Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
All right, you guys, we are jumping into an ad and I wanted to let you know that listening on Audible helps your imagination soar. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, and new ways of thinking.
Listening can lead to positive change in your mood, your habits, and ultimately your overall well-being. Audible has the best selection of audiobooks without exception, along with popular podcasts and exclusive Audible Originals. All-in-one, easy app.
app. Enjoy Audible anytime while doing other things, household chores, exercising, on the road, commuting, you name it. Audible makes it easy to be inspired and entertained as part of your everyday routine without needing to set aside extra time. You guys, since becoming an Audible member, I've found it so easy to fit more stories into my day. Recently, I've actually been listening to Twilight on audiobook and it's been a game changer during my daily walks.
So there's more to imagine when you listen. New members can try Audible now for free for 30 days with your first audiobook included. Visit audible.com slash MWMH or text MWMH to 500-500. That's audible.com slash MWMH or text MWMH to 500-500 to try Audible free for 30 days.
You guys, most weight loss plans are one size fits all. They don't take into account each person's individual needs, but Noom builds personal plans that can meet your individual needs. Noom takes into account dietary restrictions, medical issues, and other personal needs to build a plan that works for you and is built for your psychology and your biology,
meeting you where you are. And you guys, I actually have been using Noom Weight and it truly feels personalized to meet my lifestyle. What I love most is that Noom doesn't restrict what you can eat and it actually doesn't shame you when you choose to treat yourself. Noom's personalized program has felt more sustainable than other more restrictive weight loss programs.
Noom Weight uses psychology and biology, and that's why they say losing weight starts with your brain. The program helps you understand the science behind your eating choices and why you have cravings and actually helps you build new habits for a healthier lifestyle. So stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology based approach. Sign up for your trial today at Noom.com. Today, Noom has helped more than 5.2 million people lose weight.
Hey everybody, welcome back to our podcast. This is Murder With My Husband. I'm Peyton Moreland. And I'm Garrett Moreland. And he's the husband. And I'm the husband. Thank you so much for all of the love we are receiving on Binged. It seems like everyone is loving it. I know this is something that...
We have been so excited to release and so I'm so glad that it's going well and that you guys are all loving it. Peyton's worked really, really hard on this. If you have not yet listened or if you haven't been able to check it out yet, there's going to be links everywhere and one of those will take you to Binged. It's another true crime podcast and I promise you're going to love it. All right, Garrett, do you have your 10 seconds? Honestly, we've just been pretty busy getting everything ready for the release of Binged.
Um, I feel like I go through these phases of like different breakfast foods. Like right now I've been eating muffins the last couple of days before it was nothing. Yeah. It was just go to Dutch Bros every single morning. And now I'm back to like, eh, no Dutch Bros, some muffins. So I feel like I'm on a muffin phase. I'll probably hit a donut phase, you know, just switch it up a little bit. Other than my breakfast phases, nothing too crazy has been going on. So,
I think on that note, let's hop right into it. Okay, so our episode sources are Broward, PalmBeach.com, Forensic Files, Wikipedia, FloridaCourts.gov, Murderpedia.org, CharlieProject, and Newspapers.com. Okay, so jumping into this case...
Heaven forbid that your car breaks down while you're driving on the highway. At best, this can be just a day-shattering inconvenience for people. But it's also an unforeseen circumstance that can drop you into an unsafe position depending on where you're able to pull over. Okay.
Fortunately, it's not quite as bad in 2023. Nearly everyone has a cell phone and the option of remaining inside their vehicle until help arrives. But in the 20th century, even in the 90s, this wasn't an option for many people. And there have been many bad people out there always ready to take advantage of a person in this vulnerable situation.
And today's story is about one such person and one such man. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a period of economic decline and political unrest in Jamaica. And families who had the means to do so left the country and relocated to the United States in pursuit of greater opportunity, stability, and financial security.
In the 1980s, over 25,000 Jamaicans immigrated to Broward County, Florida, making this region the second most attractive U.S. city for Jamaican immigrants, ranking just below New York City. Now, Donya Hope DaCosta was born in Jamaica on December 1st, 1977, and her family was one of the many who landed in the Fort Lauderdale area in the 80s, when Donya was just 10 years old. Can you believe that?
Real quick to interrupt this, I've never been to Florida. You've never been to Florida? I've never been to Florida. I've been so many times. I know, I need to go. I've never been to Florida. You need to go. Yep. So, Donya's family consisted of Donya, two sisters, two brothers, and her mother. Donya attended Deerfield Beach Middle School and Deerfield Beach High School, and in 1998, she was enrolled full-time at Broward Community College, where she was studying to become a pediatric nurse.
