Unfinished business

Can you remember your 10^th birthday—the cake, the anticipation of opening presents?

The twins, Mara and Nicole Dosso will sadly never forget their tenth. It was December 3, 1997.

He was their dad, 35-year-old Frank Dosso.

But their father was late getting back from work. It was unlike him.  Frank had promised his wife Maria he’d bring home Chinese for the party.

Maria began to worry. Maybe there’d been car trouble, worse, an accident.

Frank worked with his father and his sister’s husband at a manufacturing business in central Florida, near Tampa. They made the kind of conveyor systems you see in dry cleaners that retrieve garments.  

But now—on the twin’s birthday—it was getting late. The last time they talked, Frank told Maria that his sister Diane would be picking up him and her husband George Patisso. They’d all arrive together.

But where were they?

Maria Dosso called her husband’s parents, Phil and Nicoletta. They hadn’t heard from their son or daughter either.  So the elderly Dossos got in their car about 6:30 p.m. and drove 20 miles to the shop, Erie Manufacturing.

The lights were on. They saw their daughter, Diane’s, car parked out front...

The parents saw their daughter, Diane, first in the hallway, her legs crumpled beneath her in a pool of blood. She’d been shot twice in the head.

Around the corner, more. Diane’s husband was murdered execution-style.

His body was slumped by Dosso’s longtime business partner, George Gonsalves.

And a few feet away lay their son, Frank Dosso—Maria’s husband, the twin’s father—like the others, shot in the head.

It wasn’t long after, Frank’s wife, Maria, arrived to flashing lights and strung yellow crime-scene tape. Her father-in-law delivered the unbearable news.

Four dead. Four murdered.

An extended family’s gaping horror became an urgent criminal investigation.

Polk county Florida, the town of Bartow, had never had a mass murder.

There were so many scenarios to run down.   Was it an act of passion, perhaps, or revenge?  Was Diane, the Dosso’s daughter — who happened to be a local prosecutor — the target?

Local police quickly called on the help of agents from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement—the F.D.L.E—the state’s counterpart of the F.B.I.  

FDLE agent Tommy Ray was put in command of a state-local task force.

Agent Ray knew all about crimes taking a long time to crack.  In his 25 years on the job, he had a well-earned reputation as a cop with a knack for solving stone cold cases.

Hopefully, the Erie Manufacturing massacre wouldn’t be one of them.

Detectives began their investigation by looking at what the crime scene itself could tell them, the warren of offices and hallways in the shop, where forensic technicians had recovered 12 bullet casings, eleven of them .22 calibre, the other a .32. That meant two different guns had been used.

From the trajectory of the wounds in the victim and resulting blood spatter no more than a foot or so off the ground, the investigators concluded that the three men had been forced to their knees or put on the ground and killed with a .22.

Diane, the evidence suggested, had apparently come in after the initial murders, been chased by her killer, and grabbed from behind by the hair. She’d been shot in each temple with both a .22 and a .32 caliber handgun.

But fingerprints? DNA? Hair? Fiber? The killer or killers hadn’t left a trace.

There was a chair with a dusty footprint of a man’s shoe on it and a drop-ceiling tile overhead that had been moved. 

But like so much else about the puzzling scene, detectives didn’t know what to make of it.

Four families were shattered. Maria Dosso was suddenly the single parent of three young girls.

The three partners who made up Erie Manufacturing were like family. They danced at the weddings of one another’s children.

In 1985 when Frank Dosso married Maria, business partner Nelson Serrano was there celebrating with his wife.

Serrano, originally from Ecuador, had been a middle-man who sold the garment conveyor systems that Erie made to big customers.

Eventually, he bought into the company and was welcomed as a full partner of Phil Dosso and his longtime friend and co-founder of Erie, George Gonsalves.

With Serrano’s flair for sales, and the original partners knowledge of the nuts and bolts of manufacturing, Erie grew into a multi-million dollar family operation by the mid-90s.

The aging partners were slowly making way for their children to take over the company.

Frank and Maria Dosso had moved down from the New York area so he could be groomed to take his father’s place.

Serrano put his son on the payroll as the bookkeeper.

But there was something about Serrano that spelled trouble to Frank’s wife, Maria.

And she wasn’t the only one that felt that way. By the summer of 1997, a long simmering dispute boiled over into an all-out war among the partners. There were allegations that Serrano stole a quarter million dollars.

After lawsuits filed and one shouting match too many, the founding partners, Dosso and Gonsalves, fired Serrano and his son and changed the locks to the office.

But Serrano didn’t leave quietly. Within weeks of being ousted, he tried to force his way back into the building. Partner George Gonsalves called the cops.

Then, six months later, December 3^rd, 1997, came another 911 call from Erie Manufacturing: Four dead, shot execution-style.

