3 SERIAL KILLINGS TIED TO DEAD MAN
Brazilian connected through DNA 16 years after his death
Sixteen years after he died in a plane crash, a man from Brazil was identified Tuesday as a serial killer who took the lives of three women on the streets of South Florida, stuffing two of them into luggage and discarding them on the roadside like trash.
The murders went unsolved for two decades, but investigators dug up the body of Roberto Wagner Fernandes in Brazil in October 2020 and matched his DNA to the Broward County slayings.
Law enforcement officials on Tuesday said Fernandes beat to death two Broward County woman. Another woman who worked the streets as a prostitute along Biscayne Boulevard in Miami was stabbed repeatedly and discarded in the bay.
Detectives believe there may be more victims.
“Personally, someone who has this type of violence toward their victims and disregard for life, I find it hard to believe that they limited themselves to three victims,” said Zach Scott, a detective with the Sheriff ’s Office. The investigation continues, Scott said.
The Broward victims suffered from substance abuse and sometimes resorted to prostitution, and that could be how they met Fernandes, officials said.
The first to die: Kimberly Dietz-Livesey, 35, of Fort Lauderdale. Her beaten body was shoved into a suitcase in the summer of 2000 and left along the road in Cooper City.
Weeks later, in August 2000, authorities say Fernandes killed Sia Demas. The 21-year-old Wilton Manors woman was beaten and stuffed into a duffle bag that was left just blocks from the Broward Medical Examiner’s Office in Dania Beach.
Jessica Good, a 24-year-old resident of Pombano Beach, followed in late August 2001 in Miami.
Fernandes, a Miami resident at the
time, then fled back to his native Brazil the next month.
Fingerprints from the evidence collected at two crime scenes in Broward were a match, but the identity of the killer remained a mystery, the Sheriff ’s Office said Tuesday.
The three cases shared similar patterns, but police could not link the Broward and Miami cases for another decade, when DNA evidence collected from all three crimes pointed to Fernandez.
A DNA lead
Fernandes first came onto the police radar because Good called her boyfriend before heading out from home. She told the boyfriend the man was a light-skinned Hispanic driving a work van. She also gave the boyfriend the number of the van, police said.
Police called the company and was told Fernandes was the only employee associated with the van, which was found outside his home. A search of the home and van turned up DNA that matched traces found under Good’s fingernails, suggesting she had fought off her attacker.
By then, Fernandes was gone. He had fled home to Brazil, a country with no extradition treaty. But all was not safe for him there.
Fernandes became a suspect in a sexual assault, and he also learned that possible assassins were looking to avenge his wife’s death from 1996, before he came to South Florida, the Sheriff ’s Office said. He had been acquitted in his wife’s death after claiming self-defense.
A licensed pilot, Fernandes tried to run again, only to crash his plane while fleeing Brazil for Paraguay. He died at age 40.
Investigators in South Florida had no idea. They arrived in Brazil to take DNA evidence from him in connection with the murders here. Working closely with the Brazilian National Police, the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI, they continued their investigation.
Those efforts involved exhuming Fernandes’ body to determine whether he was a match to the evidence collected from the murders. At the very least, the victims’ families deserved those answers, the Sheriff ’s Office said.
In October 2020, Fernandes’ grave was opened and his remains were found inside. Most importantly for the victims’ families, his DNA profile was consistent with the profile collected from the crime scenes of Dietz-Livesey, Demas and
The toll of addiction
“We were fortunate that both our government here and the partnership we had with Brazil afforded these men and women an opportunity to further investigate and get to a point where they exhumed the body to connect DNA evidence confirming this suspect, Roberto Fernandes, was indeed responsible for the brutal murder of all three of these women,” said Broward County Sheriff Gregory Tony.
Miami Police Sgt. Nikolai Trifonov said detectives thought Fernandes might have faked his death to avoid prosecution for the killings in South Florida as well as to outsmart the hired assassins who were hunting him.
Michael Livesey, the husband of Kimberly Dietz-Livesey, expressed gratitude to law enforcement officials.
“Her addiction had taken her to different places,” Livesey said. He said the Cooper City police informed him of his wife’s death.
The past 20 years have been rough, not having answers, he said. Addiction, he said, is something he too knows.
“It’s part of a disease we both shared,” Livesey said.