Paul Durousseau is serving life in prison without parole for one murder: the killing of Tyresa Mack, a 24-year-old mother of three, in her Jacksonville apartment on July 26, 1999. He was not charged in that case until four years later. In June 2003 a Duval County grand jury indicted him for the deaths of five other young Black women who had been strangled in Jacksonville between December 2002 and February 2003, a period when he had briefly driven a cab. Two of those women were pregnant, and the youngest was 17. Detectives then reopened Mack's unsolved case and matched it to him by DNA.
Prosecutors chose to try only the Mack case. At that trial in 2007 they used evidence from two of the 2003 deaths to show that the same man had killed her, and a jury convicted him of first-degree murder and voted 10 to 2 for death. Months later the State Attorney's Office dropped the five other murder charges, worried that an acquittal in any of them could endanger the conviction it had. A Georgia murder charge from 1997 was also filed against him in 2003. His death sentence survived its first appeal but was thrown out in 2017 after the United States Supreme Court found Florida's sentencing system unconstitutional. At a new penalty trial in December 2021 the jury again split 10 to 2, short of the unanimous vote then required, and he was resentenced to life.
Durousseau was born on August 11, 1970, according to the Florida Commission on Capital Cases. The defense account of his life, set out in his appeal brief from the penalty-phase evidence, says he grew up mostly in South Central Los Angeles, in the Watts area, and spent time in Texas and Georgia. He was raised without his natural father, whom he visited in Beaumont, Texas, at about 13 or 14. He was diagnosed as a slow learner and placed in special education. He was held back, and he graduated from Reseda High School in 1989, when he was almost 19.
The trial judge accepted, as mitigation, that he came from a broken home, lost the support of his stepfather early, grew up poor in a violent neighborhood, saw his stepfather abuse his mother and was beaten as discipline as a child. The judge also found that he had worked steadily as an adult, served in the Army for about six years, supported his children and was a loving father, cared for his mother, helped look after relatives and had saved the lives of a cousin and a brother. A family history of alcohol abuse was noted, along with the finding that he himself never abused alcohol or drugs. The judge gave each of these points little or moderate weight.
He enlisted in the Army in October 1992 and was stationed in Germany, according to the defense brief, which describes about six years of service ending in a bad conduct discharge. WJXT, the Jacksonville station known as News4Jax, reported in June 2003 that he had been court-martialed in 1997 while stationed in the Army near Columbus, Georgia. He was accused of several offenses, including rape and kidnapping, and acquitted of all of them except receiving stolen property; the station reported that he was dishonorably discharged. The two accounts of the discharge differ.
He married in 1995, and he has three daughters, the defense brief says. By 1999 he was living in Jacksonville. That summer he worked for a truck tire service company whose employees wore navy uniforms, and he drove a red Mazda.
Tyresa Mack was 24 and the mother of three children. On the morning of July 26, 1999, she spent several hours with a friend applying for jobs at businesses around Jacksonville, from about 9:30 a.m. until about 1 p.m., according to the Florida Supreme Court. The last time anyone heard from her was a telephone call with a friend at about 1:25 p.m. That afternoon she failed to pick up her children from daycare and missed a 3 p.m. medical appointment for her youngest child.
At about 7 p.m. her sister and stepfather went to her apartment and found her dead. A television was missing from the living room, and so was a necklace and bracelet set she owned. The medical examiner found that she had died of asphyxia. Her aunt told Channel 4 at the time that it hurt to look at her children, who could not understand where their mother was.
The case went unsolved for four years. When it was finally tried, two witnesses placed Durousseau at her apartment between noon and 2 p.m. that day. One of them testified that she saw him carry a television out and put it in his car. Witnesses described the man as wearing a navy uniform, and a co-worker from the tire company testified that all employees had to wear one. DNA evidence linked him to her killing. He told the jury in 2007 that he had met her in April 1999 and seen her often for about three months, and that she was alive when he left her on July 26. He also said she had sold him the television because it was broken; several of her friends testified that it had been working that week.
Between December 19, 2002, and February 5, 2003, five young Black women were killed in Jacksonville, according to police. The women were 17 to 20 years old. News4Jax reported that all five were strangled and that two of them were pregnant. Durousseau was later indicted for each of the five deaths. Those charges were dropped without trial. What is known of the cases comes from police, prosecutors and the courts; none of them was ever proved against him in court.
