to the murder, which is very uncommon.
Like 99% of the time. If they find semen DNA inside a
female murder victim, that probably means that she was
raped as part of the attack. And that is what they assumed.
And, you know, Rashid was 20 years old, just one year older
than Nokia, and they lived about a mile apart from each other.
So it's quite likely that they could have known each other.
They could have gone to the same school.
I don't know. Chances are they might have
crossed paths. So this seemed like quite a
believable theory, to be honest. So police start questioning
Rasheed, and he had one hell of a story to tell.
As for the events leading up to Shawanda's murder.
So Rasheed said that he had been out and about that day.
And then he came back home to the apartment.
And as he was approaching the door, he could hear music
blasting, like, blasting from inside their apartment, which
was kind of unusual. Shawanda never really did this.
And so as Rashid's, like, making his way to the apartment, he's
hearing this music. He also hears a man's voice
coming from inside the apartment.
So he knocks on the door. He didn't have his key to unlock
the door. What does this man even have a
key? He never seems to have his key
on it. So Shawanda comes and opens the
door, but she only opens it like this much.
She opens it a jar. It's kind of like she doesn't.
She doesn't want to let her own boyfriend into the apartment for
some reason. So she opens a little bit and
immediately Rashid starts shouting.
He's like, what's going on? Who's in there?
I can hear a man in there, what's going on?
And Shawanda says to him, she's going, it's nothing, don't
worry, like just just leave and I'll explain everything later.
Just go, just go. She's really trying to get rid
of Rashid. She really doesn't want him in
the house. But he's saying like, no, I've
got work, I need my uniform, my uniform's in the house.
And so Shawanda goes, OK, I'll go get it for you and I'll leave
it outside the door. So she closes the door and locks
it again so Rashid can't get in his own apartment.
Next thing he knows, she's dumped his clothes outside and
locked the door again, gone back in the apartment where the music
is blaring and where this mystery man is.
So Rasheed is, is heartbroken. He's so confused, but he's he's
heartbroken. He thinks he's just come home to
find his girlfriend cheating on him.
And so he's like shouting through the door to Shawanda
saying, like, how could you do this to me?
You're pregnant with my baby. Like we were a family.
How could you do this? In the end, Rasheed just went
off to work. I mean, he was going to miss his
shift if he didn't. And it was clear that Shawanda
wasn't going to let him in. And so he just start to go to
work with the knowledge that his girlfriend is cheating on him.
And he had no idea who with either.
He had no idea who this guy was because he never saw him because
Shwanda didn't really open the door.
All he heard was his voice. And Rashid told police it
sounded like an older black man. But that's all he could give.
Obviously that's all he could get from a voice.
So police are listening to Rashid's story thinking, oh, how
convenient. The day that Shwanda is found
murdered, she is in the company of another man.
I don't know if Rashid has just found his girlfriend cheating
and she's found murdered the same day and somehow it's
another man's fault. You know, it just seemed all too
convenient. It seemed like a potential cover
up. And so police asked Rashid if he
would take a polygraph test. He agreed and he passed.
It seemed that he was telling the truth, if you believe
polygraph tests, which I mean, we don't often, but he passed.
And obviously because polygraph tests are polygraph tests and
they're not always correct, Police decided to test Rasheedh
DNA against the DNA found at both crime scenes.
They were sent off for testing and the results came back.
And it wasn't a match. Rasheed wasn't the killer.
So now police are back to square one with no suspects.
They need to try and find a suspect or at least a lead or
something. And so they decide to go in,
question the whole neighborhood where Shawanda lived.
A few neighbors told police that they'd spotted Shawanda getting
in and out of taxis that day. Shawanda didn't drive, so this
was like her main mode of transport.
Every time she left the house, she'd just, like, call a taxi to
take her wherever she needed to go.
So this was quite a common occurrence.
Neighbors would see her doing this quite often.
But then one of the neighbors told police that they'd seen a
man coming out of Shawanda's apartment and getting into a
taxi. And this was at about 11:00 PM.