Now, while going to school, Donya had a part-time job at American Express as a customer service representative, and she was able to save most of her earnings because she was still living at home with her mom, her sister, and her two brothers. Now, Donya's life was simple but full. She had her family, which was very close and loving. She had her studies and her nursing ambitions, and she had her church, which was a major part of her life. Donya's
Donya was a member of the Faith Tabernacle Church in Deerfield Beach, which had over a thousand members but was a tight-knit community that was like Donya's extended family. Many of her closest friends were friends from the church, where she was very active in her congregation, deeply involved in the youth ministry, and sang in the church's choir. Now, Faith Tabernacle was so important to Donya that she attended at least four times a week.
and she would spend six hours worshiping at church every single Sunday. It didn't leave her with any time for dating though, and she didn't even have male friends. But although she may not have been interested in dating or pursuing casual relationships, she still fantasized about romance and marriage. The evidence of this was right there on her bedroom wall, where a magazine cutout of a white wedding gown was pinned to the wall above her bed.
And she kept a similar catalog cut out in her backpack, a full page ad featuring an assortment of engagement rings. This is so funny because of social media, we don't do that anymore. No, she was Pinterest-ing before Pinterest. Exactly. I mean, I remember when people used to cut out magazines, put them on their binders, you know, all their stuff. You just don't do that anymore. Well, for Donya, it's apparent from her cutouts that she longed for male companionship, but she was saving herself for marriage. She was waiting for the right man with the same values to appear in her life. And she was
a man she hoped she would meet at church. Now, around the neighborhood where she lived with her family, Donya was seen as an angelic, almost saintly figure. And she was known for being the friendly, outgoing young woman who could always be heard singing church hymns when she was out and about in the neighborhood. And while most 21-year-olds might celebrate their milestone birthday by going out and drinking or partying, Donya spent hers at church.
And when Friday night arrived, her first Friday night as a 21 year old woman, instead of going clubbing like the other women her age, Donya headed over to the Faith Tabernacle Church for an all night prayer service. It was December 4th, 1998. Donya had worked that day until 10:00 PM when she punched out and headed directly to Faith Tabernacle Church.
And while Donya usually went to church with her sister, Rochelle, this night was different. Her sister was swamped with homework, so she's decided to stay behind. So Donya went to church alone, prayed until around midnight, and then she left the prayer service and dropped by the home of her other sister, Cheryl. She watched TV at Cheryl's for a little while, and then she headed out ready to return home and go to sleep.
Meanwhile, back at Danya's home, her mother Daphne was getting ready for bed and was expecting Danya home any minute. And as she lay in bed, Daphne kept her ears tuned to the front door, waiting for it to open, waiting to hear Danya's footsteps enter the house. But instead, silence persisted throughout the night, leaving Daphne restless.
getting up two or three times every hour to check Donya's bed. At one point, she knocked on Rochelle's door and asked her younger daughter if she had heard from Donya or if she'd come back at any point, maybe while Daphne was dozing, but Rochelle hadn't heard a word. And by early the next morning, Donya's bed was still empty with no sign of having been slept in. She hadn't come home.
Daphne had barely gotten any sleep, wondering about her daughter all night long. And during the night, during her fitful sleep, Daphne had a dream or more accurately a nightmare, a premonition that something was horribly wrong and that Donya was not okay. Which, I mean, obviously there's something wrong because, I mean, you look at how she lives her life and her religion and everything. She's not someone to just...
All of a sudden not come home by night. Right. She's not probably not sneaking off. I mean, for her 21st birthday, she spent the whole day and night in church. Right. So something's going on. Right. So first thing in the morning, Daphne began frantically calling family and friends, but none of them had seen her daughter. So Daphne and Rochelle got into the car and drove to the Faith Tabernacle Church thinking maybe Danya had for whatever reason spent the night there.
Which would have been completely out of character for her to spend the night anywhere without calling home first to let family know. But in a situation like this, you desperately cling to whatever possibility might explain why your loved one didn't return home.
But when Mother Daphne and Sister Rochelle arrived at the church, Danya was not there, and she hadn't been seen there since 1230 the night before, or early morning. Danya's loved ones left, not knowing where to turn next. But then, as they were driving back home, Daphne, her mother, spotted something on the shoulder of the I-95 off-ramp to Hillsboro Boulevard.
It was Donya's car, a gray 1974 Ford LTD. Its hazard lights were still flashing and Daphne knew this was her daughter's car. Donya had been having transmission problems with this vehicle. So it seemed that perhaps the car had broken down and maybe instead of venturing out alone in the middle of the night, she'd slept in the car while it was broke down. So Daphne pulled in front of her daughter's car and walked over to it.
But when she looked inside, the vehicle was empty. There was a blanket in the back seat. The keys were nowhere to be seen. And this is when a horrible feeling came over Daphne. She could now only consider one possibility. Her daughter had run into foul play.
Daphne slammed the door to her daughter's car and ran back to her own. That day, she and her children systematically went through their neighborhood knocking on the doors of neighbors, passing out flyers with Donya's face and description on it. And as the search picked up steam, it also picked up manpower as people in the community began to join the search.
And by the end of the day, they had over a hundred of their friends, family and neighbors, acquaintances and even strangers helping them with their search for Donya. But nothing turned up, not even a clue. So before heading home, they went to the Broward County Sheriff's Office and formally filed a missing persons report.
