[man] When I arrived, the officers were here.
There were a couple homeless people starting to gather about.
And there was the body of a black female right about here.
She had appeared to be wearing some kind of a mesh shirt
and shorts,
and they were burnt.
They were burnt so badly that the mesh pattern
was actually burned into her body.
[narrator]
She also suffered a blow to the head.
Knowing the area is thick with drug addicts,
De La Torriente believes it's possible
the victim accidentally set herself on fire.
[De La Torriente] I thought, there's always a possibility
that she might have burned herself smoking crack cocaine.
But the blunt trauma worried me.
[narrator]
as a possible homicide,
and sends the body to the county morgue,
hoping the coroner can help determine the cause of death.
[woman] She had severe injury to her head
with skull fractures and trauma to her brain.
And one does not suffer that during a fire
that's accidentally set.
[narrator]
De La Torriente has a homicide on his hands,
one in which a woman was intentionally set on fire,
most likely as she lay dying.
Fingerprints identify the woman as Vida Hicks,
a 42-year-old local.
Amid the bustle of Miami's produce market,
a worker swings open a bay door and finds a body.
We responded there and observed the body of a black female
laying in a supine face-up position,
and she appeared to have some injuries
to the face and head area,
and appeared to have been set on fire.
[narrator]
from where Vida Hicks was found,
and is ID'd as Diane Nelms, a local prostitute.
No sooner do detectives start picking through the case file
then they get another call.
The body of a black female has been found
in a Miami cemetery.
[Calvar] We're walking into the cemetery,
and my captain comes on over to me and he says,
"We found another body beaten and burned,
like the girls over in the produce center."
And, uh, I said, "Okay, what do you want me to do?"
And he says, "You're the lead."
"You and Nelson and Carlos
are taking all three of these cases."
[narrator]
from the first two victims.
All signs point to the same killer.
The victim's name is Cheryl Ray,
a local with some history of prostitution.
She's burned from the waist up.
Cause of death: blunt force trauma to the head.
Unlike the first two cases, however,
this time the killer might have made a mistake...
in the form of semen recovered from the victim's body.
The setting is an abandoned gas station in North Miami.
The victim: a woman, partially nude
and lying near a pool of transmission fluid.
The coroner confirms an M.O.
that by now is familiar to Miami Homicide.
A blow to the head...
followed by gasoline
and the strike of a match.
The woman is ID'd as Janice Cox.
Inside the building, the floor around Cox's body
is littered with fallen ceiling tiles,
which turns out to be a break for detectives.
The ceiling tiles, to our good fortune,
landed with the white, or the exposed area, up.
Having stepped on the transmission fluid,
he later stepped on the ceiling tiles.
[narrator]
the footprints are fresh,
and most likely belong to the killer.
[Calvar] We knew that he knew the area very well,
which means that he probably lived in that area.
Let's go get him.
Let's go hunting.
[narrator]
Callejas is approached by a woman,
a prostitute named Yolanda.
She told my partner and I that there was a guy
that approximately a year ago had approached her
and asked her if she spoke Spanish.
And she got a little closer.
And as she did that, he hit her over the head.
And all she could do was run.
She told us that she had gone to the gas station
and called the police and made a police report.
[narrator]
and tells Yolanda to give him a call
if she sees her attacker again.
Three hours later, Callejas gets a page.
Yolanda claims she just saw the man who attacked her
riding a bicycle down the street.
Callejas and a partner pick her up.
Together, they roll through the streets of Miami
looking for a man on a bike.
And we're going around. All of a sudden,
she points out and goes, "There he is."
[narrator]
His name: Francisco del Junco,
a Cuban-American living in Miami's Little Havana.
Callejas notes that hanging from the handlebars
of del Junco's bike is a juice bottle
wrapped up in a plastic bag.
[man] I asked if he had a weapon.
"No, no, that's not a weapon. That's a bottle of gasoline."