Nichole Williams was 18. Her body was found in December 2002. Her grandmother, who spoke to Channel 4 after the arrest, had fond memories of her and wanted the man responsible to pay with his life. "He took my grand baby away," she said.
Nikia Kilpatrick was 20. She was found dead in Jacksonville on January 1, 2003; a neighbor reported seeing her on the night of December 31, so the exact time of her death is unclear. The state's appeal brief says telephone records showed many calls from Durousseau to her in December 2002, the last at 9:03 p.m. on December 29, and that two friends and a relative had seen the two of them together. The brief says DNA linked him to her as well.
Shawanda McCallister was 20. She was killed in Jacksonville on the evening of January 9, 2003, and found shortly after midnight. She and Nikia Kilpatrick had lived within five miles of each other, the Florida Supreme Court noted. According to the state's brief, Durousseau had picked her up as a cab fare that day, a cab from the company he drove for was seen nearby that evening, and a witness saw a man leave in a hurry. The brief says DNA evidence at the scene matched him. The next morning, the brief says, a 911 operator took a call from a pay phone in which the caller spoke of the previous night's "incident" and blamed the woman's boyfriend; a detective later recognized the voice as Durousseau's.
Jovanna Jefferson was 17. Surita Cohen was 19. The bodies of the last two of the five women were found on February 5, 2003, according to News4Jax. The aunt of one of the women described her to Channel 4 as sweet and fun loving, someone who always made people laugh. "She was my best friend," she said.
Durousseau had been in Jacksonville's cab trade only briefly. The defense brief says he did furniture moving work in December 2002 and began taxi driver training in January 2003. News4Jax reported that he drove a cab for a local taxi company from January 9 to January 27, 2003, a stretch that overlapped some of the killings, and that he may have met as many as three of the women through the job. The company's cabs carried cameras that photographed drivers and passengers and GPS units that tracked them; a company spokesman said the GPS data for his cab had been given to the authorities, and the company said it was reviewing its drivers' backgrounds more closely.
By early 2003 Durousseau was already known to the courts. News4Jax reported in June 2003 that he was on probation, most recently for aggravated assault, and that he had been arrested on February 6, 2003, for violating his probation in a 2001 rape case. The station listed four violations: he had no job, had not paid money owed to the Department of Corrections, had moved without telling his probation officer and had not completed psychosexual counseling. His probation had been extended twice. "He had violated twice, but courts decided to keep him on the streets," a Department of Corrections spokesman, Sterling Ivy, told the station. Police said he had kept in touch with his probation officer through the period of the killings and had spoken with the officer three days before his arrest. "It's difficult to say if we could have stopped anything before February because we didn't have evidence," Ivy said. A Jacksonville bail bondsman who read the arrest report said he had rarely seen so many violations in one case.
The aggravated assault was later the basis for one of the aggravating factors at his murder trial. The state's appeal brief describes it as a 2003 conviction for aggravated assault; the court records do not give the date of the offense.
Reporters also found that in August 2001 he had been hired by First Student, a contractor running buses for Duval County schools. Four contractors had taken over busing for more than 100,000 Jacksonville students on short notice that year, and dozens of drivers whose background checks were not complete were used in the first weeks of school. Durousseau was hired on August 15, 2001, completed 40 hours of training and drove a route. He was fired on August 30, after a criminal background check turned up a record of aggravated battery. A First Student vice president, Mike Murray, said he should not have been hired, but that the company's system had worked because he was let go once the check came back.
Durousseau was arrested on February 6, 2003, the day after the last two women's bodies were found. He was held on the probation violation, and while he was in jail detectives assembled the murder case. On June 17, 2003, he was formally charged with the deaths of the five women. A Duval County grand jury returned an indictment on five counts of first-degree murder; the court records date it June 23, 2003, while News4Jax reported it on June 19. The grand jury also indicted him on two counts of child abuse, involving two young children and connected with one of the deaths. No outcome of those counts has been reported.
State Attorney Harry Shorstein said the case had gone smoothly before the grand jury and credited the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office with a good investigation. A grand jury indictment was required if the state wanted to seek the death penalty, and Shorstein said it would. The evidence, prosecutors said, included DNA matches with the victims, matching fibers and cellular telephone records.
When the five murder charges were announced, police said Durousseau was also linked to the death of Tracy Habersham, 27, a woman in Georgia. Georgia filed a charge against him later in June 2003 for the 1997 killing of a woman in Columbus, where he had been stationed with the Army, News4Jax reported.
