South Florida serial killer Mosley dies in Panhandle hospital at 73

In the northwest Fort Lauderdale neighborhood where he lived, he was known as the “Rape Man.” He terrorized women in South Florida in the 1970s and 1980s, and his sexual crimes were so widely known that parents warned their daughters to avoid him if possible.

But after Eddie Lee Mosley was declared unfit to stand trial in 1988, he faded from public sight and lived the rest of his life in state mental hospitals. On Thursday, Mosley died in a medical hospital in Florida’s Panhandle at the age of 73.

Whit Majors, the District 14 Medical Examiner, who serves Jackson County and five other counties, confirmed Mosley’s death Friday evening. His office has not yet determined the cause of death, and is awaiting COVID-19 test results from Jackson Hospital, where he died, and the Sunland Center, the developmental disability center in Marianna, where he was hospitalized.

As of Thursday, Sunland Center had 16 positive cases of the new coronavirus, according to state records.

Mosley was suspected in dozens of murders and even more rapes in the Fort Lauderdale and Lakeland areas in the 70s and 80s. DNA linked him to at least eight murders in Fort Lauderdale, and he had been charged with rape at least three times before 1985. He was found not guilty twice — once by reason of insanity — and reached a plea deal in another rape case that allowed him to go free after two years in prison.

At least two men were wrongfully convicted of Mosley’s crimes, spurring the Broward Sheriff ’s Office to reach settlements with their families that combined were worth millions of dollars. One of the men, Frank Lee Smith, died of cancer on death row in 2000 just months before

DNA exonerated him of raping and murdering an 8-year-old girl in

Fort Lauderdale.

More than 13 years later, his family’s civil lawsuit against the Broward Sheriff’s

Office and two detectives accused of framing him was settled for just $340,000.

Smith’s death made him a national symbol because it was the first case in the U.S. that scientifically proved an innocent man had died in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Smith’s exoneration led to a governor’s investigation into the conduct of the detectives on the case: Richard Scheff and Phil Amabile.

The lawsuit says Mosley had become like “Teflon,” and Scheff and Amabile needed to find a suspect to whom the charges would stick.

“These defendants knew that they could not successfully prosecute Mosley because of his mental condition,” the lawsuit says. “Thus they looked for anybody, that is, somebody else on whom they could pin the blame.”

The other man, Jerry Frank Townsend, spent 22 years in prison for a series of murders that DNA later showed he did not commit. Townsend, who had the mental functioning of an 8-year-old when he was 57, received $2 million from the Sheriff ’s Office.

Townsend was sentenced to several life terms and served 22 years in prison for convictions in six murders and one rape he didn’t commit in Broward and Miami-Dade counties. He was arrested in 1979 in Miami on a rape charge, then turned over to authorities in Broward who charged him with six murders.

The case became a notorious example of how mentally challenged people are particularly vulnerable to making false confessions under pressure from law enforcement.

The Broward Sheriff’s Office and its deputies “fabricated evidence, concealed exculpatory evidence, tampered with witnesses, and coerced a false confession by intimidation and deception from [Townsend], who they knew was a mentally challenged person,” the civil suit claimed.

Townsend was set free in June 2001 after DNA indicated the crimes were committed by Mosley.

Mosley