Now, in so many cases where someone goes missing and their family or friends report it, especially the day of the disappearance and an adult, they're often brushed off by law enforcement who fail to take the report seriously or act on it until more time has passed. We've seen it before in cases that we've covered. However, with Donya's disappearance, the police were on it right away.
And this was due to the circumstances. An abandoned car on the side of the road just a mile or so from where her home was. If she'd been hit by a car, which sometimes happens when people have car trouble on the highway, there'd have been a body. And in this case, the missing woman led a squeak
Yeah.
So these circumstances left absolutely no wonder. The Broward Sheriff's Office wasted no time in launching a full-scale search with helicopters, motorcycles, and dogs, as well as an expanded door-to-door canvas and distribution of missing person flyers. What investigators had also determined, almost from the outset, was that the gas tank of Donya's car was empty.
And a small gas canister that she usually kept stored in her trunk was missing. That's extremely weird. Well, so it appeared to them that it actually wasn't transmission trouble, but maybe Donya had run out of gas on the highway. Once again, I don't know how you find someone. Like if someone had come up with a car, taken her and is now gone, how in the world do you even get a lead? Right. Well...
And that's kind of where they're at right now with everything going on. But her mom tells police this isn't the first time that she's run out of gas. She had run out of gas once before. And in that instance, she walked to a nearby gas station, got some gas and returned to her vehicle to fill her tank enough to get back to the gas station to fill it the rest of the way. So they're thinking she's done this once before. She probably did it again.
The nearest gas station to where Donya had left her car was a Texaco filling station about three quarters of a mile away. So detectives interviewed the cashier who was on duty that night.
And it was learned that at around 1:30 AM, around the time that Donya was last seen, a woman fitting her description wearing a floral print dress was seen at the Texaco station carrying a small gas canister, much like the one that was missing from Donya's trunk. So police checked Donya's credit card activity and confirmed that she'd used the card there that night. She'd spent $1.26 worth of gas. So this means she did make it to the gas station. And this woman that the cashier saw was most likely Donya.
The cashier put detectives in touch with another woman who had also been at the gas station. And both that women as well as the cashier claimed that they had seen a well-dressed man in his late 30s or early 40s approach the woman and offer help. So basically these two eyewitnesses are saying, yeah, we think that was Donya. And that morning at 1.30 a.m. we saw a man approach her asking if she needed help. And no cameras, I'm assuming, at the gas station? No cameras. Okay, okay.
According to eyewitnesses, the man said, how far do you have to go? The eyewitnesses confirmed that Donya then apparently got into the man's van and the man drove away, supposedly driving her back to her car to fill up the gas. That's what the eyewitnesses thought. But of course, what happened after that was a mystery now.
One witness described the van as green-like, maybe teal. The other witness insisted it was burgundy. So the police had two conflicted descriptions of this man's van that Donya was last seen getting into. But the burgundy witness offered an additional detail. She distinctly remembered seeing the word HOPE.
on the side of the van in block lettering. And for whatever reason, the witness was left with the impression that this was a church van of some kind, which begins to make perfect sense because although Donya was a very prudent, safety conscious person, one who ordinarily wouldn't even talk to a stranger, especially a man. She saw hope. Yes. If a stranger were well-dressed, well-spoken and appeared to be affiliated with a church, that might lead Donya to believe that the stranger was safe.
And after all, it was uncharacteristic of Donya to even go walking alone at night. But you know, what choice did she have in her situation?
Okay, you guys, shifting my wardrobe from summer to fall can be a challenge, but I'm telling you right now, my Quince products that I have, my Quince clothing items, are my go-to staples in the fall. They make it so easy. They have timeless, high-quality items. I use their silk skirts. I literally wear them in so many ways, with boots, with tights, with a sweater, with a crop top.
They have cashmere sweaters from $50, pants for every occasion, washable silk tops, so much more. And the best part is that they are priced so well because they partner directly with top factories. So they cut out the cost of the middleman and then they pass the savings onto you. So you are literally getting cashmere sweaters for $50.
I just got a cashmere sweater from Quince that I am going to be wearing. I also have a pair of their linen pants. I'm actually just going to pair them together. I will post it on my social media and you will see it. So make switching seasons a breeze with Quince's high quality closet essentials. Go to quince.com slash husband.com.
for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns you guys if you want free shipping make sure to do quince.com husband that's q u i n c e dot com slash husband to get free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com husband they have the cutest clothes you need to go check it out
Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. From the launch your online shop stage, to the first real life store stage, all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage. Shopify is there to help you grow. Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout up to 36% better compared to other leading commerce platforms.
And sell more with less effort thanks to Shopify Magic, your AI-powered all-star.
Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash husband, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash husband now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.com slash husband.
So a benign looking stranger offering a ride in his church van might have seemed like a safer alternative to Donya than walking back to her car alone at two in the morning. And if the stranger wasn't so benign, he surely would have recognized this and taken advantage of it.