Given Serrano’s stormy relationship with his partners, homicide detectives asked him to give a taped statement the day after the killings. 

Serrano talked to police willingly, speculating on how the murders went down.

Serrano told police he was in Atlanta -- 500 miles away from Erie Manufacturing on the day of the murders, holed up in his hotel room, door locked, drapes pulled, suffering from a migraine.

And an airport hotel security camera seemed to bear his story out.

Here he is on tape at an Atlanta LaQuinta Inn in the lobby around noon the day of the massacre. He walks into frame again about ten o’clock that night.

Agent Tommy Ray’s team, of course, had his alibi checked out.

But that didn’t mean detectives thought Serrano’s hands were clean of the crime.

For all the red flags flapping around him, detectives never could get enough to arrest Nelson Serrano.

Years went by.

The twins had others birthdays.

And the father of one of the murder victims, Diane’s husband George, flew to Florida to demand answers from prosecutors but got unpromising replies.

But Agent Tommy Ray—the chief investigator—hadn’t thrown in the towel. In fact, he made a promise to the victim’s families, including the mother ofvictim George Patisso.

But tenacity and resolve weren’t the same thing as results.

Here was the detective’s problem: he’d come to believe that it was Serrano himself who walked into Erie manufacturing and shot the four...

But Nelson Serrano’s alibi had him up here at the Atlanta hotel on noon of that day—the killings happened about 5:30 in the afternoon in Florida.

So how did Serrano get from Atlanta to Erie manufacturing in Florida and back to Atlanta in time to be photographed by the hotel security camera again at 10 p.m. or so?

He had to fly, obviously, but only two airports in central Florida made sense for the very tight timeline of the crime to work.   He either flew into Orlando or into Tampa.

All theory. Meanwhile, the murder investigation at Erie Manufacturing was getting colder and colder.

One of those people connected to Serrano was a nephew in Florida named Alvaro Penaherrera. The detective could not figure out why Serrano had called his nephew so frequently around the time of the murders.       

Then, Detective Ray’s team came up with a bingo moment, the discovery of a credit card transaction for Serrano’s nephew on a most interesting day and for the detective in a most interesting place.

When the detective brought the nephew in for questioning, Tommy Ray says the young man lied about the car rental at first, then caved, when he feared he might become a suspect in the mass homicide.

But another problem: if Serrano flew to Orlando that day to pick up a rental car from his nephew, he didn’t fly under his own name.

There was no Serrano on the passenger manifest of the only flight that day from Atlanta that fit the timeline.

But a few weeks earlier in a casual conversation, the detective learned from the Dosso family that Serrano had a child from an early marriage who was rarely mentioned.

Agacio! That was a name on the passenger manifest from Atlanta to Orlando, the day of the murders.   An Agacio who paid cash for a round-trip ticket and never used the return portion.

And what’s more, someone named John White had done the same thing: bought a round trip ticket for cash from Tampa to Atlanta for the evening of the murders, and like Agacio, he’d never used the return fare.

Agacio...White...a nephew instructed to arrange for a rental car in Orlando, one dropped off at Tampa airport...

The pieces were snapping into place for Tommy Ray.

Here’s what Ray was thinking. Serrano, using an alias, flew from Atlanta to Orlando, picked up the rental car and drove to Erie Manufacturing and committed the murders.  

Then he drove to Tampa, dropped the car off and returned to Atlanta using another alias. All in the 10 hours allotted. All done in a calculated way to cover his tracks.

Digging: it’s in the detective’s DNA.

And now the Erie Murders would find him digging through a box of moldy old receipts.

Like Little Jack Horner, Tommy Ray pulled out a plum.

The company made garment conveying systems and sold them for millions every year.

In the hallway and business office of Erie Manufacturing, four people, three men and a woman, had been shot dead.

Florida state detective, agent Tommy Ray, thought he could prove that Nelson Serrano, an ousted business partner had done it, even though he claimed to be in Atlanta that day and a hotel security camera there backed his story up.

Detective Tommy Ray had evidence indicating Serrano’s nephew had left him a rental car in the Orlando airport parking garage.

He’d put the ticket to get out of long-term parking in the visor.

That meant Serrano had to have touched it.

But where was that years-old ticket now?

Did it still exist?

The detective had to get his hands on it.

But there was a big problem at the airport records office.

But Tommy Ray kept on coming. That parking ticket might be his only shot at proving that Serrano had indeed put foot back in Florida the afternoon of the murders. Insisting.

And as the detective was getting ready to go to  the airport, he got a call back from airport officials saying, sorry, they were wrong about those tickets being damaged in the storm.   And they were, in fact, intact and waiting for him to sift through.

Ray and his team tediously poured over hundreds of old parking slips.

