'Crazy Joe' Case Takes Bizarre Turn
Dublin Core
Title
'Crazy Joe' Case Takes Bizarre Turn
Creator
McKinnon, John D.
Rozsa, Lori
Source
McKinnon, John D. and Lori Rozsa. “‘Crazy Joe’ Case Takes Bizarre Turn: Justice Won’t Hear Cops’ Teeth Story.” The Miami Herald (Miami, Florida), December 1, 1996, p. 1.
Publisher
HIST 298, University of Mary Washington
Date
1996-12-01
Rights
The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source.
Format
3 JPGs
300 DPI
Language
English
Coverage
Miami, FL
Text Item Type Metadata
Text
[start title page]
[Name of Newpaper] The Miami Herald
[heading underneath name] The Foremost Daily Newspaper of Florida
[edition and date] Keys Edition – Sunday, December 1, 1996
[end title page]
[Title] ‘Crazy Joe’ case takes bizarre turn
[Subtitle]Justices won’t hear cops’ teeth theory
[Authors] John D. McKinnon and Lori Rozsa
[start page one]
At 9 a.m. Wednesday, the seven justices of the Florida Supreme Court will part a black curtain and take their seats to hear the case of Florida vs. Joseph Robert Spaziano.
What they won’t hear is the state’s latest theory in the bizarre case. Call it necrodentistry.
Seeing its original murder case crumble in a Seminole County courtroom, Central Florida police are trying to link Spaziano to another unsolved murder. They now say the diminutive biker could have yanked the teeth from one corpse and put them in a second victim’s jaw.
That might explain why the teeth don’t match.
Farfetched? Sure – but
[Footnote] Please see Spaziano 28A
[end page one]
[start page two]
[Footnote] Spaziano, from 1A
that’s nothing new in this case, which began with a psychic driving around the countryside with a skull in her lap and hypnosis of the state’s star witness.
For Spaziano, now age 50 after 20 years on Death Row, the post-mortem dental theory is merely the latest indication that he still faces a long uphill climb proving his innocence.
A jury convicted him in 1976 of the murder of Laura Harberts, an 18-year-old hospital clerk. Over the years, Spaziano survived five black-bordered death warrants.
Last January, Circuit Court Judge O.H. Eaton Jr. conducted a six-day hearing in Seminole County and concluded, “In the United States of America every person, no matter how unsavory, is entitled to due process of law and fair trial. The defendant received neither.”
He ordered a new trial. The state appealed, and that’s the issue before the Florida Supreme Court on Wednesday. Orlando attorney James M. Russ will argue for the defense. Margene Roper of the State Attorney’s Office will represent the prosecution.
In the past 11 months, the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office investigators have labored to find evidence to make the Harberts case stick against the scrawny, cockeyed Outlaw biker, known as “Crazy Joe.”
They visited Spaziano’s ex-wife, Linda, in South Florida. “They asked me a million questions. They believe he’s involved in lots of murders. He’s no killer. He’s no rapist, He is just an a------,” she said.
“I have the feeling they’re looking hither and yon for some-thing to try him on,” said Gregg Thomas. He and Steve Hanlon, pro bono attorneys from the lar firm of Holland & Knight, also represent Spaziano.
“It’s a vendetta,” charged Michael Mello, Spaziano’s on-again, off-again appellate attorney between 1983 and 1995.
[heading] State denies ‘vendetta’
Florida officials deny it. Says Dexter Douglass, Gov. Lawton Chiles’ general counsel: “I’d venture to say that the state’s lawyers are more interested in reaching a just verdict than they are in vendettas.”
But two factors intensify the emotional impact in the law enforcement community. One is Spaziano’s proud membership in the Outlaws, a notoriously brutal motorcycle gang.
The other is Mello, Spaziano’s former lawyer. A law professor and former Florida Death Row defender, Mello is a harsh and persistent critic of capital punishment. Already, the Spaziano case has made Mello into something of a celebrity in highbrow legal circles. Last weekend, for example, he presented a paper on Spaziano’s case to the American Society of Criminologists’ annual meeting in Chicago.