So that's where the investigation was at when it began on Sunday morning. The story hit the news the following day on Monday morning. Her family watched the coverage of it from the house that Donya shared with them. And tragically, not too soon into the investigation, the family's worst fears were confirmed. There was breaking news three days after Donya went missing. The body of a woman had been found at 8
20 a.m. that morning, this would be Monday, dumped beside a garbage dumpster. That was fast. Three days? Three days. Extremely fast. Well, the body was in an alleyway behind some warehouses 10 miles south of the Texaco station where Donya was last seen. Donya's family saw the news and began praying, praying that this body was not Donya's.
A gathering of over 80 of their friends from the community and from church held a vigil on the family's front lawn, leading a collective prayer for Donya's safe return. But at 8.20 p.m. that night, exactly 12 hours to the minute that the body was found, police cruisers and a chaplain showed up at the DaCosta home. Daphne knew immediately what that meant. It meant that their prayers had gone unanswered and that this was Donya. A
A wave of sorrow swept through the house and all the people gathered there. What had been the murmur of solemnly hopeful prayers now turned to moans of grief.
Even before the body was taken to autopsy, it was clear that Donya had died a violent death. She had been wrapped up tightly in several layers. There was a purple laundry bag and a trash can liner over her head. And the body was nude. She was folded into the fetal position and bundled inside of a shower curtain, a yellow sheet, and a brown sheet. So just wrapped very extensively. Okay. I'm going to trigger warning. Which is weird. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Almost like a mummy. Right. Right.
And I'm going to trigger warning here because we are going to go into some more gruesome details. But whoever dumped her had also driven over her legs on the way out of the alley. Give me a break. Which that left behind entire impressions on her body.
could be used to rule out or rule in a suspect vehicle. So it was a piece of evidence, but it's awful. Oh, horrible. It's awful. It was clear from the state of decomposition that Donya had been dead for at least 48 hours by the time that she was found. So she was murdered not long after she disappeared. And you
And you have to keep in mind that although it is December during our story in the late 90s, this was South Florida. And the temperatures were still peaking in the 80s during this weekend of Donya's murder. I thought you were going to say it's Florida. So there's always crazy things happening in Florida. No, no, no. Just the weather. Was she sexually assaulted? She was sexually assaulted. Okay. But trying to figure out what happened, investigators interviewed the businesses that operated out of the warehouses behind where Donya was dumped. Because keep in mind, she was kind of dumped in Florida.
a public area. That's why her body was found so fast. And some of the business owners that police talked to were working in the warehouse on Sunday night, late into the night, and they didn't see the body during that time. So it was determined that the body was probably dumped sometime in the early morning hours on Monday, within several hours of it being found by landscape workers. So whoever had done this, even though she had died almost after she was taken, she was held, her body was held somewhere until it was dumped Monday morning. Okay.
So after this, her body was taken to the medical examiner's office where the full story of her violent death began to kind of take shape for investigators. She had a large horseshoe-shaped bruise on her head that suggested that she'd been delivered a hard blow, hard enough to knock her unconscious.
although this injury wouldn't have been fatal. Neither were any of the 36 superficial puncture wounds across Donya's chest, hands, arms, and head. What does that mean? What do you mean by superficial? They were star-shaped wounds that appeared to be inflicted by a screwdriver, and the only purpose that the medical examiner and police could find for it was torture.
Oh my gosh. So she had been tortured. So there's no reason at all. They weren't meant to kill her. And it was also clear that, again, like Garrett asked, she had been sexually assaulted and then there was the death blow to Donya's head. This was delivered by some kind of heavy instrument with a sharp edge because whatever it was, it penetrated her skull and eventually caused her death.
this wasn't before the hours of sexual assault and the torture that she suffered. So for Donya's family and everyone who knew and loved her, this was an unimaginable fate. Daphne, Donya's mother, tried to keep herself composed, but it was hard. Donya's funeral was held at the Faith Tabernacle Church, which had been like Donya's second home. The church was filled almost to capacity that afternoon with over a thousand mourners paying their respects. For
For investigators, their number one priority in solving Donya's murder was tracking down the man with the van. With the help of the witnesses at the Texaco station, a composite sketch was made and released to the media, along with a description of the man's van. Except one detail the investigators held back from the public was the word hope that the eyewitness had saw. I wonder why they would hold that back.
Well, they wanted to make sure that the suspect didn't hide the van, didn't paint over it, conceal the word. Or take the sticker off or whatever it is. So they felt like it was specific enough that it's their best lead. But it's also kind of...
tragically ironic that their best lead is the word hope on a side of a van because if you remember at the beginning of the story donya's middle name is hope oh i did not remember that so detectives glenn bucata and kevin kaminsky with the broward county sheriff's office built a list of every business and organization in the county with the word hope in its name
from Hope Church to Hope Chiropractic Center to Hope Thrift Centers. And after running this list into the ground, they were left no closer to finding the mystery green, maybe burgundy, van with the word Hope on the side of it. That's what I mean. I mean, he could be in Mexico. He could be in Alaska for all we know. He could be anywhere. How do you track it down? Especially, I mean, 20, 30 years ago, things were...
