Another wrongful conviction, years old, set right.
Who cleaned up the mess? Ask any of the old hands around Broward’s tainted criminal justice system. Had to be Curcio.
Det. John Curcio has long been our indefatigable righter of wrongs; dogged enough to pursue the truth 36 years after Hollywood cops hung young Regina Harrison’s murder on the wrong man.
The killer wasn’t, we now know, Ronald Henry Stewart, a serial rapist and convenient fall-guy. Stewart, resigned to spending the rest of his life in prison anyway, had pled no contest to the charge that he raped and murdered 20-year-old Regina Harrison to avoid the death penalty.
Stewart died in prison in 2008. So who cares if this repulsive criminal with multiple rape convictions in Mississippi and Florida was saddled with someone else’s crime? That would be Curcio.
Curcio, 59, a legendary, much-decorated homicide detective first with the Fort Lauderdale Police Department, now with the Broward Sheriff’s Office, was the same skeptic who doubted the string of horrors ascribed to a mentally retarded carnival worker from Hallandale Beach named Jerry Townsend. With no evidence other than a string of coerced and sometimes contradictory confessions, police had cleared half-dozen unsolved murder cases in Broward and Miami-Dade counties in 1980. Which led to seven concurrent life sentences for Townsend.
Eighteen years later, Curcio revisited the case. He was particularly suspicious of Townsend’s alleged connection to the murder of 13-year-old Sonja Yvette Marion, whose horribly beaten body had been discovered near Dillard High School in the summer of 1979. “That one got to me. It was a vicious case,” he said.
The problem, of course, was that Sonja’s murder wasn’t classified “unsolved,” but as a conviction, case closed, based on evidence gathered years earlier. Re-opening that kind of investigation won’t make you popular in the cop world. “Nobody wants to hear your guys arrested the wrong man,” he said.
Curcio turned to an emerging new technology and discovered — just as he suspected — that the DNA analysis of old crime scene evidence didn’t match up with Townsend. Nor did it match Frank Lee Smith, another patsy who had been given the death penalty for eight-year-old Shandra Whitehead’s 1985 murder in northwest Fort Lauderdale.
More DNA tests followed and Townsend’s other murder convictions crumbled. He was released after 22 years in prison. Smith died on death row in 2000, a few months before DNA testing finally cleared him. Meanwhile, Curcio suspected that the real killer was Eddie Lee Mosley, a brawny lawn service worker, serial sex offender and former mental patient, known around the neighborhood as “the rape man.”
Sure enough, DNA samples from the Marion and Whitehead murder scenes rang up Eddie Lee Mosley. Curcio matched six other unsolved local murders to Mosley. And his stunning findings helped knock down Florida’s resistance to post-conviction DNA testing. (Mosley, however monstrous, was deemed too mentally impaired to stand trial and was shipped off to a state mental hospital)
Curcio, known as Mongo back in the day, had been a cop legend even as a young robbery detective. (In 1989, he accounted for 338 felony arrests, most of any Fort Lauderdale cop.) But here’s the thing. Old newspaper clips over his 40-year career describe one defendant after another deciding to surrender to Curcio. And nobody else.
A 1992 Sun-Sentinel story described him as “the cop who crime suspects and their mothers ask for by name.” The same story called him the most trusted cop in the city’s poor, black neighborhoods. The big, tough cop who could affect this peculiar rapport with criminals.
Something of that rapport was on display as Curcio elicited an hours-long confession from Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland shooting suspect. And it was his famous rapport that ultimately allowed him to solve the Regina Harrison murder last month. After a suspect named Jack Harold Jones was implicated in killing of tourist Lori Anne Barrett on Fort Lauderdale Beach in 1991, Curcio struck up a relationship. (Jones was already on death row for a murder in Arkansas.)
“I always thought he was a serial killer,” Curcio said. Jones admitted that he had killed at least one other person in Broward and promised that, eventually, he’d tell Curcio about it.
A year after his 2017 execution, Jones’ sister relayed a letter to the detective: a confession to the Regina Harrison murder. Curcio ordered up DNA tests on the old evidence. Jones was a match.
The convict had also mailed Curcio one of his prison paintings: a woman in a lounge chair. Signed with his footprint on the back (for authentication purposes, Jones said.) And the inscription, “To Mongo from Jack.”
Another case set right.
Fred Grimm (@grimm_fred or leogrimm@gmail.com), a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976.