Police and prosecutors would hate to lose this one. To do so would put a serial killer that much closer to freedom, they say.
[heading] Started with a corpse
It began Aug. 23, 1973, when a man spotted a skeleton at a dump near Altamonte Springs. A dentist identified it as Harberts, who had disappeared a couple weeks earlier.
The case went unsolved for months. Then amid a spate of publicity about crimes by local Outlaws, police got a call from a young woman who claimed that Spaziaono had raped her.
That led police to her stepson, Tony DiLisio, a 16-year-old doper. Spaziano used to hang around his father’s boat marina. Tony offered little that the police could use. But the teenager seemed eager to help nail Spaziano.
Finally, after police hypnotized him twice and took him to the dump, DiLisio suddenly remembered the biker showing him Harberts’ body.
A jury in Sanford believed him in 1976, convicted and recommended life in prison. Judge Robert McGregor overruled and sentenced Spaziano to death.
[heading] Witness recants
On June 9, 1995, DiLisio recanted – 16 days before Spaziano’s scheduled execution. DiLisio said he had been a scared, troubled teen back then. He was only trying to get in good with police and his abusive father, who bore a grudge against Spaziano for having an affair with his wife.
DiLisio might have had another reason for concocting a tale. He, too, was having an affair with his father’s bride-to-be, Keppie and secretly ached over the revelation that Spaziano was his rival, he says.
After Eaton ordered a new trial, the Florida Attorney General appealed. And now the state Supreme Court must decide.
[heading] ‘Decision will be final’
For the state, “the Supreme Court’s decision will be final for all practical purposes,” said Assistant Attorney General Richard Martell.
Despite Eaton’s opinion, Spaziano’s lawyers wonder if some-how they will lose again, as they have so often in the past. Lately they’ve had one more thing to worry about. Orange County Circuit Court Judge Dorothy Russell recently read the testimony that Eaton heard. She came to exactly the opposite conclusion – that DiLisio also was a key witness in that case and now says he lied then, too.
If the state wins before the high court, Spaziano could be back on Death Row. Chiles hasn’t changed his mind about Spaziano’s guilt, says Douglass, the governor’s top legal adviser. He’ll leave it to the courts.
If Spaziano wins, the state must retry him within 90 days. The evidence is thin. The original trial prosecutor, Claude Van Hook, said that without DiLisio, there was “no case.”
Other evidence: The victim’s roommate and boyfriend identified Spaziano – 2 ½ years after she disappeared – as a “traveling cook” who came to the apartment looking for Harberts.
In a new trail, DiLisio’s original testimony could be presented – with a little legal maneuvering – although it would be subject to a strong attack by the defense.
“It certainly is going to be a monumental undertaking to try to put something together,” Seminole County prosecutor Tom Hastings said.
[heading] Linked to other murders?
If the state can’t convict Spaziano for the Harberts murder, police want to connect him to other crimes.
[image caption] Sentenced to death 20 years ago: Joseph Spaziano.
[end page two]
[start page three]
Among the possibilities:
[bullet point] The murders on New Year’s Eve 1974 of an Outlaw motorcyclist and his girlfriend in Chicago. Although police there cleared the case with another suspect years ago, a woman who lived with Spaziano and an Outlaw informant implicated Spaziano in 1995.
[bullet point] Two unrelated murders of women in Orlando. “The information we received from the streets would indicate Spaziano was responsible for their deaths,” said Sgt. Dan Nazarchuk of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office. The problem, he says, is that valuable witnesses are scared to testify.
[bullet point] A second skeleton found at the dump in 1973 along with Harberts, never identified.
[heading] A second skeleton
Earlier this year, Seminole County deputies Ray Parker and Ralph Salerno reinterviewed witnesses from the original Harberts investigation.
They took a statement from a woman who knew Spaziano then. She said that in the spring of 1973, she saw Spaziano at Daytona Beach with a “a young girl” riding on the back of his motorcycle. The girl asked her to hold her purse “for safekeeping,” according to the Seminole County sheriff’s office. The girl didn’t pick up her purse after the motorcycle ride. Five days later, she said, Spaziano showed up at her door “and demanded the purse.”