Things are so much different. Like as far as technology and cameras and tracking, it's just so different. I mean, if you draw it to the current Idaho cases, they were able to track him down because of his car. Yeah. Because of cameras like that. It was literally what led them to him. Yep. And,
- They knew his phone, everything was just so. - And now we have such a distinct van with a word that's very distinct and they can't find it. - But no cameras. - Nothing. - No cell phones or you can track where they're at. I mean, how do you find someone? - Well, luckily for police at this point, a tip does come in about a burgundy church van parked at a house not far from where Donya went missing and only two blocks from her own home.
It was a house where four male roommates lived, all of whom had access to this van connected to the Community Church of God in Christ. Now, as the police showed up at the home to interview the men, they peeked inside the van and immediately saw something of interest.
It was a floral print dress, which is exactly what Donya had been wearing the night that she was abducted. And remember, she was found nude, so her clothing and belongings were still unaccounted for. So they confiscated the van and began to process it, thinking this was their break.
But to their disappointment, they found that the tires did not match the entire impressions found on Donya's body and in the alleyway where she was dumped. Why were those clothes there? And then Donya's mother took a look at the floral dress and didn't recognize it. Oh, okay. It wasn't the one Donya had been wearing. Got it. So it seemed like this lead was suddenly falling apart.
But the detectives wanted to make sure to solidly eliminate each of these four men. So they took their DNA and their fingerprints because they had what they believed was the killer's DNA from skin cells found beneath Donya's fingernails from when she struggled with her killer and also from sperm recovered from her body.
And they also had multiple fingerprints found on the plastic bag that had been included in the mummy part of the body. So they sent the DNA and the fingerprints off to the crime lab. And that's when it was confirmed nothing matched. These four men had nothing to do with Donya's murder. Which if we know anything about DNA, I mean, even now you can get fingerprints. You can put them in the system. And if nothing comes up, nothing comes up, nothing comes up.
So it was back to square one for detectives, but with not much more to go on other than the Hope Church van, fingerprints that matched no one in the national or local databases and DNA, which like Garrett just said, well, before forensic genealogy, you needed a suspect to compare it to. It was filling to the BSO detectives like Donya's murder was destined to just become one of their county's many cold cases.
Meanwhile, Christmas at the DaCosta household was drained of joy. It was bare bones. The living room had no tree, no Christmas decorations. The presents were all unwrapped.
and the presents that Donya had bought her family, which she had hidden in various spots throughout the house, no one in the house could bear to search for them. It was too painful. A piece of everyone in the family had died along with Donya, and it looked like her murder might not ever be solved. Another month went by without any more leads. And then, on January 30th, 1999,
It was purely by chance that detectives Bukata and Kaminsky, who were out working another case and driving through Lauder Hill, Florida, happened to spot a van very similar to what the Texaco witnesses had described. Which is insane to me. Why is that guy still driving that van? Right? What?
Well, I don't know. I'll explain. Okay. Okay. So it was teal colored, like one of, like one of the witnesses had reported and had the words, here's hope across the side panel. But hope was appearing much more prominent. It was in capital letters. It was in a larger font and it was burgundy lettering. So maybe the witness couldn't see the here's at 1 30 AM at night.
But the hope was prominent enough that that's all she saw. Okay. So the van was parked in front of the Generation Hope Daycare, which was connected to Hope Outreach Ministries. Oh, even worse, at a daycare center. Yes. So they made note of the van and after working other cases for the next two months, they returned to Donya's case in late March and decided to pay a visit to Generation Hope Daycare.
So they do wait two months. - Why? - To go fall asleep. - I don't understand. - They were working other cases, but I don't have an explanation for you. It's going, as the case goes on, you're going to. - Get frustrated? - Yes, that they waited this long. They needed to find out who owned the van so they go back to the daycare center. Detectives arrived at the center and were greeted by the pastor, Reverend Frank Lloyd, who was a friendly looking man around 53 years of age. He was the one who owned the van, he told the detectives, but he says he wasn't using the van on the night in question.
"'Well, who was?' the detectives asked. The pastor couldn't tell them offhand. It had been over four months since Donya's murder. However, much to their luck, the pastor was a consummate record keeper and stored logs for every transaction at the church, including when the church vehicles were borrowed and by whom. So it wouldn't be a big deal, he said, to just leaf through his logs and find out who had the van that night.'
He went into his office and dug the box of logs out of his file cabinet and began thumbing through them. Two, three, four months back, till he reached the weekend of the previous December. Lucius had the van that weekend, the pastor said. Now, Lucius was the daycare center's 40-year-old maintenance worker. His name was Lucius Boyd. He had borrowed the van that Thursday, and according to the logs, did not return it until Monday. That's the same day that Donya's body was dumped.
The van's extended absence had gone unnoticed at the time because the van was not generally in high demand on the weekends, and the pastor himself was out of town through the middle of the month.
The investigators took a look inside the van with the assistance of the pastor. The first thing that caught their eye was a purple laundry bag, which looked eerily similar to the laundry bag that Donya had been stuffed inside. The detectives asked if anything had gone missing from the van, and the pastor told them that there actually was a box of tools that he usually kept inside the van that hadn't been seen since around the time that Lucius had borrowed the van. So what kind of tools? Investigators asked him. The pastor thought about it.