And the neighbor said that at the time, they just assumed it
was Rasheed, her boyfriend because, well, obviously.
But now that we know Rasheed wasn't there, and 11:00 PM would
have been around the time that Shawanda was killed, it seemed
that this witness had seen her killer leaving the crime scene.
So if it wasn't Rasheed, then who was it?
Right now, police had a double murderer on the loose.
Well, actually, what if it was more than just a double
murderer? What if Nokia and Shawanda
weren't this killer's only two victims?
What if there were other victims out there, other bodies yet to
be discovered? What if this was already a
serial killer that they had on their hands?
They didn't know right now. So this LED police to pull up a
bunch of old unsolved disappearances, unsolved murders
of young women kind of around the same age and description of
these two girls to see if any of them had any similarities to
Nokia and Shwanda's murders. Police very quickly came across
an unsolved murder case of an 18 year old girl named Nicole
Williams, and this immediately piqued their interest.
She'd only been found dead less than two weeks before Nokia had,
so the timeline is making sense. The way that Nicole was found,
her body was wrapped up in a blue blanket and just ditched on
the side of the road somewhere. And this blue blanket that was
wrapped around her, it seemed to be, well, well, you know, those
blankets that like hotels put on the bottom of the bed, They're
not really supposed to be like comfy blankets that you use.
It's just kind of like a aesthetic blanket.
It was one of those. So this led to police theorizing
that maybe Nicole Williams had been murdered inside of a hotel
or a motel and then her body wrapped up in this blanket and
disposed of. But there was one thing that
helped police link Nicole's murder to the other two DNA.
Nicole had also been raped by her attacker and when they
tested the sample on the system, there was no match.
When they tested it against the crime scene samples, it was a
match. So this confirmed to police that
they were looking for a serial killer.
Nicole Williams was one of his victims.
They had at least three victims. God knows how many more they
were going to be. Well, actually if we count
Nokia's and Shawanda's unborn children in the death toll,
because both women were planning on having these children, they
were going to have them full term give birth to these babies.
They were supposed to live. So taking that into account,
that makes this serial killer's death toll 5 if you want to see
it that way. And this was in the space of
just over a month. Three women killed, 5 lives lost
in just over a month, all at the hands of this mystery man.
And it wouldn't be long until police were presented with
another victim. On February 5th, 2003, police
received a call from some construction workers.
They'd arrived at the site that morning and they could hear some
dogs barking in the distance. And they really didn't think
twice about it. But as they're working through
the day, these dogs are not shutting up.
And they're starting to think, well, what?
What are they barking at? What's going on?
And so one of the workers decides to go and investigate.
He follows the barking until he finds the dogs.
They were all crowded round something on the floor, just
barking at it. And when this construction
worker arrived, it kind of disturbed the dogs.
They ran away and and he saw that they'd been crowded around
a dead body, so he called the police.
They arrived as quickly as they can and they start searching the
area for clues, but what they didn't expect to find was a
second body. The second victim was found
literally within a few feet of the 1st and it was a very
similar victim profile. Both of these victims were young
black women and both of them were found in very similar
circumstances. They'd both been strangled to
death. They'd both been raped, it
seemed. That both of their hands and
feet had been tied at points and immediately just looking at
these two girls on the ground, police knew that their serial
killer had struck again. These two victims were 17 year
old Jovanna Tyreeka Jefferson and 18 year old Sarita and
Cohen. Taking the death toll now from
3:00 to 5:00 or from 5:00 to 7:00 if you're including the
unborn children. Following the discovery of these
latest 2 victims, police decided to issue a warning to to
everyone, to young women, but most specifically to young black
women. Basically telling them look
we've got a serial killer and you are the exact victim type so
please don't go anywhere alone, don't go out at night until we
have caught who was doing this. As police started digging into
these two cases, they found that the younger of the two,
Giovanna, had actually been missing for quite some time,
like over 2 weeks. And they think, chances are she
had been said the whole time. They think that she was murdered
the night that she went missing on January 20th.
