Santrail Lowe was a 24-year-old woman whose life ended violently in Fort Lauderdale on February 24, 1987. Her body was discovered in a junkyard along Northwest Sixth Place, an isolated setting filled with discarded vehicles and debris. Investigators determined that she had been sexually assaulted and strangled. Her killing came during the final months of a long series of attacks on women in northwest Fort Lauderdale, many of whom had been found in vacant lots, abandoned structures, and other secluded places.
The investigation was assigned to Fort Lauderdale homicide detective Kevin Allen, who was relatively new to the division. Despite the brutality of Lowe's death, contemporary accounts later reported that the case initially received limited attention. Allen nevertheless pursued the evidence and began examining whether Lowe's killing could be connected to Eddie Lee Mosley, a Fort Lauderdale man who had repeatedly been investigated for sexual assaults and the strangulation deaths of women in the same area.
Mosley had a long and troubling history with law enforcement. He had been arrested numerous times for offenses involving women and had previously served time for an attempted sexual assault. He had also spent years in psychiatric institutions after being found mentally ill or incompetent in earlier criminal proceedings. By 1987, investigators already regarded him as a possible serial offender because many attacks had occurred near places where he lived or regularly traveled. Witness descriptions, the methods used against the victims, and the geographic concentration of the crimes repeatedly drew police attention back to him.
On May 17, 1987, officers arrested Mosley after he was found with stolen plants. What began as a theft arrest quickly became an opportunity for detectives to question him about Lowe's death and other unsolved killings. During questioning, Mosley reportedly described an encounter with a woman inside or near an abandoned block building. He recalled drinking, having sexual contact with her, the clothing she wore, and seeing her become unresponsive before he left. Investigators believed parts of his account demonstrated knowledge of the crime scene and placed him with Lowe shortly before or at the time of her death.
Mosley was charged with Lowe's murder on May 18, 1987. Police believed his statements, the physical evidence available at the time, and his familiarity with the location gave them enough evidence to proceed. Investigators also compared biological evidence from Lowe's case and other homicides with Mosley's blood characteristics. Before modern DNA testing became widely available, blood-group analysis could include or exclude a potential suspect but could not identify one person with the certainty later provided by genetic profiling.
The murder charge never resulted in a completed trial or conviction. Psychological evaluations found that Mosley had profound intellectual and psychiatric impairments and was not competent to understand the proceedings or assist his attorneys. In October 1987, he was committed to the Florida State Hospital for treatment rather than brought before a jury. He remained confined in Florida psychiatric institutions for most of the rest of his life, but the legal finding of incompetence prevented the evidence in Lowe's case from being fully tested at trial.
Later genetic examinations complicated the original case against Mosley. Accounts of the subsequent investigation indicate that DNA associated with several suspected victims, including Lowe, did not conclusively match him. The results weakened any claim that forensic science had definitively proven he killed her. Authorities nevertheless continued to view him as a suspect because of his alleged admissions, his reported knowledge of the scene, the circumstances surrounding the killing, and the similarities to other attacks attributed to him. The available record does not show that another individual was arrested, tried, or convicted for Lowe's murder.
Mosley was eventually connected through DNA to several other Fort Lauderdale homicides, exposing serious failures that had allowed him to remain free while innocent men were blamed for some crimes. Those later findings strengthened investigators' broader belief that he had preyed upon women in the area for years, but they did not produce a conviction for Lowe's death. Mosley died in 2020 after decades in state custody. Santrail Lowe's case therefore ended without a trial establishing who killed her, leaving Mosley as the principal publicly identified suspect but not a legally proven murderer in her death.