There were screwdrivers, he said, a drill, a saw, stuff like that. Do you remember the brand of the saw? Police asked him. The model, maybe? The pastor couldn't recall, but remember, he did keep meticulous records, so it was just a matter of going back to his office and digging it up, which he did. Dang, what are the chances? I know. The investigators were curious to compare the saw to wounds on Donya's body. In particular, they had been unable to find anything that matched the horseshoe-shaped wound on her head.
but Lucius Boyd was someone they wanted to track down immediately until they could figure this out, until they could match it. For one, he looked similar to the composite sketch of the man last seen with Donya, but also the name Lucius Boyd was not unfamiliar to the detectives. And when, uh,
The pastor had said his name. They knew who he was. His family, the Boyd family, was well known to police, not because of criminal activity, but because they operated a successful Fort Lauderdale funeral home, the James C. Boyd Funeral Home,
near downtown. But also, Lucius Boyd's name had surfaced early on in the investigation. Oh, man. This always happens. I know. The name always comes up early. And they don't catch it. And all of a sudden, da-da-da-da-da. And then, whatever later, he ends up doing it. Right. Right.
Well, the reason was at the time when Donya died, Boyd was already being investigated in the disappearance of another woman. Oh my gosh. 19 year old Patrice Ashton, who was last seen getting into a car with Boyd. It was Boyd's girlfriend's car. Never to be seen or heard from again.
Lucius and Patrice were friends and apparently they had planned on taking a trip to Winter Haven, Florida. And when Boyd returned from the trip, he was alone. So her family obviously notices Boyd is questioned and he claims that Patrice had just met two other men while they were there and decided to go away with them instead and he hadn't seen her since. To this day, Patrice Ashton remains a missing person. Her case is still unsolved. But she was last seen with Boyd. That seems so obvious. Whose name has now come up in this case.
And Lucius Boyd had since been connected to yet another woman who went missing. 25-year-old Danielle Zakat, who was an acquaintance of Boyd's and who was last seen buying bread at a Winn-Dixie supermarket on February 25th, 1999, which if Boyd was responsible for her disappearance,
makes it tragic that BSO detectives waited two months to follow up on that Generation Hope daycare van because it was during that time that Danielle vanished. Got it. So essentially we have Patrice who goes missing before Donya, then Donya goes missing, and then Danielle goes missing. And Danielle goes missing after police already know about the van but have yet to investigate it.
So now believing that Boyd was responsible for three disappearances and at least maybe one murder, police look into the background of Lucius Boyd. They're like, we need to figure out who this guy is. Where's he come from?
Boyd's background revealed that he was a violent, dangerous individual who had many brushes with the law, but always seemed to walk away scot-free and clean. Which is why Reverend Lloyd, despite knowing of his arrest record, gave Lucius a pass and even hired him in the first place. The pastor assumed that because he was always acquitted or the charges were dropped, he was an innocent man, just unfairly persecuted.
But it seems awfully weird that Boyd was given a pass when you know about his crimes preceding these disappearances. Okay, let me guess. Your medicine cabinet is crammed with stuff that does not work. You still aren't sleeping, you still hurt, and you're stressed out. That's what you're saying.
That's how it was for me, so I cleared out my cabinet and reset my health with CBD from CB Distillery. CBD Distillery's targeted formulations are made from the highest quality clean ingredients, no fluff, no fillers, just pure effective CBD solutions designed to help support your health.
In two non-clinical surveys, 81% of customers experienced more calm, 80% said CBD helped with pain after physical activity, and an impressive 90% actually said they slept better with CBD. I have personally used CBD before to help me sleep. I used to have a lot of trouble sleeping and I couldn't figure out what to do to help. And honestly, CBD did help. And if that's something you're struggling with, yeah.
Give it a try. Check it out. If you struggle with a health concern and haven't found relief, make the change like I did to CBD Distillery. And with over 2 million customers and a solid 100% money back guarantee, CBD Distillery is the source to trust. You guys, we have a 20% discount to get you started. So if you've ever wanted to do CBD, now is the time. Visit CBDistillery.com and use code husband for 20% off. That's CBDistillery.com.
CbDistillery.com, code husband. Hola. Como esta? Hola, como estamos? Want to learn a new language? Well, the best way is to uproot your entire life, move to Spain, and live there for the rest of your...
I made that up. I went off the ad. Let me go back to the ad read. The best way is to uproot your entire life. Drop your... Oh. You literally followed the ad. I didn't read the rest of that. Drop yourself in the middle of a new country and figure it out from there. I just want to let everyone know that's what I did. But... That's what I did. It worked. If you're not ready for that, you can still learn a new language the next best way, and that is with Babbel. See you.
Speak like a whole new you with Babbel, the science-backed language learning app that gets you talking. Wasting hundreds of dollars on private tutors is the old school way of learning a new language. Babbel's 10-minute lessons are quick and handcrafted by over 200 language experts, ready to get you talking your new language in three weeks, because talking is the key to really knowing any language.
