Arnette Tukes was a 20-year-old woman whose life was taken in Broward County on February 22, 1980. Contemporary and later accounts identify her death as a rape and strangulation. Her killing occurred during a terrifying period in northwest Fort Lauderdale, where a succession of women and girls had been sexually assaulted and murdered. Tukes left behind a young son, Dominick Richardson, who was only three years old when his mother died.
Her family would spend decades believing that her death could have been prevented had authorities acted sooner against the man they suspected.
Tukes was killed about five months after the September 1979 arrest of Jerry Frank Townsend, a man with significant intellectual disabilities who was accused of several South Florida murders. Townsend’s arrest had been portrayed as the end of the search for a serial predator, but Tukes’s murder and additional killings demonstrated that the danger had not ended. Townsend was never prosecuted for Tukes’s death, and the fact that she was killed while he was already incarcerated became an important indication that authorities had imprisoned the wrong man while the actual attacker remained free.
Suspicion in Tukes’s case eventually centered on Eddie Lee Mosley, a Fort Lauderdale serial rapist and suspected serial killer who preyed primarily on women and girls in the city’s northwest neighborhoods. Before Townsend’s arrest, Fort Lauderdale Detective Doug Evans had already identified Mosley as the leading suspect in a series of rape-murders. Evans reportedly relied on eyewitness accounts and physical evidence, but detectives from the Broward Sheriff’s Office pursued Townsend instead. Evans later continued working to expose the wrongful case against Townsend and helped direct attention back toward Mosley.
Tukes’s family had a personal connection to the investigator who suspected Mosley. Her mother, Clarice Tukes, was Evans’s cousin. Clarice later said that Evans had told the family he believed Mosley killed Arnette and that he could not understand why other authorities would not accept or act upon his findings. For the family, Mosley’s continued freedom was not an abstract failure of police procedure. It represented a missed opportunity that they believed cost Arnette her life.
Mosley remained at large after Tukes’s murder and was associated with a continuing series of sexual assaults and homicides. He was arrested in April 1980 while attempting to rape a young girl and received a prison sentence, but legal proceedings and questions concerning his mental competency repeatedly complicated efforts to keep him confined. By 1987, after being accused of additional killings, he was declared incompetent to stand trial and committed to a state psychiatric institution.
Years later, DNA testing connected Mosley to several Fort Lauderdale murders and helped clear Townsend of crimes to which he had falsely confessed. Authorities and investigative reporting also linked Mosley to Tukes’s killing through other evidence, although the publicly available record does not show that he was formally tried or convicted for her death. Some later summaries have described the forensic evidence in several suspected cases, including Tukes’s, as inconclusive or inconsistent, leaving the legal status of her case different from the murders directly established through DNA.
No one was ultimately convicted of killing Arnette Tukes. Mosley remained the principal publicly identified suspect, supported by Detective Evans’s investigation, the circumstances surrounding the wider series of attacks, and the conclusions reached by Tukes’s family. However, he never faced a completed criminal trial for her rape and murder, and there was no verdict that formally established his guilt in her case.
The aftermath extended far beyond the original investigation. Townsend spent approximately 22 years in prison before DNA evidence exposed the miscarriage of justice and led to his release in 2001. Relatives of Tukes and other victims later demanded an investigation into the conduct of detectives whose testimony had helped convict Townsend while Mosley remained free. Clarice Tukes said she believed her daughter would still have been alive had investigators not focused on the wrong man.
For Arnette’s family, the passage of time did not bring the finality of an arrest, trial, or conviction. Her son grew into adulthood and had children of his own, naming one of his daughters Arnette in remembrance of the mother he lost as a small child. The surviving family continued to regard her death as both a brutal unsolved murder and a consequence of an investigative failure that allowed a known violent suspect to remain in the community.