She turned it over but not before peeking inside for the identification. She told Salerno and Parker that she remembered only that the girl was from Ann Arbor, Mich.
Two months ago, Seminole police asked forensic anthropologist Dr. William Maples to examine the unidentified remains.
They had been examined before. In 1973, Lawrence Angel of the Smithsonian Institution’s Department of Anthropology concluded that the body was that of a white female 16 to 21, about five feet five inches, slender build. She had crooked lower teeth and two fillings in her upper teeth.
According to a 1996, press release from the Seminole sheriff’s office, Maples concluded that the girl was 15 to 16 years old, five feet seven inches, 110 pounds and had crooked teeth.
[heading] Help in ID
Based on Maples’ description, a police artist drew a sketch of what the girl might have looked like. Seminole police asked Ann Arbor police and TV stations for help in identification.
Deputies in Washtenaw County, where Ann Arbor is, came up with a missing persons case from 1970, three years before the Daytona Beach motorcycle ride.
In April 1970, Cynthia Coon, 14, disappeared on her way to school. She was five feet four inches and weighed 110.
She “looked a little bit” like the police artist sketch, Seminole sheriff’s spokesman Ed McDonough said.
Dental records could establish and identification – the skull of the skeleton had crooked teeth and fillings, easy to match.
But they didn’t match. Cynthia Coon had never been to a dentist in her life. Her father, Dr. William Coon, a pathologist, said “she had straight teeth,” no fillings.
How to reconcile that?
[heading] ‘Someone else’s teeth’
McDonough said Spaziano “had the habit of removing teeth from his victims.” Those found in the skeleton “probably weren’t her teeth. They could very well be someone else’s teeth.”
Maples said that if anyone had tried to adhere teeth from one body into the jaw of this body, it would have showed.
“If the corpse had fillings in places where there should not be fillings, there is a problem.” Maples said.
Seminole police want the Coon family to give a blood sample for DNA testing. The family has not consented.
McDonough still sees Spaziano as a suspect. “He was the type that removed teeth and put them back in other victims,” McDonough said. “He was very sick that way.”
[image caption] Will argue for defense: Attorney James M. Russ.
[end page three]
[Name of Newpaper] The Miami Herald
[heading underneath name] The Foremost Daily Newspaper of Florida
[edition and date] Keys Edition – Sunday, December 1, 1996
[end title page]
[Title] ‘Crazy Joe’ case takes bizarre turn
[Subtitle]Justices won’t hear cops’ teeth theory
[Authors] John D. McKinnon and Lori Rozsa
[start page one]
At 9 a.m. Wednesday, the seven justices of the Florida Supreme Court will part a black curtain and take their seats to hear the case of Florida vs. Joseph Robert Spaziano.
What they won’t hear is the state’s latest theory in the bizarre case. Call it necrodentistry.
Seeing its original murder case crumble in a Seminole County courtroom, Central Florida police are trying to link Spaziano to another unsolved murder. They now say the diminutive biker could have yanked the teeth from one corpse and put them in a second victim’s jaw.
That might explain why the teeth don’t match.
Farfetched? Sure – but
[Footnote] Please see Spaziano 28A
[end page one]
[start page two]
[Footnote] Spaziano, from 1A
that’s nothing new in this case, which began with a psychic driving around the countryside with a skull in her lap and hypnosis of the state’s star witness.
For Spaziano, now age 50 after 20 years on Death Row, the post-mortem dental theory is merely the latest indication that he still faces a long uphill climb proving his innocence.
A jury convicted him in 1976 of the murder of Laura Harberts, an 18-year-old hospital clerk. Over the years, Spaziano survived five black-bordered death warrants.
Last January, Circuit Court Judge O.H. Eaton Jr. conducted a six-day hearing in Seminole County and concluded, “In the United States of America every person, no matter how unsavory, is entitled to due process of law and fair trial. The defendant received neither.”
He ordered a new trial. The state appealed, and that’s the issue before the Florida Supreme Court on Wednesday. Orlando attorney James M. Russ will argue for the defense. Margene Roper of the State Attorney’s Office will represent the prosecution.