And then she was eventually found early February, February
5th. The last time that Giovanna was
seen alive was on January 20th. She went to a party, she had a
great time, all her friends were there.
And then she called a taxi to go home.
And the last time she was seen was getting in that taxi.
She never arrived home that night.
So something happened to her on the way home.
Of course, her family were at home waiting for her to come
back that night. And when she wasn't coming home,
her aunt got really worried and she called her phone.
But when it picked up, it wasn't Giovanna on the other end.
It was an older man. This older man just said that
Giovanna would be home soon. And so her aunt was saying,
well, who are you? And the only name that this man
gave was D, and then he put the phone down.
Her family then didn't hear anything else until now until
February 5th, when Giovanna's body was found.
And like I said, police believed that she was killed on the night
of the party and that her body had just laid decomposing in
this construction site for weeks.
It's believed that the second victim, Sarita, was killed about
10 days after Giovanna. The two actual attacks were
separate, but they think that the killer decided to dispose of
their bodies in the same place because, well, Jovanas hadn't
been found yet. It seemed like this was quite a
good place to dispose of a body where no one's going to find it.
So now police are looking at all these different cases and
they're looking for different similarities.
And they notice one common theme.
There's more often than not a taxi involved somehow in these
stories. So they went to a few of the
witnesses that saw these girls, either like getting in and out
of taxis, and they asked if they knew what taxi company it was.
And every single witness give the same taxi company, Gator
City Taxi. So police went down to the taxi
rank to try and gather some information about it.
They get talking to the staff and they realized that it's it's
quite a small taxi company. There's the same few guys
working pretty much every night. But they did discover that one
of the drivers was very new to the job.
In fact, his first day working was actually the same day that
Shawanda was murdered. Interesting.
The nearest taxi driver at the company was 32 year old Paul
Derusa, which immediately as soon as police heard that name
Derusa D, you know the person on the phone have been Paul Derusa.
So police start looking into this man and his history because
he is now a potential suspect. So he was originally born in
Texas on August 11th, 1970. He was raised by a single mother
because his father left pretty much as soon as he was born.
And from that point on he was never in Paul's life, not even
like financial support like that man was as good as dead to Paul.
After the split, Paul and his mother moved to LA, so he never
really grew up in Texas at all. Well, he never really grew up
grew up in LA either because him and his mum just moved all over
California. He was never in the same place
for well longer than a year, and this meant that Paul didn't have
much stability in his childhood. Like at all.
He was never at the same school for too long, never had a
hometown really, he never had a consistent group of friends.
Everything was just always getting shuffled and rearranged
in his life. The only thing that was ever
consistent was his mother, which would be fine, but because she
was a single mother, she used to work like insane hours to be
able to provide for the family. And so his mother wasn't around
and all that much and he didn't have anything else really.
Which meant that Paul Derusa had a quite lonely and isolated
childhood. When he grew up, he got his
first job age 18 as a security guard.
And he was quite well suited to this job because he was a really
blooming massive guy. Well, he was tall.
He was 6 foot 6. In his later life, he got quite
skinny, but when he was younger, when he was like 18, he was
going to the gym quite a bit. And so he was quite muscular.
He wasn't like a massive guy, but like quite scary.
You know, if, if your security guard is 6 foot 6 and relatively
muscly, I'm I'm scared I'm running away.
Paul kind of liked this job, but it wasn't that exciting for him.
His whole life wasn't exciting for him.
He didn't really have friends, he didn't have a girlfriend.
And so to entertain himself, Paul de Russo starts committing
crimes. He starts carrying around guns
everywhere he goes. And he got caught for this
because he weren't very discreet about it.
Not that I think you should carry guns anywhere, but he
wouldn't carry it in his hand. Police actually let him off with
a warning for this. I think they could have
confiscated the gun as well. But he didn't get any time or
anything, or even any charges, I don't think.
And then less than a month later, he was arrested for the
exact same thing, for concealment of a firearm.
