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  Past
Special Reports
Aug. 5, 1973: Laura Lynn Harberts, 18, Orlando hospital records clerk, disappears. Aug. 21: Pool worker finds Harberts' body in a dump in Altamore Springs. (Another corpse never identified.) Dec 2: Ralph DiLisio, marina owner in Maitland, marries Keppie Epton. Her secret lover, Outlaw motorcyclist ''Crazy Joe'' Spaziano, attends ceremony. Feb. 9, 1974: Someone assaults Vanessa Dale Croft, 16, slashing her eyes. Feb. 10: Medical examiner finds no evidence of sex. Police believe crime occurred at Outlaws clubhouse. Feb. 13: Police issue warrant for Spaziano's arrest. Feb. 15: Spaziano takes off for Rochester, N.Y. February: Croft fails to identify photo of Spaziano. March 8: Croft fails police lie detector test. Examiner concludes she knew the men and that sex was consensual. Oct. 7: With tip from Ralph DiLisio, police interview his son Tony, 16, at juvenile detention center. He says Spaziano raped lots of women. April 25, 1975: Spaziano arrested in Chicago for disorderly conduct. May 13: Croft fails to identify Spaziano in police line-up. May 14: Croft changes her mind, identifies Spaziano. May 15: Joseph McCawley hypnotizes Tony DiLisio for police. May 16: Police take Tony to dump and McCawley again hypnotizes him. May 16: State indicts Spaziano for Croft rape and assault. Aug. 11-13: Spaziano tried for Croft rape. Judge tells jury it can not consider Spaziano's tattoos. Tony testifies Spaziano admitted slashing and rape. Jury convicts. Spaziano sentenced to life. Sept. 12: Spaziano indicted for Harberts murder. Jan. 19-23, 1976: State tries Spaziano for Harberts murder. Tony DiLisio is prosecution's star witness. Spaziano convicted. Jury recommends life. July 16: Circuit Judge Robert McGregor, relying on rape conviction, overrules jury and sentences Spaziano to death. June 9, 1995: Tony DiLisio recants to The Miami Herald. Sept. 12, 1995: Execution stayed. Jan. 22, 1996: After a six-day hearing, Circuit Judge O.H. Eaton Jr. orders new trial in Harberts murder case. Nov. 6, 1998: States offers deal. Plead to second degree -- and take ''time served.'' Spaziano accepts, citing ''best interest/maintaining my innocence, nolo contendere.'' Dec. 28, 1998: Appellate defense lawyers petition Florida Supreme Court on Croft rape conviction.  |
''He should rot in prison,'' said Seminole County State Attorney Norman Wolfinger. ''He should die there.''
The prosecutor is exasperated. The rape conviction is the reason Spaziano remains in prison. Without it, he would be a free man.
The saga of Joseph Robert ''Crazy Joe'' Spaziano may well be modern America's most unusual malfunction of justice, defenders assert. Not only was he framed for murder, they say, he also was framed for rape.
''Simply put, Spaziano is, in fact, innocent of the crimes for which he was convicted based on highly trustworthy, newly discovered evidence,'' appellate defense attorneys Philip A. Hubbart, Melvin S. Black and James M. Russ declared in a Dec. 28, 1998 petition to the Florida Supreme Court, referring to the recantation. They want an evidentiary hearing. Prosecutors don't.
Between 1976 and 1996, Spaziano survived five death warrants for the murder of Laura Lynn Harberts, 18, a hospital clerk whose body was found in a dump in 1973. Seminole County Circuit Court Judge O.H. Eaton, Jr. conducted a six-day hearing in 1996, threw out the conviction and ordered a new trial.
For almost three years, Wolfinger's investigators ''tried and tried and tried to build a case.'' They failed. That's when the state offered Spaziano a plea-bargain deal. Its formal title: ''Mr. Spaziano's 'best interest/maintaining my innocence' plea of nolo contendere (no contest) to the lesser included offense of murder in the second degree.'' The agreement: No trial. Take ''time served.''