Finally there it was: December 3^rd 1997 a car had left the long-term parking garage at 3:49 pm and printed right on the receipt, the license plate of the rental picked-up by Serrano’s nephew.

And when Lynne Ernst, the fingerprint expert at the state crime lab, started processing that three-year old parking receipt, a wondrous thing happened for Tommy Ray’s blossoming theory of the case.

The fingerprint proved Serrano was in Orlando, Florida on December 3, 1997, just an hour and half drive from Erie Manufacturing, not in a hotel room in Atlanta nursing a migraine.

And in May 2002, almost four and half years after the murders—Tommy Ray finally got his indictment - four-counts of first-degree murder against Nelson Serrano.

Federal officials said the chances of extraditing Serrano, an Ecuadorean national, would be slim to none.

The detective’s superiors told him to forget about it.

But orders were orders—and Ray got new ones, a reassignment to Miami.

But luck followed the detective to Miami where a chance meeting with an Ecuadorean colonel soon changed everything.

Ray asked the colonel to convince his government to extradite Serrano, and told him why he wanted him back so badly.

And that’s just what Tommy Ray did with the full cooperation of Ecuadorean authorities. When officials there discovered Serrano had actually been a U.S. citizen for years, they deported him to America in the custody of Detective Ray.

In September, 2002, Nelson Serrano walked into a Central florida courtroom  and pleaded not guilty to the murder charges.

After a snarl of legal delays, in September 2006, nearly 9 years after the murders—Serrano finally sat before a jury: the accused; in a  first degree murder death penalty case.

In court, Tommy Ray sat a few feet away from Nelson Serrano...

The families of the four victims packed one side of the courtroom, as the prosecutor, John Aguero, called Phil Dosso to recount the history of bad blood with Serrano.

The voice of the mother of two of the victims took jurors back to the horrors of the night captured on that 911 call.

The prosecutor introduced the gruesome crime scene photos, bullet casings and bodies that accompanied the story he told the jury about a onetime business partner’s homicidal revenge, the bitter loser in a fight for control of the company.

And when jurors went to tour the murder scene itself, the prosecution explained its theory of why that ceiling tile had been moved and why there was a dusty footprint on the chair beneath.

Employees testified that Serrano, a gun enthusiast—kept handguns in his office—and MAY HAVE stashed at least one away in the drop ceiling.  

Behind the tile, likely, prosecutors say where he kept the .32 — one of two guns used that night.

And as for the dusty shoeprint? Not definitively Serrano’s but very much like a shoe he’d once owned and experts examined.

Prosecutors knew they’d have to shred Serrano’s alibi that he was in Atlanta for a business trip.  They laid out its evidence for Serrano being in Florida that day.

They called the nephew who rented the car for his uncle and he told a damaging story about him. The day after the murders, he said his uncle ordered him to retrieve that same car in the Tampa airport parking garage and drop if off with the rental company. 

Weeks later, the uncle told the nephew to keep his mouth shut about the incident.

And the prosecution played maybe its best evidence: the Orlando airport date-stamped parking ticket with Nelson Serrano’s fingerprints on it.

And prosecutors especially wanted jurors to listen closely to that taped statement Serrano gave police a day after the murders.

It was weirdly as though he were reciting the state’s own theory of the crime.

And listen further, urged the prosecutor, to what Nelson Serrano had to say about why Diane Patisso was murdered when she went to pick up her husband and brother.

The investigators never did find the two handguns used in the killings... but as it rested its case, the prosecution was comfortable in thinking it had convinced the jury they could only have been in the hands of Nelson Serrano...a onetime partner, the prosecutor argued, with a wounded pride and a murderous rage.

The heart of Nelson Serrano’s defense was simple: There’s no evidence to prove that Serrano ever set foot in Erie Manufacturing the day of the murders.

Defense team Bob Norgard and Cheney Mason were relentless in their cross examination of prosecution witnesses, starting with the crime-scene technicians who gathered evidence...12 bullet casings, for instance, that told them nothing about who loaded the guns.

No Serrano fingerprints found anywhere around the crime scene.

The dusty footprint on the chair seemed to be Serrano’s shoe size but...?

Serrano’s son, Francisco, had been called by the prosecution but the defense used him to flip the tables, testifying that it was his father’s partners who actually stole business money from him, not the other way around.

Then the defense went after the busy here, there and everywhere of Serrano’s alleged travels the day of the murders, in and out of airports, boarding planes, driving around. How come no person or camera saw him?

And in that day of travel, the defense argued that there just wasn’t enough time for Serrano to have pulled off the crime he was charged with.

Leaving the Orlando airport garage at 3:49 p.m. as the timecoded parking record indicated...