Because Tyresa Mack's killing resembled the 2003 cases, investigators looked at it again. The state's brief says DNA evidence led the Sheriff's Office to the Mack homicide, and that the re-investigation concluded she had been the sixth Jacksonville victim. An arrest warrant was issued after DNA connected him to her death. On August 26, 2003, he was arrested for her murder. When Detective Rodney McKean told him at booking that he was being charged, Durousseau said, "I don't know no Mack" and "I don't know that girl," according to the Florida Supreme Court. A grand jury indicted him for her murder on September 4, 2003. Sheriff John Rutherford announced the new charge.
In August 2003 Durousseau was 32. Investigators said they were examining unsolved killings in Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, Alabama, California and Germany, all places he had lived in the previous ten years, and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement was comparing DNA from cold cases with his. No further charges from that review have been reported.
The case took almost four years to reach trial. Before it began, prosecutors asked to put evidence of two of the 2003 deaths, those of Nikia Kilpatrick and Shawanda McCallister, before the Mack jury. The state offered them under Florida's Williams rule to prove identity and premeditation. The two cases were chosen from the five to keep the trial manageable. After a hearing on June 28, 2006, the trial court ruled the evidence admissible. The judge gave the jury limiting instructions when the evidence came in and again at the close of the case.
The state argued that the three deaths shared a pattern: young Black women of similar build, death by asphyxiation, and his DNA on or near each woman. His fingerprints were not found at any of the scenes. The defense argued that the similarities were general, not unique, and pointed to differences between the scenes described by a defense medical expert. It also argued that the state had not proved by clear and convincing evidence that he had committed either of the other two killings.
Jury selection began on May 22, 2007, according to News4Jax, and the trial began on May 23. Over about two weeks the jury heard dozens of witnesses. On the day before the case went to the jury, Durousseau testified for about 90 minutes. He admitted having sex with Mack, Kilpatrick and McCallister shortly before each of them died, and he denied killing any of them. He said he had heard Mack had been shot, that he had nothing to tell the police and that she was alive when he left. He said he had been with McCallister the night she died, had left, and had come back to find her dead. He admitted he had first lied to detectives by saying he did not know any of the women. Asked on cross-examination whether his sex life kept being interrupted, he answered, "It all depends on what you mean," before agreeing.
After more than ten hours of deliberation, by the News4Jax count, the jury found him guilty of first-degree murder on June 8, 2007. Mack's sister, who was raising her three children, said the long wait had been devastating. "He's getting what he deserves," she said. She said the family now had closure.
The penalty phase ran from June 26 to June 28, 2007, and the jury recommended death by a vote of 10 to 2. The defense called two mental health experts and 17 lay witnesses. Dr. Jonathan Pincus, a neurologist, testified to diffuse brain damage, mainly frontal lobe dysfunction. Dr. Dorothy Lewis, a psychiatrist, working with the neuropsychologist Dr. Katherine Yeager, diagnosed brain damage, bipolar mood disorder and schizoaffective disorder, and reported an overall IQ of 82. His lawyers argued that brain damage and mental illness had impaired him; prosecutors said he knew what he was doing. After a Spencer hearing on August 2, 2007, Circuit Judge Jack Schemer sentenced him to death on December 13, 2007.
Schemer found four aggravating factors: the murder was especially atrocious or cruel; it was committed during a robbery and a sexual battery; it was committed for financial gain; and Durousseau had a prior conviction for a violent felony. He rejected both statutory mental mitigators the defense sought, extreme mental or emotional disturbance and impaired capacity, and preferred the lay testimony to Dr. Lewis's conclusions. He found 16 of 17 proposed nonstatutory mitigators. In court he called the killing "a consciously hideous crime" and described Durousseau as "manipulative, devious and crafty." Mack's sister said afterward, "Thank God it's all over with. We have a closure." The family had waited eight years.
In November 2007 the State Attorney's Office dropped the five remaining Duval County murder charges, in the court term a nolle prosequi. News4Jax reported that prosecutors feared an acquittal in any of those cases could put the Mack conviction at risk, and that if the Mack conviction were ever overturned, it could cause problems for the remaining cases. Durousseau was never tried for the deaths of Nichole Williams, Nikia Kilpatrick, Shawanda McCallister, Jovanna Jefferson or Surita Cohen. In December 2007 he was expected to face trial in Georgia for the death of Tracy Habersham, whose body was found on September 7, 1997, two days after a party on the base at Fort Benning. Police believed she had been strangled soon after the party. No Georgia trial or verdict has been reported.