Again, he was let off with a warning.
I don't know why they're not actually like doing all about
this guy, but he was let off with a warning again.
And I think these two cases kind of shook him up a bit, like kind
of scared him a little bit. And he decided to get his life
in order. He decided he was going to join
the army. This was supposed to be like a
fresh start for him. He was going to move away with
the army. He was going to have a second
chance at life to be like a good, good citizen.
Uh, yeah. So he goes off to Germany.
He's stationed in Germany, and everything's going really well.
He's actually really enjoying the Army.
And while he was there, he met a lady, this woman was named in a
Tucker span. And the two of them got on
really, really well, like a house on fire.
And within a couple of years, they were married.
Once the two of them got married, the Army people allowed
them to move to a bit more of a stable base.
They moved to Georgia together. They were given a house on the
base, and there they started a family together.
They had two daughters and everything was great.
Everyone was really, really happy.
This was exactly what they wanted.
Paul and his wife were in love like nothing was wrong at all.
Paul decided to make it wrong. He was getting bored, and so he
did the only thing that he could think to do when this man was
bored, commit some crimes. Only this time it was a million
times worse than what he'd previously been doing before.
It was just like guns. And I think it was just, it's
more like the rebellion factor for him before, whereas now he
was actually like sinister and like a cold blooded criminal.
In 1997, Paul Derusso committed his first violent crime.
As far as we're aware, this is the first one we know of when he
kidnapped and raped a young girl.
But Paul was actually never found guilty of this attack
because police just couldn't find enough evidence to actually
send it to trial. They were very, very sure that
he had had committed this crime, like there was no doubt in their
minds, but they just couldn't find the physical evidence.
So he was never actually charged with this.
It was never put on his record. But following the suspicion and
the accusations and, you know, the whole, the whole thing, he
was dishonorably discharged from the army.
So now he's unemployed. He's just spending all his days
at home doing nothing. He's bored.
You can see where this is going. Paul starts committing crimes
left, right and center, robbery, theft, burglary, sexual battery.
He's like talking to underage girls, like anything and
everything horrid that he could be doing, he's doing.
And every single time, every single one of these crimes that
he would commit, he would get away with.
Like sometimes he would be caught by police, sometimes he
wouldn't. And in the times when he would
get caught by police, somehow the charges would be dropped or
they just wouldn't find evidence against him.
Like, crime followed him everywhere he went, but he was
never held accountable for any of it.
And because he was getting away with so much, his confidence was
growing, He was becoming arrogant.
He was committing worse and worse crimes.
And all of this was putting a huge, huge strain on his family
life because his wife obviously wanted to raise their two
daughters in a stable, happy, nice, safe environment.
And their father is making it the complete opposite.
There's police at that house like every other day.
Their dad's getting arrested. This is no environment for two
kids to be raised in. And so, in an attempt to
stabilize their lives a bit more, Paul's wife suggested that
they may be moved back to her hometown in Jacksonville, FL.
They can live near her parents. They can have a fresh start.
It was supposed to be like a second chance for their
marriage, the family for everything, so Paul agreed.
The family upped and moved to Jacksonville, but nothing
changed. Paul was the exact same horrible
man, just in a different location.
Now he was still committing all these crimes and now he was
disrespecting his wife, abusing his wife verbally, emotionally.
He would shout at her, scream at her, and occasionally he would
get violent. He was also very, very
unfaithful. Like Paul Derusso had multiple
affairs. He would go out to bars and
cheat on his wife and and flirt with other women and everything.
And I think she knew. I think she knew that he was
doing this, but she was so determined to make their their
like family and home environment a happy and safe one for those
kids that she was kind of willing to stick by Paul Derusa
no matter how horrid he was. And he was only getting more and
more horrid by the month. Like he was doing worse and
worse things throughout this marriage.
In the beginning, as far as I could tell in my research, he
was genuinely a nice guy, or at least he was putting on this
facade for her. Like it wasn't like this in the
beginning. It just gradually got worse and
worse and worse and she was putting up with more and more
and more as time was going on because she didn't want to leave
him and for the kids to have no dad.