In the past 11 months, the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office investigators have labored to find evidence to make the Harberts case stick against the scrawny, cockeyed Outlaw biker, known as “Crazy Joe.”
They visited Spaziano’s ex-wife, Linda, in South Florida. “They asked me a million questions. They believe he’s involved in lots of murders. He’s no killer. He’s no rapist, He is just an a------,” she said.
“I have the feeling they’re looking hither and yon for some-thing to try him on,” said Gregg Thomas. He and Steve Hanlon, pro bono attorneys from the lar firm of Holland & Knight, also represent Spaziano.
“It’s a vendetta,” charged Michael Mello, Spaziano’s on-again, off-again appellate attorney between 1983 and 1995.
[heading] State denies ‘vendetta’
Florida officials deny it. Says Dexter Douglass, Gov. Lawton Chiles’ general counsel: “I’d venture to say that the state’s lawyers are more interested in reaching a just verdict than they are in vendettas.”
But two factors intensify the emotional impact in the law enforcement community. One is Spaziano’s proud membership in the Outlaws, a notoriously brutal motorcycle gang.
The other is Mello, Spaziano’s former lawyer. A law professor and former Florida Death Row defender, Mello is a harsh and persistent critic of capital punishment. Already, the Spaziano case has made Mello into something of a celebrity in highbrow legal circles. Last weekend, for example, he presented a paper on Spaziano’s case to the American Society of Criminologists’ annual meeting in Chicago.
Police and prosecutors would hate to lose this one. To do so would put a serial killer that much closer to freedom, they say.
[heading] Started with a corpse
It began Aug. 23, 1973, when a man spotted a skeleton at a dump near Altamonte Springs. A dentist identified it as Harberts, who had disappeared a couple weeks earlier.
The case went unsolved for months. Then amid a spate of publicity about crimes by local Outlaws, police got a call from a young woman who claimed that Spaziaono had raped her.
That led police to her stepson, Tony DiLisio, a 16-year-old doper. Spaziano used to hang around his father’s boat marina. Tony offered little that the police could use. But the teenager seemed eager to help nail Spaziano.
Finally, after police hypnotized him twice and took him to the dump, DiLisio suddenly remembered the biker showing him Harberts’ body.
A jury in Sanford believed him in 1976, convicted and recommended life in prison. Judge Robert McGregor overruled and sentenced Spaziano to death.
[heading] Witness recants
On June 9, 1995, DiLisio recanted – 16 days before Spaziano’s scheduled execution. DiLisio said he had been a scared, troubled teen back then. He was only trying to get in good with police and his abusive father, who bore a grudge against Spaziano for having an affair with his wife.
DiLisio might have had another reason for concocting a tale. He, too, was having an affair with his father’s bride-to-be, Keppie and secretly ached over the revelation that Spaziano was his rival, he says.
After Eaton ordered a new trial, the Florida Attorney General appealed. And now the state Supreme Court must decide.
[heading] ‘Decision will be final’
For the state, “the Supreme Court’s decision will be final for all practical purposes,” said Assistant Attorney General Richard Martell.
Despite Eaton’s opinion, Spaziano’s lawyers wonder if some-how they will lose again, as they have so often in the past. Lately they’ve had one more thing to worry about. Orange County Circuit Court Judge Dorothy Russell recently read the testimony that Eaton heard. She came to exactly the opposite conclusion – that DiLisio also was a key witness in that case and now says he lied then, too.
If the state wins before the high court, Spaziano could be back on Death Row. Chiles hasn’t changed his mind about Spaziano’s guilt, says Douglass, the governor’s top legal adviser. He’ll leave it to the courts.
If Spaziano wins, the state must retry him within 90 days. The evidence is thin. The original trial prosecutor, Claude Van Hook, said that without DiLisio, there was “no case.”
Other evidence: The victim’s roommate and boyfriend identified Spaziano – 2 ½ years after she disappeared – as a “traveling cook” who came to the apartment looking for Harberts.