On Nov. 6, 1998, Spaziano took it. He had been on Death Row for two decades.
Bitterly, Wolfinger said the deal ''sickened'' him. ''This is the worst day of my career.''
THE BEGINNING
Motorcyle gang created fear
in Central Florida
The odyssey of Crazy Joe began late the night of Feb. 9, 1974 with a tangle of lies during an era when the citizenry of Central Florida detested motorcycle gangs for good reasons. To peace and tranquillity, the Outlaws qualified as a genuine menace.
On that chilly winter night a man -- never questioned, never identified -- pounded on the door of a house off a dirt road north of Orlando. Ann Hawkins came to the door, and the man told her, ''There was a girl out in my front yard . . . cut up and beat up and needed help.'' Bleeding and dirty, clenching a blanket, she wore only a torn shirt, bra, panties and shoes.
Vanessa Dale Croft, then 16, a high school student known as ''Squeaky,'' needed help. Someone had taken a sharp instrument -- possibly a scalpel, possibly a razor -- and slashed her eyelids deeply, cutting into the left eye itself.
The inflictions appeared sadistic in nature, as if someone had deliberately tortured her.
At 12:35 a.m. Feb. 10, 1974, the first Orange County sheriff's deputy arrived at the house. James Michael Hoover was a trouble-prone cop with an unusal job distinction: He had worked undercover at a dilapidated clubhouse of the Outlaws motorcycle gang -- about 10 miles away. Only two days before, The Orlando Sentinel-Star had reported a previous biker attack on two girls.
From his conversation with Croft, Hoover quickly deduced that the crime occurred at the Outlaw clubhouse. Croft told him two men had kidnapped her at knifepoint from the street as she was walking home. She lived one block from Orlando's Orange Blossom Trail, a thoroughfare with strip joints and bars.
Croft, whose older brother ran around with bikers, described her assailants. One was Dennis, about 24, about 5-foot-5, 130 pounds, long dark hair and a beard, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and a Levi jacket.
Hoover asked her specifically if he had any tattoos. None, she said. It didn't seem important at the time. At trial 19 months later, Dennis had become Spaziano -- a man with tattoos on both upper arms: crossed pistols, ball of fire, waving ribbon, and four initials, F, T, G and W.
Croft described the other assailant: Ronnie, about 24, 5-foot-7, 150 pounds, straight black hair and a moustache, wearing slacks and a sweat shirt. Ronnie had the knife, she said.
According to Hoover's original report, Croft said the two men drove her to a rundown house with a dismantled motorcycle in the kitchen. They undressed her, raped and punched her, she said, and Dennis choked her unconscious with her own belt. She didn't know who cut her eye, she said, and afterward they dumped her in a woods. A motorist found her, she said, and dropped her off in the yard of a stranger, Ann Hawkins. Hoover didn't bother to ask what the motorist looked like.
Years later Hoover said it was Croft, not he, who came up with the description of the Outlaw clubhouse.
POLICE WORK
Facts didn't seem to fit the
crime
Hoover didn't last too long as a cop in Orange County. Ten days after the Croft crime, he left the sheriff's office. His 1998 explanation: Involvement in a traffic accident that ''killed a priest and two nuns.'' The sheriff, he professed, thought his continued employment could be a political albatross. The Catholic Diocese in Orlando is unaware any such fatalities in 1974 or any other year.
Hoover lasted a year with the Minneola Sheriff's Department. In a letter to the Florida Police Standards and Training Division, Officer Edsel Decker complained that Hoover had spread ''malicious gossip'' about him raping a 14-year-old girl. ''Any agency that hires him is asking for grief,'' Decker wrote.
The Gainesville Police Department hired Hoover in December 1975. Retired on disability in October 1981, he became a criminal defendant himself in 1992. Police arrested him for robbing the Suwanee Swifty convenience store in Keystone Heights, using a pocket knife to steal $25. He pleaded no contest -- and got two years of house arrest. These days Hoover says he is in hiding because the Mafia is after him.