Durousseau's appeal to the Florida Supreme Court was filed on January 22, 2008. His lawyers, from the public defender's office, raised five main issues: the admission of the Kilpatrick and McCallister evidence; whether the evidence supported the financial-gain aggravator; the judge's rejection of the expert testimony on his mental state; whether the evidence was enough for a first-degree murder conviction; and a challenge under Ring v. Arizona. The court heard argument on February 10, 2010.
On December 9, 2010, the court affirmed the conviction and the death sentence. The majority held that the trial judge had not abused his discretion in admitting the collateral-crime evidence, which was relevant to identity and premeditation; that the similarities were sufficient; that the gap of about three and a half years between Mack's death and the later killings did not make the evidence unreliable; and that the evidence had not become a feature of the trial. It rejected his argument that the robbery was an afterthought, upheld the financial-gain aggravator, found the evidence of guilt sufficient, upheld the judge's handling of the mental health evidence, rejected the Ring claim and found the death sentence proportionate.
Justice Pariente dissented, joined by Justice Quince. She wrote that the trial court had never found clear and convincing proof that Durousseau committed the collateral crimes, and had instead relied on the similarity between the crimes, a kind of bootstrapping she said the law did not allow. In her view the evidence in the McCallister case was strong enough on its own, but the Kilpatrick evidence, which showed that he had had sex with her shortly before her death, had been in the area and had denied knowing her, did not meet the standard. She concluded that its admission was harmful because the state had used the similarities to argue that the deaths could not be a coincidence. A motion for rehearing was denied on February 21, 2011, and the court's mandate issued on March 9, 2011.
In October 2012 Durousseau filed a motion for postconviction relief in the trial court. It claimed that his trial lawyer had been ineffective during jury selection, and after a two-day evidentiary hearing that began on April 9, 2015, the motion was denied. Before his appeal of that ruling was decided, the law changed. In January 2016, in Hurst v. Florida, the United States Supreme Court held that Florida's capital sentencing procedures violated the right to a jury trial.
His appeal became a test case. On June 9, 2016, the Florida Supreme Court heard argument on whether the 389 people then on Florida's death row should get new sentencing hearings or have their sentences reduced automatically to life, and his lawyer, Richard Kuritz, told the justices his sentence could not stand. The lawyer argued that a Florida statute, section 775.082(2), required a life sentence.
On January 31, 2017, the court ruled. It rejected the ineffective-assistance claims and left the conviction in place, but it held that his death sentence had been imposed under an unconstitutional sentencing statute, that Hurst applied to his case and that the error was not harmless beyond a reasonable doubt, given that only ten of twelve jurors had voted for death. It vacated the sentence and sent the case back for a new penalty phase, rejecting the argument that the statute required an automatic life sentence. Justice Canady, joined by Justice Polston, dissented in part, arguing that Hurst should not apply retroactively; Senior Justice Perry would have ordered a life sentence. Durousseau was 46.
Durousseau was returned to the Duval County jail in August 2019 ahead of a hearing on his resentencing. The new penalty trial was set to begin on December 6, 2021, with about 100 prospective jurors called, before a newly selected jury that would hear the evidence again and decide whether to recommend death. At a final pretrial hearing on December 2 he said little, answering the judge in one or two words.
By then Florida law, after the 2016 rulings, required a unanimous jury recommendation for a death sentence. On December 10, 2021, the second jury voted 10 to 2 for death, the same split as in 2007. Because the vote was not unanimous, he was resentenced that day to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The Death Penalty Information Center noted at the time that Alabama was then the only state that still allowed a judge to impose death on a non-unanimous jury recommendation.
In 2023 Florida changed the law again. A bill signed by Governor Ron DeSantis in April 2023 allowed a death sentence on the vote of eight of twelve jurors. In May 2023 Durousseau, then 52 and held at Walton Correctional Institution in DeFuniak Springs, in the Florida Panhandle, spoke against it to Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications. He said the change gave "all power to the state." "Eight jurors isn't enough," he said. "They need to keep it at 12." He added that reducing the number would be unfair to a defendant fighting for his life.