Detective Tommy Ray testified it had taken him an hour and fifteen to drive from the airport to Erie Manufacturing.

That would have put Serrano at the shop just after 5 pm, leaving him only fifteen minutes to kill four people.

And the last part of the timeline, the defense argued was even more implausible.

In less than half an hour, Serrano would have had to get off a wide body jet, exit Atlanta airport—one of the busiest in the world—and arrive back at his hotel five miles away.   All in time to be photographed looking up at that surveillance camera.

The biggest hurdle for the defense  was just ahead, starting with the testimony given by the nephew that he’d arranged a car rental at Orlando airport for his uncle on the QT.

The defense grilled the nephew, portraying him as someone who was just interested in saving his own skin.

In a circumstantial case that the prosecution had the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt, it came down to one crucial piece of evidence, nothing less than the foundation of the prosecution’s charges against Nelson Serrano: his fingerprint on that parking ticket that put him in Florida on the afternoon of the murders.

The state had put on three fingerprint experts. Two agreed that it was Serrano’s, but the third surprised the prosecutor when under cross examination he testified he wasn’t entirely convinced.

An expert in the field—the prosecution’s own witness—telling the court he had reservations about the fingerprint?

Why, he wondered, was a finger from Serrano’s right hand on the ticket and not one from his left?

The defense leaped into the crack in the prosecution’s case and floated the possibility that the all important fingerprint was bogus, forged by person or persons unknown to implicate Serrano in the crime.

Had the defense made the jury wonder? Had they put some cracks in the prosecution’s theory of the crime?

After 60 witnesses, 400 exhibits and five weeks of trial, closing arguments were at hand. 

The defense going first.

The prosecutor countered that Serrano had a volcanic grudge against his former business partners and the parking ticket and the long chain of circumstantial evidence was the proof that he was the killer.

It was now up to a jury to decide.

No juror had bargained for this when they got their summons...potentially a death penalty case.

And looking over at the defense table and seeing Nelson Serrano...the accusation didn’t seem to fit.

We gathered eight of the twelve jurors to talk about the case, starting with the prosecutions four-hour opening statement that left some jurors scratching their heads.

More important than the assertions from both sides was the evidence in the case. A visit to the crime scene was a jolt for jurors.  They literally walked in the killer’s footsteps at Erie Manufacturing.

There they saw the ceiling tile that had been moved...where Serrano was accused of hiding a gun used in the murders.

But as for a supposedly tell-tale dusty footprint on a chair beneath that tile... some jurors dismissed it as evidence.

But what preoccupied jurors most was the tight timeline of the prosecution’s theory of the crime— just 10 hours for Serrano to fly, drive, murder, fly again and be back in Atlanta photographed by a hotel security camera.

Jurors also weighed whether Serrano’s nephew, Alvaro, was a possible suspect as the defense suggested. After all, the nephew had not only rented the car, he also admitted to lying to investigators early on.

And finally, jurors had to evaluate probably the most important evidence in the case — that fingerprint on a parking lot ticket from the Orlando airport.

Jurors heard two experts say it was Serrano’s... but another opened the door to doubt, conceding under defense questioning,  that the print could have been planted.

After seven weeks of trial, Serrano’s very life hung in the balance...the jurors still unsure themselves at the end of testimony, what side they’d come down on.

Jurors: (shaking head) yes.

The jury was out. Stretched nerve endings got rawer yet.

Four victims, four families.

They had waited for this moment for nine years. But neither they, nor Serrano’s family would have to wait much longer.

After six hours of deliberations, a verdict. Anticipation outside the courtroom...even Tommy Ray, the cold case cop who pursued Serrano for so long, looked frazzled.

The jurors filed back. The families held hands, braced.

The defendant stood as the judge read the verdict.

Serrano never flinched.

The families’ gasps were silent but the relief was visible.

In the end, jurors say they didn’t buy the defense argument that Serrano couldn’t have had enough time to travel and commit the crime all inside 10 hours.

The other thing critical to their conviction:  Serrano’s fingerprint.

Outside the courtroom, it was as thought the families were finally able to have the wake they’d been denied all these years.

The Dossos who lost their son, Frank and daughter, Diane.

The Patissos who lost their son, George.

and the grieving widow of the partner in the business, George Gonsalves.

And then there was Maria, and her three girls. They lost their father...on, of all days, the twins birthday.

Tommy Ray, the detective who never gave up, put close a chapter of his life, almost a decade pursuing a man who’d boasted in the first hours of the investigation that they’d never catch the one who did it.

Agent Tommy Ray promised the families he’d never retire before this case was over.   Now, finally, he could.

The jury has recommended the death penalty for Nelson Serrano. Sentencing is expected some time after the New Year. Prosecutors say the judge is likely to follow the jury’s recommendation.