But on that February night in 1974, no one questioned Hoover's conclusion that the crime occurred in the Outlaw clubhouse.
At Florida Hospital, an ophthalmologist, Garrett Crotty, sutured Croft's wounds, noting a superficial cut to her throat. Someone had struck her in the right eye, possibly with a blunt instrument, he said. Croft remained in the hospital two weeks. The doctor said she lost nearly all vision in her left eye.
At 10 a.m. the next day, Dr. Guillermo Ruiz, the Orange County medical examiner, examined Croft, supposedly the victim of five or six distinct sexual acts by the two men, cunnilingus, fellatio, vaginal and anal intercourse. She talked about it in the language of the street. They held her captive, she indicated, for more than two hours.
Yet microscopic tests for spermatozoa proved negative. ''There is no evidence that this girl had recent sexual intercourse,'' Ruiz concluded. Furthermore, he found no evidence of a beating or injury other than the inflictions to her eye. No one asked him if a belt used to choke her unconscious would bruise her neck.
Logically, though, if the assault occurred at the Outlaw clubhouse, police could find physical evidence there: sperm, hair, blood, fingerprints. Missing still were Croft's belt, orange hip huggers and a brown vest. And what happened to the weapon -- whatever it was?
Lab technicians found nothing. If they compiled a report, it was never filed in a court proceeding.
Marianne Pearch Scholer, then a rookie cop, remembers going to the Outlaw clubhouse. ''It was nasty inside. It looked abandoned'' -- and it didn't have electricity. Much later Croft would describe the interior as it appeared the hour before midnight and claim she saw an electric heater turned on.
CHANGING STORIES
Victim gave differing
accounts in 3 interviews
In the 24 hours after the crime, Pearch interviewed Croft three times. Her story kept changing. Dennis' black hair became ''reddish.'' She wasn't forced into the pickup truck at knifepoint, she admitted, but voluntarily got in to smoke pot.
And Croft changed the place where someone cut her eye. It no longer occurred at the clubhouse, but after the rape in a weedy place. Police never found the site.
The clubhouse account blossomed into headlines on page one of the Orlando newspaper on Feb. 11: ''Cycle Duo Assaults, Stabs Eye of Girl/ 'Outlaws' Get Blame For Attack.'' The report touched on other Outlaw acts of terror, among them a Fort Lauderdale woman ''strung up by her thumbs and killed.''
Among the readers that day was Keppie Epton DiLisio, 28, an attractive and promiscuous boat show model. Two months before, she had married Ralph DiLisio, 52, a hot-tempered, wheeler-dealer owner of a marina in Maitland. He had just divorced his wife, mother of six.
Keppie, as she was called, cut a wide swath through the DiLisio family -- by any standard, a dysfunctional family. She had affairs with two of her husband's sons, eventually running off with one who died of a drug overdose.
A bunch of Outlaw motorcyclists hung around the marina at the time, and as Keppie put it, ''Ralph was insanely jealous.'' He kept her virtually locked up in an expensive house.
Keppie telephoned JoAnn Hardee, the lead detective on the case. She knew who committed the crime: ''Crazy Joe.'' That's who. He had raped her, too, she said.
Spaziano, 28, also known as ''Little Joe,'' was a well-tattooed, 130-pound, low-level crook from Rochester, N.Y., with a rap sheet for grand larceny, petty larceny, assault, vagrancy, robbery, soliciting a prostitute, lewd and lascivious behavior, and driving with no driver's license. He served a year in prison in 1967.
''Crazy Joe,'' they called him because a car ran over his head at age 20, and he acted funny, often playing the clown, showboating and hotdogging. Soaked in a rainstorm once, Spaziano put his clothes in a laundromat dryer -- and waited in the nude for them to dry.
In Rochester, he got into a hellacious fight after he joined -- and tried to quit -- the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang. Bikers tied him to a basement water pipe and beat and burned him with cigarettes. His father-in-law, a Florida jockey, treated his injuries with horse medicine.
