UPDATE
Apr 8, 2025 6:16 PM CDT
Florida has executed a man who kidnapped, raped, and murdered a Miami Herald employee 25 years ago. Michael Tanzi, whose lawyers had argued that he was too obese for lethal injection to work, was pronounced dead at 6:12pm Tuesday following a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison, the AP reports. In his final statement, the 48-year-old apologized to Janet Acosta's family and recited a Bible verse. Tanzi kidnapped Acosta in Miami on April 25, 2000 and left her body in a remote part of the Florida Keys. After his arrest days later, he confessed to killing a Massachusetts woman the previous year but he was never tried for the killing of laundromat employee Caroline Holder. Police described him in 2003 as a "fledgling serial killer."
Apr 7, 2025 10:56 AM CDT
Florida is set to execute a "fledgling serial killer," who admitted to killing two women within eight months before his 2000 capture. Defense attorneys say Michael Tanzi deserves mercy due to trauma and abuse as a child, developmental issues, and health issues stemming from severe obesity, per USA Today. But prosecutors say the 48-year-old doesn't deserve any mercy following a killing that can "only be described as horrific." Michael Tanzi was arrested in 2000 in the rape and murder of Miami Herald employee Janet Acosta. The 49-year-old was on her lunch break, eating in her van at Miami's Japanese Rock Gardens, on April 25 when Tanzi forced his way inside and tied her up.
He then drove around, at one point raping Acosta while threatening to cut her with a razor blade, per the AP. "I told her that I'd cut her from ear to ear," he told police during a confession, per USA Today. After four hours of torture, he told Acosta he would release her, but ultimately strangled her and dumped her body. "If I had let her go, I was gonna get caught quicker," he told police. "I didn't want to get caught. I was having too much fun." After his arrest, Tanzi admitted to fatally stabbing 37-year-old Caroline Holder, an employee at a laundromat in Brockton, Massachusetts, on Aug. 11, 1999, though his death sentence in the Acosta case prevented him from being extradited and tried.
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Defense lawyers say Tanzi's behavior stemmed from childhood sexual molestation by a friend and physical and emotional abuse by his father. A friend recalled seeing Tanzi's father slam his head against the side of a truck, per USA Today. Lawyers have also argued that, as a morbidly obese man with sciatica, Tanzi would face "torture" in having to lie down and be restrained in preparation for a lethal injection. They've suggested the usual sedative won't work on a man of his size. But the Florida Supreme Court allowed the execution to go forward, meaning Tanzi is likely to die by lethal injection at 6pm Tuesday at Florida State Prison, even though Acosta was against the death penalty, per the Herald. (More execution stories.)
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