So yeah, he is cheating on his wife with loads of different
women, flirting with loads of different women.
Some of them, some of them were girls, some of them weren't
women. Some of them were girls as young
as 13 and 14. This man had two daughters of
his own. And he is approaching 13 year
old girls in a sexual manner, that is, that is sick.
And he wasn't doing it very discreetly either, or
secretively. Paul de Russo was making a
reputation for himself in the area as a paedophile, as a
creep, as a predator. And because of that, people
wanted less and less to do with him.
People were avoiding him, people didn't want to be mates with
him. And once again, Paul de Russo
found himself quite isolated from society, just like he was
when he was a kid. And with this increased
isolation from society, Paul starts taking out his
frustrations more and more on his wife.
The violence that she was experiencing at this point in
the case, I think it was like slapping her during an argument
or like pushing her away and stuff like that.
And over time, it was getting worse and worse until one day he
grabbed her by the throat and choked her against a wall.
This was the worst it had gotten so far, and she feared that it
would only get worse from this point if she didn't report this.
And so in 2000, his wife got, she filed a court order against
him. And I think the involvement of
the court and the legal system really scared Paul.
Like up until now, he'd gotten away with everything.
He'd been able to abuse his wife however much he wanted.
But now she was actually like fighting back kind of.
So it scared him. It scared him into behaving
better and treating her better for a short while.
But over time, this started to drop and he became abusive
again. Not even a full year after the
court order was filed, Paul once again choked his wife, this time
with both hands up against the wall until she almost passed
out. And this was in front of their
two kids. The whole time that he had her
up against the wall, he was telling her he was going to kill
her. He was screaming at her.
The kids were hearing all of this.
They were screaming, they were crying.
And so again, following this incident, she files another
court order against him. I don't know why it wasn't more
than just a court order against this man that literally just
threatened to kill her, but she goes to file another court order
against him. But it turns out she wouldn't
actually need one because Paul Derusso was about to get locked
up for the first time in his life about a month or two after
he assaulted his wife again. Paul Derusso was charged with
raping a young woman and for this he was sentenced to one
month in prison. One month, one month for rape.
This man is a seasoned criminal that is committing crimes, and
every month yet he is given one month in prison for raping a
woman. So yeah, he's gone for 30 days.
And then when he returns, he moves back into the home with
his wife and two children, and they decide that they're going
to give it a fresh start for, what, the 100th time?
This just keeps happening and this man never changes.
But again they give it a fresh start.
Please by the way, never give anyone this many chances.
It's extremely unlikely that someone at this level of abuse
will ever change. Just just get out as soon as you
can. You can't change anyone like
this. But anyway, he is back and it
didn't take long for him to get abusive again.
This time his wife decided to go just straight to the police.
Skip the court order, straight to the police.
And she told them everything this man had ever done to her,
all the times he'd abused her. And he was charged with domestic
violence. He was sent back to prison for a
whopping 48 days, 48 days for abusing his wife like this, for
for choking her until she nearly passed out, for threatening to
kill her, for doing it all in front of the kids. 48 days in
prison. And again, when he came out of
prison, he moved right back in with his wife and kids.
And this actually brings us up to date in the timeline of the
case because now it is January of 2003.
Paul Derusso has just got a job at Gator City Taxi Company.
And this job really enabled his infidelity against his wife
because he was picking up new women every single day.
Every single time they would get in his car, he would try and
flirt with them. Sometimes it would work because
these women said that Paul Derusso was really quite
charming. He knew how to like, he just
knew all the right things to say and so it would work.
He started affairs and relationships and went on dates
with so many other women and eventually his wife found out.
When she found out just how much Paul Derusso was cheating on
her, she took the kids and left. So now Paul is all alone and
able to meet more women, I guess.
So, yeah. Back to the timeline of the
investigation. Police have gone down to the
taxi rank to get some more information, and they find that
it was Paul Derusso that picked up both Jovanna Jefferson and
Sarita Cohen on the nights that they both disappeared.