Spaziano and his wife moved to Hollywood in 1970. He drove a truck for a concrete company and became a Teamster. He moved his family to Orlando in 1972 and joined the Outlaws in November 1973 -- three months before the Croft episode.
Spaziano knew the DiLisio family well. He and Ralph, he said, talked about converting a boat and smuggling marijuana from the Bahamas. Spaziano attended the Keppie-Ralph wedding -- and flirted with the bride. For weeks, he said, he secretly romanced her. ''She was a real looker.''
Spaziano remembers Ralph coming to his house and pointing a revolver at him in February 1974.
''He told me to stop sleeping with his wife, or he'd kill me. I believed him. He knew people. I was an easy target, everybody knew how to find Crazy Joe. He coulda got somebody to do it for him, easy.''
From Keppie's tip, police identified Spaziano and obtained a highly detailed description from Rochester. Then they concocted their own description, attributing it to Croft. She failed to pick Spaziano out of a photo lineup.
Keppie's tip to police wasn't the only one. Deborah Magruder, a high school dropout, said two men abducted her at knifepoint and took her to a party outside the Outlaw clubhouse. Both were named ''Joe,'' she said. This led to another rape charge against Spaziano and John Allen Beeker, an Outlaw whose nickname was ''Ratturd.''
That prosecution collapsed months later when, among other things, the teenager testified in a deposition that Detective Hardee mentioned Spaziano by name during a lineup.
Spaziano's girlfriend, a topless dancer named Darcy Fauss, said they heard about the Croft rape on the radio. She remembered the night of the assault. She was dancing at The Inferno. Spaziano was there and he gave the keys to his pickup truck to two Outlaw pals, she said. It was a two-toned blue Deluxe Ford only six months old.
Croft had described the rapists' vehicle as a black Chevy pickup, stripped down inside, bare floorboard, maybe five years old, maybe one year.
To Spaziano, ''It was time to get out for a while.'' Once before, he said, he had loaned his truck and his pals used it in a burglary. Credit card receipts showed he left five days after the crime and it took him a week to drive to Rochester. That's where he found out about the warrant, he said. ''They told my Dad it was for rape, and I just knew it was Keppie. I figured Keppie and Ralph set me up.''
POLYGRAPH TEST
Examiner concluded the
victim was lying
Despite the warrant for Spaziano, Croft's inconsistent statements worried police. So on March 8, 1974, they did something highly unusual in a rape case. Polygraph examiner James E. Shannon tested the victim:
''Did you willingly go with those two men? Did anyone use drugs, including marijuana that night? Have you been to that house before? Have you seen those men before? Did you willingly have sexual relations with those men? Do you know who these men are?''
To all questions, Croft answered no. Shannon concluded she was lying: ''It is my opinion that Dale left willingly with the two men to a house that she has visited previously. Sexual relations were indicated to be freely given and that she knows the men involved.''
Police kept the report secret. Prosecutors produced it during appellate litigation in 1995 -- 21 years later. The examiner didn't question her about the one indisputable fact of the case: the eye injury that put her in the hospital.
In the summer of 1974, Croft was hospitalized again. Police arrested her father, Vann Croft, for ''beating his 16-yr-old daughter with a belt to the point of cruelty.'' A judge dismissed the charge when the state didn't comply with the speedy trial limit.
The hunt for the second suspect, ''Ronnie,'' the knife-wielder, never went very far. Detectives suspected a young man named Ronnie Horne, under arrest that April in the first of four sexual assault cases. But he wasn't a biker, didn't hang around the Outlaw clubhouse and Croft failed to pick him out of a lineup.
FATHER AND SON
Both had sex with same
woman -- the father's wife
This didn't bother Ralph DiLisio too much. He tipped his police pals about his son, Tony. Tony knew things about Spaziano, the father told George Abbgy, a deputy in neighboring Seminole County. Deputies bought boats from Ralph DiLisio.
Deputy Abbgy had a troublesome double homicide, unsolved for six months, and publications like True Detective played it big: ''Florida's Riddle of The Naked Teenagers On The Dump Heap.''