Well, it just so happens is the accelerant used
in, you know, on these victims was gasoline.
[narrator]
detectives Andreu and Calvar show up.
Just like Callejas, they want to know why a bike
without a motor requires gasoline.
Curious. Our questions to him are, "Why the gasoline?"
He says, "Well, the chain on my bicycle falls off
every once in a while, it's kind of defective."
"And I get grease on my hands,
so I use the gasoline to wipe the grease off my hands."
Um, didn't satisfy my questions very well.
I said, "Let me see the bottom of your shoe."
And there was that elusive footprint impression
that I had been looking for.
[narrator]
to come down to the station. He agrees,
but refuses to admit any involvement in the murders.
[Andreu] The question was,
"Why would somebody do something like this?"
And his response was, like,
"You wouldn't know what drives people to do things like this."
So what makes somebody do this?
[narrator]
reasons that del Junco might have wanted
to kill the four women.
[Andreu] And we start throwing out a bunch of things,
and basically he's saying, like, "No, no. Well, could be. Maybe."
Then, for some reason, it occurs to me to say,
"Santeria."
[narrator]
in Miami and the Caribbean.
A mix of Christianity and the pagan religions of West Africa.
Santeria doesn't often come up in police interrogations.
In this case, however, it seems to strike a chord.
And he says, "What did you say?"
And I said, "Santeria."
And basically his demeanor changed.
And he says, "Can we go somewhere else to talk?"
And I said to myself, Bingo.
This is it. He's ready.
[narrator]
suddenly wants to talk,
but he'll follow the lead wherever it takes him.
In this case, del Junco wants to go to the beach.
[Andreu] He says he's doing his normal daily activities.
He will become sexually aroused,
and without provocation or without any of his own doing,
he will ejaculate.
He says, "This is embarrassing."
"I could be working. I could be shopping."
"I could be doing something."
And he says, "These people do this to me."
"These people" were the voices that were telling him.
He says, "This is a Santeria priestess."
And the leader of them is this black woman.
[narrator]
as a way to get back at the priestess
who controls his mind.
[Andreu] He says that he would kill these women
to try to get even with these voices
for what they were doing to him,
to get revenge.
Maybe to try to get him to stop.
Um, this was his rationale for what he was doing.
[narrator]
is truly hallucinating,
or if the Santeria talk is just an excuse.
Whatever the case, the truth of his confession
will be tested by details only a killer would know.
With videotape rolling,
Francisco del Junco leads detectives
to the spot where he placed two bodies by the railroad tracks.
[in Spanish]
Next, they go to a cemetery,
where the body of Cheryl Ray was found.
Throughout, del Junco is the one leading police.
[Calvar] We were lost inside the cemetery,
and he actually found the spot.
And then he told us exactly, you know, how he did it.
He says, "I told her to bend over."
"I dropped her pants. We had sex."
"And then as we're having sex
and I'm about ready to ejaculate,
I reach back,
and on the vertical post of my bicycle,
I had the weapon."
"I took it out and I just started beating her with it."
[narrator]
their suspect is telling the truth.
He is arrested and charged with multiple counts of murder.
DNA from semen recovered at the Cheryl Ray crime scene
is subsequently matched to del Junco.
And his boots cannot be eliminated
as the ones that made the impressions
at the Janice Cox murder scene.
It seems that just one question remains:
Is Francisco del Junco responsible for his actions,
or is he legally insane?
[Calvar] He was off.
There was just something off about him.
[narrator]
Fink believes a "not guilty by reason of insanity" defense
is not a good option.
Under Florida law,
a defendant who is criminally insane
must not know the difference between right and wrong.
For all his bizarre behavior,
it's evident from del Junco's confession
that he can make that distinction.
The case is finally tried before a judge, in May of 2003.
After a six-week trial,
the judge finds Francisco del Junco guilty
on four counts of first-degree murder
and sentences him to four back-to-back life sentences.