So immediately they go and track down Paul Derusso and arrest
him. They bring him into the police
station for questioning. But he he was cool as a
cucumber. He showed no emotion.
He was just no commenting his way through the whole interview.
But police were kind of like worried now because if he wasn't
talking, how were they going to get any evidence against him?
Like, they really hoped that they would be able to, I don't
know, use his own words against him somehow.
But he's not using them. He's not using words.
So they were going to have to find some other methods to get
evidence against Paul de Russo. I mean, they knew that they had
the DNA sample and that would be a slam dunk piece of evidence if
they sent his DNA off to test against the DNA from the crime
scenes. And it was a match perfect that
that would be the best kind of evidence they could get in this
case. But this was 2003.
And the, the DNA test lab thing, the whole process took forever,
like ages, way longer than it takes now.
It would have taken months. I want to say back then, I don't
know. I wasn't a scientist in 2003,
unfortunately, but it was going to take a long, long time.
And so in the meantime, police had to find some other pieces of
evidence, but they were hoping that that DNA was going to be a
match. But, you know, they needed other
evidence as well. So one of the things police did
was check both Giovanna and Sarita's phone records from the
Knights of their disappearances and compare them with Paul de
Russo's phone records, you know, where they can see, like the
location that the phone was at. And it turns out both women were
in the exact same location as Paul de Russo on the nights that
they were both murdered, respectively.
That can't be a coincidence that he happens to be around when
both of these women were killed. Oh, and another piece of
evidence. Remember how I said right in the
beginning of this investigation that the slipknots used to tie
the cords around these women's necks?
The Slipknot was a very specific kind of Slipknot.
Quite uncommon. Well, it turns out that that
specific kind of Slipknot is one that they teach you to do in the
army. And who was in the army?
Paul de Russo. They also searched Paul's car
and in the boot of his car they found a load of tiny blue
fibres, fibers that matched the blanket that Nicole Williams was
wrapped up in when her body was disposed on the side of the
road. So evidence is quickly
connecting this man to pretty much all of the murders.
They found evidence to connect him to Shawanda Mcallister's
murder as well. Remember when they searched her
house and they found that ATM receipt that showed that she'd
gone to an ATM, got some cash out about 8:30 that night.
So police went down to that ATM and they checked the security
footage on the cameras around there.
And sure enough, at 8:30 PM, Shawanda pulls up to the ATM in
a Gator City taxi, gets out, gets the cash out, and then hops
back in the taxi and it drives away.
And finally, after they'd collected all of that evidence,
the lab test results came back and the DNA was a match.
Paul Derusso. DNA was found at, I think every
single one of these crime scenes with every single victim.
This confirmed he was their serial killer.
So in June of 2003, Paul de Russo was charged with five
counts of murder and two counts of child abuse for leaving
Nokia's children locked inside the house with her dead body.
I have read some reports that say, fortunately these two
children, now that they're all grown up, they don't remember
anything of that night, which is a silver lining I guess.
They were way too young to know what was going on.
Neither of them remember being left in the house.
Neither of them remember seeing their mother being killed,
seeing her dead. So, so they had their killer.
But that doesn't mean it's the end of the investigation.
Because like I said, yes, he's currently a serial killer, but
how do they know they've found all his victims?
There could be other victims out there that they're yet to find.
And their suspicions were correct because as they dug
further and further, they found more and more murders that this
man was responsible for, one of which he committed actually
while he was stationed over in Georgia with the Army when he
had just married. His wife, they just had two
beautiful baby girls and he's going out murdering people and
his wife has no idea. This victim was 26 year old
Tracy Habersham. She was last seen leaving a
party in 1997 and her dead naked body was found two days later.
She'd been raped, bound and strangled to death, all the same
hallmarks of a Paul de Russo murder.
DNA was retrieved from her body at the time it was tested on the
system and there was no match. But now that they had Paul de
Russo, they tested it against his DNA and it was a match.