In May 2023 he was serving his life sentence at Walton Correctional Institution. No later change in his status has been reported.
The deaths of six young women in one city, and the four years it took to charge anyone with the first of them, left families waiting a long time. Tyresa Mack's sister raised her three children. Nichole Williams's grandmother told reporters in 2003 that the arrest brought relief and pain at once, and relatives said there would always be a gap in their lives. The other five Jacksonville families never saw a trial.
The case also raised questions about how Durousseau kept getting jobs that put him in contact with the public. A school bus contractor had put him behind the wheel of a school bus in 2001 before his background check was finished, and he drove a cab in January 2003, weeks before his arrest for violating probation. Both companies said afterward that they had acted or would tighten their checks.
In Jacksonville television coverage he became known as the "Cabbie Killer." His appeal also became part of the long legal fight over Florida's death penalty, from Hurst in 2016 to the eight-juror law of 2023.
Proven in court and final: the first-degree murder of Tyresa Mack on July 26, 1999. The trial judge found that the killing took place during a robbery and a sexual battery, and those findings were upheld on appeal.
Charged and dropped, never tried: the deaths of Nichole Williams, Nikia Kilpatrick, Shawanda McCallister, Jovanna Jefferson and Surita Cohen. The Kilpatrick and McCallister cases were put before the Mack jury as evidence of identity, and two justices of the Florida Supreme Court said the Kilpatrick evidence should not have been admitted. Durousseau told the jury he had had sex with both women before their deaths but denied killing them.
Charged in Georgia, outcome not reported: the 1997 death of Tracy Habersham in Columbus. He was expected to be tried there after 2007; no trial has been reported.
Suspected, never charged: killings in Germany in the early 1990s, which News4Jax reported in 2017 that German authorities suspected; and the unsolved cases in several states that investigators said in 2003 they were reviewing. No charges from those reviews have been reported.
Details on which accounts differ: the date of Mack's death (July 26, 1999, in the court records; July 25 in one 2003 news report); the date of the five-count indictment (June 23, 2003, in the court records; June 19 in news reports); how his Army service ended (a bad conduct discharge, in the defense brief; a dishonorable discharge, in a 2003 news report); the spelling of two women's names (McCallister and Nichole in the court records; McCalister in news reports, and Cohn in one 2003 report); the sentencing date (December 13, 2007, in the capital cases record, the state's brief and news reports; June 28, 2007, in the 2010 opinion); and the length of the jury's deliberation (more than ten hours in news reports; about nine and a half in the defense brief).
August 11, 1970: Paul Durousseau is born.
1989: graduates from Reseda High School in Los Angeles.
October 1992: enlists in the Army; serves in Germany.
1995: marries.
1997: court-martialed near Columbus, Georgia; acquitted of all charges but receiving stolen property (News4Jax).
September 7, 1997: Tracy Habersham, 27, is found dead in Columbus, Georgia.
July 26, 1999: Tyresa Mack, 24, is killed in Jacksonville.
August 15 to 30, 2001: drives a school bus for a Duval County contractor until a background check ends the job.
December 19, 2002, to February 5, 2003: five young women are killed in Jacksonville.
January 9 to 27, 2003: drives a cab for a Jacksonville taxi company.
February 6, 2003: arrested for violating probation.
June 17, 2003: charged with the five killings; Georgia files a charge later in June.
June 23, 2003: indicted on five counts of first-degree murder and two counts of child abuse.
August 26, 2003: arrested for the Mack murder.
September 4, 2003: indicted for the Mack murder.
June 28, 2006: Williams rule hearing.
May 23, 2007: trial begins.
June 8, 2007: found guilty of first-degree murder.
June 28, 2007: jury recommends death, 10 to 2.
November 2007: the five other murder charges are dropped.
December 13, 2007: sentenced to death by Judge Jack Schemer.
December 9, 2010: Florida Supreme Court affirms.
October 1, 2012: postconviction motion filed.
January 2016: Hurst v. Florida decided.
June 9, 2016: Florida Supreme Court hears his Hurst appeal.
January 31, 2017: death sentence vacated; new penalty phase ordered.
August 2019: returned to the Duval County jail ahead of a resentencing hearing.
December 10, 2021: second jury votes 10 to 2; resentenced to life without parole.
April 2023: Florida allows death sentences on an 8 to 4 jury vote.
May 2023: speaks against the law from Walton Correctional Institution.