Abbgy, in fact, had given the skull of one victim to a psychic and driven her around the countryside in a squad car, hoping for extrasensory guidance.
On Oct. 8, 1974, Abbgy and Ralph DiLisio visited Tony -- in a juvenile detention center. Jailed as delinquent at age 16, Tony had a drug problem: LSD, heroin and marijuana. Sure, he said, Spaziano told him about raping and slashing lots of girls. What he didn't tell was that he knew all about Spaziano's affair with Keppie, and that he, too, had slept with her.
(Keppie denied this for years. But after a 1996 interview, Seminole investigators Ralph Salerno and Ray Parker wrote: ''Ledford [her new married name] volunteered that she had an affair with Anthony, prior to marrying Anthony's father, Ralph.'' but declined, due to the embarrassment, to elaborate further.'')
In Chicago a year later, Spaziano got picked up for disorderly conduct, waived extradition, and Orange County police conducted a lineup on May 13, 1975.
In one respect, it was extremely unusual: Five men -- Spaziano, 29, two men aged 18, one 21, and another 23 -- put their arms behind their backs, hiding any tattoos.
Police gave Croft an identification form: ''If you have previously seen one or more the persons in the lineup, place an X in the appropriate spot.'' Croft made a zero.
That's when Detective Hardee took her to the captain's office and had a little talk. The next day -- after she said she spoke to the Lord -- she changed her mind. She identified Spaziano.
In a deposition later, defense lawyer Ed Kirkland asked, ''Isn't it true, Vanessa, that you did in fact discuss this matter after you had failed to recognize him with Detective Hardee, and she, in fact, told you the names of the persons in the lineup, more particularly as Joe Spaziano was the one? Swear to it. Answer to that on your God.''
''She said that, yes,'' Croft replied.
On May 15, two days after the flip-flop identification, police acquired the services of Joseph B. McCawley, a self-proclaimed ''ethical'' hypnotist. He questioned Tony about the dump murders, unsolved for almost two years. Tony said he didn't know anything about any dead bodies.
But the next day, May 16, Deputy Abbgy and Ralph DiLisio took Tony to the dump -- and McCawley again hypnotized Tony. This time Tony proclaimed, in a trance, he had seen a body; no, two bodies. That same day the state of Florida formally indicted Spaziano for rape, aggravated assault and assault with intent to commit murder.
THE TATTOOS
Judge told the jury not to
consider them
When the rape case went to trial in August, Croft testified she was positive of her identification. Seeing Spaziano on television had nothing to do with it. She admitted she had lied at first because ''I was afraid . . . I did not want to be bothered by people. I was upset.''
Prosecutor William Ray Sharpe hammered home the point: ''We told you from the beginning that she had given inconsistent statements . . . She didn't want people to think bad of her. She didn't want her parents to find out . . . She had to go through a lot in this courtroom.''
Everyone went through a lot in that courtroom. In a what amounted to an incredibly dumb psychological tactic for the defense, swaggering bikers showed up as spectators. People felt intimidated. The judge intensified security. A prosecutor said later that he had been threatened.
 IMPORTANT POINT: This
1971 family photo of Spaziano and his baby daughter shows he had the
tattoos well before the alleged rape was committed.
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He instructed jurors a third time -- in writing: ''The subject of whether or not the defendant had tattoos on his arms at the time of the alleged offense should not be discussed or considered or weighed in any way in your deliberations or your verdict.''
Why? Because the defense didn't show when Spaziano got them. It could have been after the rape, the prosecutor suggested.
It wasn't until the late 1980s -- more than 12 years after the conviction -- that an appellate lawyer asked Spaziano's mother, Rose, about photographs. She found one: Joe, 26, sprawled on a carpet playing with his baby daughter, Mary Noel, his tattoos clearly visible. The age of the baby established the date: late 1970 or early 1971 -- more than two years before the crime.
By 1990, though, appellate courts ruled that procedural time restrictions made it too late to bring up. Innocence wasn't an issue.