So that is how they caught him for that one.
But that's not all because there was a 6th murder as well.
Two years later in 199924 year old mother of three Teresa Mack
was found murdered in her own apartment again.
She'd been raped, strangled to death.
The phone cord that was used to strangle her was still found
around her neck when her body was found.
She even had marks on her wrists, like time marks on her
wrists where it seemed that the phone cord had been tied around
her wrists and then moved to her neck.
She had marks all over her body. The the bedroom that she was
found in was completely trashed. Like it seemed like this had
been a violent struggle. She had really fought for her
life. One of the worst like injuries
she had was an abrasion to her nose that had pretty much taken
all the skin off. And Paul had actually robbed
this woman as part of the attack.
He hadn't done this. I as far as I'm aware with any
of the others, but this time he stole Tyrese's ring and the TV
from her living room. And actually at the time
neighbors had seen him carrying the TV out and into a taxi and
leaving but they I don't think anyone really thought anything
of it at the time. And again, he was caught for
this murder in the exact same way that he was caught for the
last. The DNA evidence just came back
to bite him. So now Paul de Russo is
officially linked to 7 murders, 9 if you want to include the two
unborn children. He was an incredibly dangerous
and cold blooded man and for that reason the prosecution was
seeking the death penalty. Now for some reason, and this is
a part that I don't really understand, I'm going to be
honest, I'm going to be vulnerable with you guys.
I don't get it. He was only tried for one murder
and that was the murder of Tyrese and Mack.
Now, I thought that the evidence that they had for a lot of these
murders was pretty damn concrete, like the DNA evidence
and the fibers and all that. But for some reason it wasn't.
Police were told that they were not allowed to take this man to
trial for all these murders. The only one that they could was
Theresa Mack. No idea, no idea why and I'm
really sorry. I think one of the reasons was
that the, the biggest piece of like evidence that police had
against this man was the DNA, the semen DNA.
And like I said earlier on in the video, his defence team
could just argue that he had consensual sex with all of these
women. We know that that's very, very,
very unlikely. But they would be able to argue
that, you know, with like, reasonable doubt or whatever.
So I think that had a part in why he wasn't actually put on
trial for the rest of the murders.
He was only put on trial for this one murder.
But obviously, they used all the other ones kind of as backup
evidence to say that they thought that this man was
responsible for Teresa Mack's murder.
So the jury and the whole court did still hear about all these
other murders, don't worry. But by the end of the trial,
Paul Derusso was found guilty for that one murder.
He was found guilty and he was to be sentenced to death by
lethal injection, something that it never actually ended up
happening. In 2007, his death sentence was
actually overturned. His sentence was changed to just
life in prison. And that's where he is right
now. He is age 52 and he's going to
be there for the rest of his life.
In the aftermath of this case, a few of the victims families
actually filed lawsuits against Gator City Taxis for not
carrying out a good enough background check on Paul
Derusso. I don't know how that lawsuit
went, but I do know that Gator City Taxi Company shut down like
immediately after this case. It doesn't exist anymore and
hasn't for a long, long time. And something I wanted to
mention at the very end of this case, it's kind of like a
conspiracy theory, which is why I just wanted to like, shove it
in at the end, but that's that. Paul de Russo is actually
suspected of a bunch of other murders over in Germany.
Remember, he was stationed over in Germany right when he first
joined the Army. Well, around that same time,
there was a string of unsolved murders of young women being
strangled and raped. Same victim profile, same method
of killing. It was the exact time that he
was in Germany. And when he left Germany, guess
what? The murders stopped.
No evidence has ever been found to tie Paul Derusa to these
murders, which is why I say it's like a conspiracy theory.
But it is something that people mention quite a bit because it
hasn't really properly been looked into by police.
And a lot of people think that if it was, they would find
evidence. But as As for right now, there's
no evidence. That is just a theory.
And that is all I have on this case.
Thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate you coming
along. OK, bye.
I'll see you in the next one. Bye.