In a new trail, DiLisio’s original testimony could be presented – with a little legal maneuvering – although it would be subject to a strong attack by the defense.
“It certainly is going to be a monumental undertaking to try to put something together,” Seminole County prosecutor Tom Hastings said.
[heading] Linked to other murders?
If the state can’t convict Spaziano for the Harberts murder, police want to connect him to other crimes.
[image caption] Sentenced to death 20 years ago: Joseph Spaziano.
[end page two]
[start page three]
Among the possibilities:
[bullet point] The murders on New Year’s Eve 1974 of an Outlaw motorcyclist and his girlfriend in Chicago. Although police there cleared the case with another suspect years ago, a woman who lived with Spaziano and an Outlaw informant implicated Spaziano in 1995.
[bullet point] Two unrelated murders of women in Orlando. “The information we received from the streets would indicate Spaziano was responsible for their deaths,” said Sgt. Dan Nazarchuk of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office. The problem, he says, is that valuable witnesses are scared to testify.
[bullet point] A second skeleton found at the dump in 1973 along with Harberts, never identified.
[heading] A second skeleton
Earlier this year, Seminole County deputies Ray Parker and Ralph Salerno reinterviewed witnesses from the original Harberts investigation.
They took a statement from a woman who knew Spaziano then. She said that in the spring of 1973, she saw Spaziano at Daytona Beach with a “a young girl” riding on the back of his motorcycle. The girl asked her to hold her purse “for safekeeping,” according to the Seminole County sheriff’s office. The girl didn’t pick up her purse after the motorcycle ride. Five days later, she said, Spaziano showed up at her door “and demanded the purse.”
She turned it over but not before peeking inside for the identification. She told Salerno and Parker that she remembered only that the girl was from Ann Arbor, Mich.
Two months ago, Seminole police asked forensic anthropologist Dr. William Maples to examine the unidentified remains.
They had been examined before. In 1973, Lawrence Angel of the Smithsonian Institution’s Department of Anthropology concluded that the body was that of a white female 16 to 21, about five feet five inches, slender build. She had crooked lower teeth and two fillings in her upper teeth.
According to a 1996, press release from the Seminole sheriff’s office, Maples concluded that the girl was 15 to 16 years old, five feet seven inches, 110 pounds and had crooked teeth.
[heading] Help in ID
Based on Maples’ description, a police artist drew a sketch of what the girl might have looked like. Seminole police asked Ann Arbor police and TV stations for help in identification.
Deputies in Washtenaw County, where Ann Arbor is, came up with a missing persons case from 1970, three years before the Daytona Beach motorcycle ride.
In April 1970, Cynthia Coon, 14, disappeared on her way to school. She was five feet four inches and weighed 110.
She “looked a little bit” like the police artist sketch, Seminole sheriff’s spokesman Ed McDonough said.
Dental records could establish and identification – the skull of the skeleton had crooked teeth and fillings, easy to match.
But they didn’t match. Cynthia Coon had never been to a dentist in her life. Her father, Dr. William Coon, a pathologist, said “she had straight teeth,” no fillings.
How to reconcile that?
[heading] ‘Someone else’s teeth’
McDonough said Spaziano “had the habit of removing teeth from his victims.” Those found in the skeleton “probably weren’t her teeth. They could very well be someone else’s teeth.”
Maples said that if anyone had tried to adhere teeth from one body into the jaw of this body, it would have showed.
“If the corpse had fillings in places where there should not be fillings, there is a problem.” Maples said.
Seminole police want the Coon family to give a blood sample for DNA testing. The family has not consented.
McDonough still sees Spaziano as a suspect. “He was the type that removed teeth and put them back in other victims,” McDonough said. “He was very sick that way.”
[image caption] Will argue for defense: Attorney James M. Russ.
[end page three]
Original Format
Newspaper
Contributor of the Digital Item
Leahey, Jordan
Student Editor of the Digital Item
Dickinson, Terra
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Citation
McKinnon, John D. and Rozsa, Lori, “'Crazy Joe' Case Takes Bizarre Turn,” HIST299, accessed July 4, 2024, http://hist299.umwhistory.org/items/show/266.