Designed by real people for having real conversation, Babbel gets you talking. You guys, I actually use Babbel to brush up on Spanish when we travel. I love it. It is so easy. And then I can actually kind of keep up with what's going on. And with over 16 million subscriptions sold, Babbel's 14 award-winning language courses are backed by a 20-day money-back guarantee. So...
There's no pressure. Buy Babbel and travel. Here's a special limited time deal for our listeners right now. Get up to 60% off your Babbel subscription, but only for our listeners at babbel.com slash husband. Get up to 60% off at babbel.com slash husband spelled B-A-B-B-E-L.com slash husband. Rules and restrictions may apply.
Back in 1993, Boyd stabbed his friend, Roderick Bullard, to death following an argument over a car. Essentially, when it went to trial, Boyd was able to argue that it had been done in self-defense. And so he got off. The strategy worked. Boyd was acquitted. His record also revealed that Boyd had gone to trial on at least two different occasions for rape.
A woman named Brenda White, this is a pseudonym, who was then visiting Fort Lauderdale, her hometown from Maryland, where she'd relocated, went dancing with Lucius Boyd at Fort Lauderdale's Baja Beach Club in 1997. She had known Boyd for a while because she was close friends with one of his sisters, and she had no reason to expect danger from him. It was just a night out with Lucius Boyd. But at the club, Lucius was relentless in his clearly unwanted advances towards her. This was romantic for him. It wasn't for her.
which after a while, she grew exhausted in her attempts to dodge. And after dancing, he somehow convinced Brenda to go sit down on the beach with him to, quote, fill the sand in her toes. And while they sat in front of the ocean, Lucius spoke of his grand ambitions to travel the country, telling her about his life, his plans for the future.
he was posturing himself like some storybook romantic suitor. And indeed, many of the women in Boyd's life did describe him as a charmer. And it's kind of, I think it's true because at this point in our story, he had been married twice and had at least eight children.
Oh my gosh. It keeps getting crazier and crazier. When he's on the date with Brenda, like he's been married twice and has eight kids. He's getting more crazy. He raped a couple of girls, got acquitted, killed one of his best friends or killed his best friend. Nothing happened to him. Has been married twice. Has eight children. Has eight children. Patrice is missing and was last seen with him. Now, Adonia...
His body's been found and she's killed. And now another girl. Yeah. But I don't think it's him though. It's yeah. I don't think we're talking about Brenda who happened before. All of this. Um, Danielle is the girl who went missing. Yes. Brenda was just one of, was one of the rape victims that he's gets off that I'm, I'm telling you basically right now. Um,
He's not succeeding in charming her at the beach. And so when he drives her back to his home, he parks the car behind the house in the backyard and he turns off the engine and he lunges at Brenda's throat, strangling her until she passes out. When she regained consciousness, he demanded that she have sex with him. And when she resisted, he climbed on top of her, held her tightly by her throat and raped her.
All while warning her, you don't know who you're messing with. Now, repeatedly throughout the ordeal, he squeezed her neck tightly enough that it would cut off her air and she would be close to passing out. But finally, when it was over, he told Brenda, who was shaken and traumatized by having just been violently raped by her partner.
friend's brother that he would let her go unharmed under one condition that she forget all about what happened and doesn't go to the cops and she's like absolutely i won't go to the cops i'll forget all about it please let me go after which she immediately went to police and filed a report
Lucius Boyd was then arrested and charged with rape, but he was released on bond. And at trial, this is nearly two years later, Boyd's defense attorney re-traumatized Brenda, who again had been violently raped by attacking her character, pointing out that she wasn't wearing underwear the night of the offense and that she'd been drunk. So he basically just tries to come up with all this bull crap. She was asking for it. Yes, it's basically what's happening. And again,
He gets off. He gets off. The angle works and he gets off. I don't understand how one person can get off so many times. Especially because there's a living victim. She went to the police immediately after. And this is why women don't report. So crazy. Which is so crazy that...
You don't look at his record before and take that into account when you're at trial. I don't understand. He's already been to trial for stabbing someone. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. So he gets off and acquitted of this in 1999. This is less than two months after Donya's murder and two days after Danielle disappeared. Okay. So he gets acquitted of this right in the middle. All of these attacks, disappearances, and even murders were happening one after the other. Well, this one was the trial, but...
If only the BSO detectives had met with Reverend Frank Lloyd on January 30th, immediately after they spotted that Hope van,
Danielle may still be here today, but they waited. And this story gets worse because there are more attacks previous to where we started our story. Only two months after he brutally attacked Brenda in 1997, a woman named Michelle also had an encounter with Boyd that she would never forget. So essentially Michelle needed a ride and Boyd picked her up, said, save your money. I'll just drop you off. He drove her around. He didn't take her to her house and she was starting to get nervous. One
Once the sun went down, he drove her to a park and then held a knife to her throat and demanded that she perform sexual acts on him. Oh, my gosh. While she's doing so, he was smoking above her. And she gets this idea to pretend that the ashes that have been falling down are melting the car. And so she starts screaming and this distracts him. She grabs the knife and she stabs him.
