Lifelong best friends Megan Marie Carr and Cherish Fountain DeSantis, both 16-year-old high school juniors from Thomasville, Georgia, were looking forward to their spring break. Born just a day apart in August 1975, the two were inseparable. Megan, a talented member of her school's band and drama programs, and Cherish, a vibrant cheerleader known to friends as "Sherry," planned a day trip to the beach.
On the morning of March 27, 1992, they drove Megan’s car to the serene and secluded shores of Alligator Point, a quiet beach town on the Florida coast, about 75 miles south of their homes.
The girls arrived at the beach sometime after noon, ready to enjoy the sun and sand. Later that afternoon, at about 2 p.m., a vacationing police officer and his wife were walking along the beach and noticed the two teenagers lying on their beach towels. On their return walk, they saw that the girls hadn't moved and, upon checking, made a horrifying discovery. Megan and Cherish were deceased, still in their bikinis, having each been shot twice in the head with a.38-caliber handgun. There were no signs of a struggle, and robbery was ruled out as their purses and other valuables were left untouched at the scene.
The brutal and seemingly motiveless double homicide baffled investigators from the Franklin County Sheriff's Office and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE). The Alligator Point Homicide Task Force pursued more than 100 leads, but the case grew cold. A witness recalled seeing a suspicious car near the beach that day, but there was little else to go on. The breakthrough came weeks later when a woman contacted police to report that her ex-boyfriend had confessed to killing the two girls. She identified him as Robert Neal Rodriguez, a 42-year-old former police officer.
Shortly after his ex-girlfriend's tip, Rodriguez himself contacted authorities. On May 15, 1992, he called the FDLE and confessed not only to the murders of Megan and Cherish but also to the 1984 killing of 22-year-old Valerie Hunt, a college student who had disappeared from a Tallahassee shopping center. Rodriguez provided details about the Alligator Point crime scene that only the killer could have known. Investigators had previously interviewed Rodriguez because his car matched the description of the one seen near the beach, but he disappeared from his Tallahassee home on May 5, shortly after his mother's death.
Before investigators could apprehend him, Robert Neal Rodriguez fled. He was found dead on May 16, 1992, in his car at a highway rest stop along Interstate 40 in New Mexico. He had committed suicide by ingesting cyanide. Rodriguez, a former Mormon missionary and police officer in Portland, Oregon, left behind multiple letters. In a six-page letter mailed to an FDLE agent and another sent to the *Arizona Daily Sun*, he provided a full confession. He explained that his motive for the murders was to avoid being caught after his attempts to rape his victims failed.
In one of his notes, Rodriguez stated he took his own life "for the sake of the girls' parents, for their peace of mind, and to avoid a prison term." With the killer's confession and subsequent suicide, the cases of Megan Carr, Cherish DeSantis, and Valerie Hunt were officially closed. The tragic end to a spring break trip left two families and a close-knit community shattered by the senseless loss of two bright and promising young women whose lives were stolen by a serial killer.
