Geraldine Barfield was a 35-year-old Black woman whose life ended violently in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on December 19, 1983. Her body was discovered by a group of boys in a field adjoining the Immanuel Church of God in Christ, near Sunland Park in northwest Fort Lauderdale. Investigators determined that she had been sexually assaulted and strangled.
A place connected with worship and community had become the backdrop to a brutal killing, leaving Barfield’s family to confront not only her sudden loss but years of uncertainty about whether anyone would ever be held responsible.
The killing occurred during a deeply troubled period in Fort Lauderdale, when numerous women and girls were being raped and murdered in and around predominantly African American neighborhoods. Barfield’s death soon became associated with Eddie Lee Mosley, a repeat sexual offender who was suspected by investigators of committing a long series of attacks and murders in the city. Mosley had been released from custody only weeks before Barfield was found. He had accepted a plea agreement in an earlier criminal case and left jail in November 1983, placing him back in the community shortly before the homicide.
Barfield was not the only woman killed soon after Mosley’s release. Emma Cook was found raped and strangled in northwest Fort Lauderdale several days later, on December 25. The similarities between the deaths, their geographic proximity, and Mosley’s extensive history of sexual violence caused police to view him as a likely suspect. Investigators ultimately believed he killed Barfield and several other victims during the years following his release, although the publicly available record does not show that forensic testing conclusively tied him to Barfield’s death.
Mosley continued to attract police attention after Barfield was killed. In May 1984, he was arrested and accused of raping another woman. He claimed the encounter had been consensual, and a jury acquitted him later that year. He was released again, while additional women and girls were attacked and murdered in the Fort Lauderdale area. Investigators eventually assembled a broader picture of Mosley as a suspected serial rapist and killer whose movements, behavior, and criminal history repeatedly placed him near the pattern of violence affecting the community.
In 1987, Mosley was charged with two other murders after investigators obtained statements and evidence connecting him to those deaths. He was found mentally incompetent to stand trial and was committed to a secure state psychiatric institution rather than prosecuted to a verdict. Later DNA testing connected him to multiple Fort Lauderdale murders, while his own statements implicated him in others. Those developments strengthened the belief that Mosley had been responsible for a much larger series of killings, but Barfield’s homicide was not among the cases that resulted in a completed murder trial or conviction.
No one was convicted of murdering Geraldine Barfield. Mosley remained the principal suspect identified in accounts of the case, yet he was never brought to trial for her death. His continuing incompetency findings prevented prosecutors from trying him even in cases where charges had been filed, and he remained institutionalized until his death in 2020.
For Barfield’s relatives, the absence of a prosecution did not erase the need for accountability. Her daughter, Jacquelyn D. Miller, later publicly called for the case to be reopened as families of victims questioned how authorities had handled the wider series of killings. Geraldine Barfield’s death therefore remains both an individual tragedy and part of a broader story of missed opportunities, unresolved murders, and a suspected serial offender who was linked to numerous victims but never convicted of killing her.
