Theresa Giles was a 22-year-old Black woman whose life ended violently in Fort Lauderdale on December 18, 1984. Her name is also rendered as Teresa Giles in some accounts. She was killed during a period when women and girls in northwest Fort Lauderdale were being sexually assaulted and murdered under strikingly similar circumstances. Although publicly available accounts provide few details about Giles’s personal life or the precise location where she was found, investigators concluded that
she had been sexually assaulted and killed, placing her death within a series of attacks that had frightened the community for years.
Suspicion eventually centered on Eddie Lee Mosley, a Fort Lauderdale man with a long history of arrests, sexual violence allegations and psychiatric confinement. Mosley had previously been imprisoned for an attempted sexual assault, but his conviction was overturned, and he was released in December 1983. During the following years, additional women were attacked or killed in and around the same part of Fort Lauderdale. Detectives noticed that many of the crimes involved vulnerable victims, secluded locations and sexual violence followed by strangulation or suffocation.
Mosley had already been investigated in connection with numerous assaults, yet efforts to keep him confined repeatedly failed. In May 1984, only months before Giles was killed, he was arrested for allegedly raping another young woman. Mosley claimed the encounter was consensual, and he was acquitted in October. He was returned to the community, and Giles was killed less than two months later. Her death became one of the cases that investigators later used to strengthen their belief that the same offender was responsible for a continuing pattern of violence.
The investigation gained momentum in 1987 after Mosley was taken into custody on an unrelated theft allegation. Detectives questioned him extensively about several Fort Lauderdale murders. Investigators also had blood-group evidence that was consistent with biological material recovered in the homicide cases. During questioning, Mosley reportedly provided information indicating knowledge of the crimes and ultimately confessed to killing Giles and Emma Cook, another Fort Lauderdale victim.
A Broward County grand jury indicted Mosley in July 1987 for the murders of Giles and Cook. The charges appeared to bring the Giles case closer to a courtroom resolution, but Mosley’s mental condition became the central issue in the proceedings. Psychological testing found that he had a severe intellectual disability and was unable to understand the case against him or assist his attorneys adequately. In October 1987, a judge ruled him incompetent to stand trial and ordered him committed for psychiatric treatment.
Because of that ruling, Mosley was never tried or convicted for Giles’s murder. He remained confined in Florida psychiatric institutions, where officials periodically evaluated whether he had become competent enough to face prosecution. He was repeatedly found unable to proceed, preventing a jury from hearing the evidence and leaving the murder charge unresolved through a formal verdict.
Later forensic testing provided powerful confirmation of the investigators’ case. DNA examinations conducted years after the killing linked Mosley to Giles and several other women and girls murdered in Broward County. Those findings supported the confession and connected him biologically to a wider series of sexual assaults and homicides attributed to him. Authorities ultimately associated Mosley with at least eight killings, while investigators suspected that the true number of victims may have been considerably higher.
Mosley remained institutionalized for the rest of his life and died in 2020. Although he was arrested, indicted and forensically linked to Giles’s death, there was no completed trial and no murder conviction because he was continually considered mentally incompetent. Theresa Giles’s case was therefore solved in the investigative and forensic sense, with Eddie Lee Mosley identified as her killer, but it never reached the final courtroom judgment that might otherwise have provided a formal measure of justice.
