FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — A Brazilian national who was killed in a 2005 plane crash has been identified Tuesday as a serial killer connected to the deaths of at least three Florida women in the early 2000s.
Roberto Fernandes was linked via DNA evidence to the murders of Jessica Good, 24, Kimber Dietz-Livesey, 35, and Sia Demas, 21, the Broward County Sheriff’s Department said, according to WPTV-TV.
Once he was identified as the suspect in the cold case homicides, investigators worked with the Brazilian government to exhume Fernandes’ body for confirmation.
Dietz-Livesey was beaten to death in the summer of 2000. Afterward, her body was stuffed in a suitcase and left on the side of a road in Cooper City, Florida, the Sun-Sentinel reported.
Demas was murdered weeks later. Her body was also shoved in a suitcase and discarded on the side of a road in Dania Beach, Florida.
Good’s body was found floating in Miami’s Biscayne Bay about a year later, WPTV reported.
Fernandes, who was living in Miami at the time of the homicides, is believed to be responsible for each murder, according to investigators. He reportedly fled to Brazil after Good was murdered.
Kimberly Dietz-Livesey, Sia Demas and Jessica Good, from left, were killed by Roberto Fernandes in 2000 and 2001, authorities say.
“We were fortunate that both our government here and the partnership we had with Brazil afforded these men and women an opportunity to further investigate and get to a point where they exhumed the body to connect DNA evidence confirming this suspect, Roberto Fernandes, was indeed responsible for the brutal murder of all three of these women,” Broward County Sheriff Gregory Tony said in a news conference Tuesday. “Justice never expires.”
The Sun-Sentinel reported that Dietz-Livesey and Demas worked as prostitutes and that may have been how Fernandes met them.
According to BSO, Fernandes likely killed additional victims, Fox reported.
“Personally, someone who has this type of violence toward their victims and disregard for life, I find it hard to believe that they limited themselves to three victims,” Det. Zach Scott said.
Early in the investigation, detectives noticed a pattern in the homicides, but couldn’t connect all three.
The killer’s fingerprints were matched to two of the murders, and a decade later his DNA was linked to all three crime scenes. Hence, his body was exhumed in Brazil last October, WPTV reported.
In 1996, Fernandes was accused of killing his wife in Brazil. He was acquitted after claiming self-defense. According to reports, he crashed his plane in 2005 while trying to flee Brazil for Paraguay after discovering that assassins may have been hunting him in retaliation for his wife’s death.
“There were a lot of circumstantial things that were discovered in Brazil that led them to believe that he might have faked his own death,” Scott said. “He had amassed a certain amount of enemies in the country of Brazil.”
As a result, investigators worked with Brazilian authorities and the U.S. Department of Justice to convince a judge there to exhume the body in Fernandes’ grave, the Sun-Sentinel reported.
Scott said the Brazilian government “has been nothing but helpful” in their investigation.
