As Florida authorities await a promised letter from a confessed killer describing why he committed three murders, another letter from him showed up at an Arizona newspaper.
The Florida investigators were still awaiting their letter Monday.A handwritten letter dated Friday and sent to The Arizona Daily Sun in Flagstaff doesn't explain why former Brigham Young University law-enforcement student Robert Neal Rodriguez might have wanted to kill a Florida woman in 1984 and two teenage girls from Georgia on a Florida beach this March.
"Whether they know it or not, I am wanted for three murders by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement," the neatly written letter reads. "I don't think they could prove any of the three, but I can't live with myself if I'm going to act like this."
Rodriguez was found dead Saturday at an I-40 rest stop in New Mexico.
Rodriguez, who apparently killed himself by swallowing cyanide powder, had telephoned FDLE to confess to the three murders Friday, about 10 days after he fled Tallahassee.
"By the time you receive this, I expect to be dead by suicide (cyanide poisoning and/or gunshot)," Rodriguez wrote to the Daily Sun.
A note found with Rodriguez's body said he had mailed a detailed letter to FDLE Investigator Delbert McGarvey explaining why he shot and killed Megan Carr and Sherry DeSantis, both 16 and from Thomasville, Ga., at an Alligator Point beach on March 27
FDLE spokesman John Joyce said Rodriguez, 42, also confessed to the 1984 slaying of 22-year-old Valerie Hunt, whose skeletal remains were found in a Wakulla County pond three months after she disappeared from a Tallahassee shopping center.
Rodriguez, son of a 22-year Air Force veteran, attended seven different schools while growing up in Florida, Georgia and Alabama, according to his personnel file at the Portland, Ore., Police Department.
Rodriguez graduated from high school in Fort Walton Beach in 1968, attended Okaloosa-Walton Junior College and then enrolled at Brigham Young University in Provo. His personnel file indicates he became a Mormon.
After spending two years as a Mormon missionary in Guatemala, Rodriguez got his law enforcement degree from Brigham Young and then was hired by the Portland Police Department in March 1975. He resigned two years later.
The 1979 Plymouth Volare that led investigators to Rodriguez carried a stolen Utah license plate when his body was found. The car matched that of a vehicle seen near the Alligator Point beach the day the teenagers were killed.
Rodriguez left Tallahassee May 5, a few days after FDLE agents interviewed him because of the car.
While in Tallahassee, where his mother lived until her death on Easter Sunday, Rodriguez attended Florida State University, worked as a sign-painter and janitor and was active in the Unity Church. He even delivered sermons on occasion.