Crime Beat

last week, and another suspect is being sought.
    What remains to be learned is the identity of the victim.
    “We don’t have anything, not a clue to who he was,” said Edwina Johnson, an investigator for the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office. “We have gone to great lengths to find out. We’ve done everything we could think of and gotten no luck whatsoever. It would seem that somebody has to know who he was.”
    Fort Lauderdale Police Detective Phil Mundy said that in his 10 years in the homicide bureau there have been unidentified murder victims before, but not a case where a killer is caught and convicted while the name of the victim remains unknown.
    “It’s unusual,” he said. “In a whodunit type of murder, you first try to identify the dead man and go from there. But we never got anywhere with the identification. All we have is a dead man who has nothing extraordinary about his appearance. He could fit the description of thousands of men.”
    On police and medical examiner’s records, the murder victim is simply known as “unidentified white male, case no. 85-43959.” On court documents, photographs of the man slumped in the motel room and laid out on a medical examiner’s table are attached to that identification.
    The man is described as having been 5-foot-8, weighing 180 pounds, with brown hair, eyes and mustache. He was approximately 35 years old.
    He was found sprawled on the floor of a room at the Interlude Motel, 1215 S. Federal Highway. Police think he accompanied two male prostitutes to the room and then was robbed and killed. His body was nude. There were no clothes or other belongings in the room. No wallet. No I.D. Just the signs of a struggle and a bloody handprint on the wall—a print that would later lead to the identification of one of his killers.
    “There was nothing left in that room that could help us identify the victim,” said Mundy. “The killers took it with them.”
    So the detective started with the dead man’s fingerprints. They were sent to state and national agencies, to Canadian authorities and to Interpol for comparison. They got no matches.
    Missing persons bulletins were sent out across the country with an artist’s drawing of the victim attached. A few leads came back, but they were dead ends.
    “Nothing panned out. They weren’t our guy,” said Mundy. “Usually the description wouldn’t match. We ran down a few of the names we got and found each guy was still alive and well.”
    Locally, investigators had the drawing published in newspapers and magazines, put it on TV, passed it around hotels and bars frequented by a mostly homosexual clientele. They found no one who had seen the man.
    Believing the victim had been a tourist, investigators checked with auto rental agencies in Broward in hopes of finding a report of an overdue car with the name of the murder victim on it. They visited local car towing agencies to check on abandoned vehicles that had been towed in the city after the murder. They found no clues.
    “If he did rent a car, God knows where he rented it,” said Mundy.
    A month after the murder, the bloody palm print on the wall of the motel room led to the positive identification of Peter L. Ruggirello as a suspect. He was arrested in Jacksonville a year ago today. His accomplice, a man police identified as Wayne Moore, remains at large.
    Mundy said Ruggirello never cooperated with investigators in providing the name of the murder victim. At his trial in Broward Circuit Court, Ruggirello said the man’s name was Adam and that he had met him and Moore near the Backstreet bar on West Broward Boulevard near downtown. He denied being involved in the murder.
    Prosecutor Peter LaPorte said an informant told authorities that Ruggirello once said the man’s name was Henry Faulkner. Authorities aren’t sure whether either of the names is the real one but believe Ruggirello knows more about the man he is convicted of killing than he has said.
    “There are still a lot of questions that only Ruggirello and the individual that is still at large could answer,” said Mundy.
    Because of those questions, Mundy keeps the investigation file on the top of his desk. The case is still open, though the chances of identifying the victim grow slimmer with time.
    “My guess is he was from out of state,” Mundy said. “He could have been reported missing in some other jurisdiction and we might never know it.”

DOUBLE LIFE
MICHAEL BRYANT’S DOUBLE