Oh, she gets out of the car. She starts screaming. Tennis players who are playing tennis nearby in the park hear her screams and call 911. So police respond. Now get this. When police respond and she's hysterical, this man just tried to rape me. This man just held me against my will. He held a knife to my throat, but she has the knife in her hand. Police don't believe her.
They don't believe her. They think that... They say to her, you think someone as small as you was able to overpower this man? And he says, listen, she's a sex worker. She was living at...
She had had a hard past. She was living at a woman's house. And he said she just got mad that I didn't have enough money to pay her and freaked out. Oh, my gosh. And she tells police, listen, I am not a sex worker. I work at Lens Express. I was just walking to the train station when he pulled up and offered me a ride. I'm just trying to get back to women in distress. This is where I'm staying. And police tell her, listen, if anybody's going to jail, it's going to be you.
what they don't believe her so this is where it gets worse the deputy who responds to this never took a report from this incident he never ran lucius boyd's background or criminal history which not only would have included the prior rape charges stemming from brenda but also the 1993 murder charges when he stabbed his friend but also numerous other complaints of rape which never led to charges being filed so his
If they had just ran his name, they would have known that he was a predator. And also the deputy lost the knife that was used. So he got three days suspension for that, but he wasn't, I mean, he wasn't let go or anything, but Michelle Galloway, this is our victim in this instance. She didn't give up the next day. She went back to the BSO and talked to another deputy about what happened. And that deputy actually believed her.
and Boyd ended up being charged with rape, aggravated assault, and armed kidnapping. However, at the trial, Boyd's prince of a defense attorney, same guy, once again attacked the victim's character, bringing up that she had served time in prison before for shooting a former boyfriend in self-defense and was successful in getting Boyd acquitted. Also, on the same day that Michelle Galloway had been attacked by Boyd, that all this had happened,
The body of 24-year-old Melissa Floyd was found in a grassy area behind a guardrail alongside I-95. And three weeks later, her ID card was found 20 or so miles south on the grounds of the James C. Boyd Funeral Home. So I'm only telling this so you can understand how many women attacks, rapes, murders, disappearances were tied to this guy back when we started our story. Yeah.
So police learn all of this and they can't believe that he's gotten away with it this long, but maybe this time it's going to be different. BSO detectives investigating Donya DaCosta's murder tracked down Lucius Boyd and obtained a DNA sample from him. And then on March 25th, the results came back. It was a match to the skin cells found beneath Donya DaCosta's fingernails, as well as the traces of semen found. So Lucius Boyd was once again arrested and he was charged with Donya's murder.
what took you so long to catch me is what he told police when they arrested him. Because he finally realized there was DNA. So then he decided to say that. That's insane. Police learned that Boyd's girlfriend had been out of town on the weekend that Donya was killed. So they went to her apartment where she was more than willing to cooperate with them. She allowed detectives to search the bedroom and they asked her if there were any bedsheets that had gone missing. When Boyd's girlfriend checked the closet, she discovered that two sets of bedsheets were
were missing a yellow sheet and a brown sheet, the same colors as the sheets that Donya had been wrapped in. A search warrant was served on the property and the girlfriend took the children she had with Boyd, who lived with them, and left town for a few days. It's so crazy that he has eight kids. And children with this girlfriend. They are just living in his home as he's this awful predator.
Beneath the bed, in the bedroom, detectives found bloodstains which were later positively identified as Donya's. The carpet fibers in the apartment also matched brown carpet fibers found on Donya's body, and the fingerprints on the plastic bag matched those of Boyd's girlfriend.
Which isn't to say she had anything to do with the murder, but rather that it was just a plastic garbage bag that was from the apartment that she lived in. The tires on the Here's Hope daycare van matched the tire tracks found at the dump location, and the tools that went missing from the van were consistent with the wounds on Donya. And remember that saw that was among them? The base of the saw was perfectly consistent with the horseshoe-shaped bruise on Donya's head. So yeah, unlike the previous cases in which Lucius Boyd had been acquitted,
This case against him in the murder of Donya DaCosta was airtight. He did it. There was no doubt. And a jury agreed. Good. He was found guilty on June 21st, 2002, and he was sentenced to death. He still sits on Florida death row awaiting execution today. And he still denies responsibility and refuses to reveal the locations of Patrice Ashton and Michelle Zaycott. And that is the case of Lucius Boyd and all of his victims.
Oh man, what a sick human being.
These predators. I just don't understand how, I mean, it's hard. Police work is so hard. It just sucks when it takes so long for people to get caught like that. I know. Like he just got out so many times and that just sucks. And it's also like, you understand that someone has to defend these monsters, but then you look at his defense attorney and you just want to like, really? But like, like you said, someone has, it's their job. Someone has to defend. And then you want to look at the police and be like, really? But also how are they supposed to know that this was the lead? They were working on it. So it's just like this hard thing.
thing of you know it's a mess it's a mess crazy all right you guys that is our case for this week and we will see you next time with another episode and also some more binged episodes coming out here soon i love it and i hate it goodbye