Even more crucial to the 1975 conviction was the testimony of Tony DiLisio. He claimed that Spaziano ''bragged to me that he raped a young girl . . . stabbed and raped her, slashed her eyes . . . I don't remember his exact words, but it was like if he knew she was still alive, he would have went back and finished it.''
In closing arguments, prosecutor Sharpe emphasized DiLisio's importance. ''He is the strongest reason in the case, outside the facts and the physical evidence and the emotional evidence that the victim has given. Tony DiLisio's testimony corroborates her story. I know it's a one-on-one situation, the victim versus the defendant, saying he did it, but we have a second person who can say that he did it. That's very strong evidence.''
FALSE TESTIMONY
It kept prisoner on death
row for 20 years
DiLisio's testimony in 1975 was not only untrue, but ''devastating,'' his lawyers now say. For rape and forcible carnal knowledge and aggravated battery, Spaziano got life, plus five years.
Even more devastating was DiLisio's false testimony in the 1976 murder trial -- six months later -- that put Spaziano on Death Row for 20 years. Five times governors signed his death warrant.
Only 19 days before the scheduled 1995 execution, DiLisio admitted to The Miami Herald that he made it all up. He lied, he said, because his father hated Spaziano for making love to his new wife. He lied because he wanted the cops to get him out of the juvenile detention center. And he lied, he said, because he would have done anything to please his demanding, abusive father.
Spaziano suspected another reason. ''He [Tony] is mad maybe because his stepmom told me to tell Tony not to mess with her no more because she was married to his dad. But then he seen her give it to me many times.''
Seminole County Circuit Judge Eaton listened to this sordid soap opera during a six-day hearing on the murder case in 1996 and ordered the new trial. But when defense attorney Russ asked Orange County Circuit Judge Dorothy Russell for a new trial on the rape case, she refused a hearing. Instead, she relied on the 1975 transcript.
A ''colossal waste of time and resources for everyone concerned,'' she concluded. The Fifth District Court of Appeal upheld her without an opinion. This is the issue now before the Florida Supreme Court. Hubbart and Black also filed a petition in federal court in Orlando.
OF LITTLE HOPE
Spaziano believes he will
stay behind bars
Much has changed since the 1975 conviction. Homicide investigator Abbgy is dead, as is DiLisio's father. Tony, now 41, is a born-again Christian known as ''Brother Nitro'' for his bombastic preaching. He restores antique cars in Pensacola.
Seminole County is adding up bills for its futile $200,000-plus investigation. To its psychic and hypnotist beginning, investigators added cannibalism. Sandra Lynn Rose Radford, a onetime go-go dancer, stepped forward in 1996 to claim a bunch of bikers attacked her ''somewhere near Jacksonville'' in 1971, and Spaziano knifed and mutilated her breast and consumed the pieces. At the time of this alleged crime 28 years ago, she didn't bother to tell police or see a physician.
To Spaziano, there seemed no end to the lies. Sammy Nails, an Outlaw informant in the federal witness protection program, claimed Spaziano kept a bag of teeth as souvenirs and had his own personal cemeteries where he buried ''hundreds'' of bodies.
Investigator Parker found Croft in Marianna in 1996, and she provided the state with a new theory. ''While in the witness room [20 years ago] with DiLisio, she stated she felt uneasy,'' Parker wrote. ''She stated she couldn't help think that DiLisio was the unidentified subject that accompanied Spaziano the night she was raped.''
Why didn't she say anything at the time? Why didn't her descriptions come close? Parker didn't inquire.
Croft refuses to talk to the press and directs inquires to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Her former mother-in-law said Croft sought counseling because of her ordeal.
Spaziano's ordeal diminishes. After 20 years on Death Row and two years in solitary confinement, he now makes french toast, corn bread, chocolate cake and cookies in the kitchen at Florida State Prison in Starke and cheerfully serves them to assorted thieves, murderers and rapists.
At age 53, he is not hopeful. ''I don't think I'll get parole. They got me in a trap. I ain't gonna see the outside of these doors.''
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Copyright 1999 Miami Herald