Deadly Deception: The Murders of Serial Killer Bobby Joe Long

By JT Hunter

One after another, young women disappeared without a trace in the night. One by one, their brutalized bodies turned up, the macabre crime scenes suggesting they shared the same cruel fate. Abducted, bound, and raped, all fell prey to an unknown killer. All became victims of a deadly deception.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pedialaw Publishing
• Release date: Dec 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781088077153

JT Hunter

J.T. Hunter is an attorney with over fourteen years of experience practicing law, including criminal law and appeals, and he has significant training in criminal investigation techniques. JT is the author of eight published true crime books. In addition to writing true crime, he is a college professor where he enjoys teaching fiction and nonfiction to his creative writing students.

Book preview

ONE

Sunday, May 13, 1984

It’s Mother’s Day, for Christ’s sake .

That had been Gary Terry’s first thought when he heard the news.

Of all the days to find her.

She could be someone’s mother.

She was someone’s daughter.

Lieutenant Terry of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Department had seen a lot during his thirteen years of law enforcement, many of them as a homicide detective, but this would be a crime scene he could never forget.

The body of a young Oriental female had been discovered shortly before 6:00 p.m. by two teenaged boys in a remote area of Old East Bay Road in the Tampa suburb of Gibsonton in southern Hillsborough County. The boys had been playing with makeshift toy parachutes when they noticed a bad smell coming from beyond a barrier located about 500 yards from their house. At first, they thought the odor must have been from a dead cow, not an uncommon occurrence in their rural area. But as they walked closer, they found the true source of the smell.

The body lay face down in a ditch in a barricaded area just beyond a part of Interstate 75 being constructed near Symmes Road. After making the grim discovery, the boys ran home and told their parents, who called the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office after first taking a quick look at the body to make sure the boys were telling the truth. The first responding deputies were at the scene by 6:30 p.m.

As head of the Sheriff’s Major Crimes Unit, Lt. Terry also responded to the call. He pulled up next to the police vehicles already on site, parked, and started walking toward the crime scene. The moment he reached the body, he immediately noticed something striking about it. The young woman had been left nude, bound by rope, and turned over on her stomach. Her hands were tied behind her back, and a rope with a leash-like extension was also around her neck. Maggots crawled around the victim’s torso and neck, while flies swarmed in the air all around her. That was disturbing enough. Even more disturbing was the fact that her legs had been forced apart by her killer, deliberately positioned so that they spread over five feet apart from foot to foot. It was an image that would stay burned in Terry’s memory for the rest of his life.

I had never seen a body displayed in that nature, Terry recalled of the macabre scene. It scared the hell out of us.

The May 15 edition of the Tampa Tribune newspaper included the headline, Investigators Lacking for Clues in Girl’s Death. The accompanying article described a teenage girl 5 feet, 2 inches tall, about 88 pounds with long black hair. Although police had not yet identified the body, Terry told the paper: We are confident it was a homicide.

Through fingerprint analysis, investigators identified the body less than 48 hours later as Ngeun Lana Long, a 20-year-old dancer at The Sly Fox, a strip club in Tampa’s red-light district on Dale Mabry Boulevard. Lana, a recent transplant from Los Angeles, had only been in the Tampa Bay area since January. She had last been seen alive leaving her apartment complex near the University of South Florida in the northern part of Tampa on May 11. During her autopsy a few days later, the Hillsborough County Medical Examiner concluded that she had been killed by strangulation.

On May 20, the heavy metal band, Motley Crue, performed at the Sun Dome on the University of South Florida campus. The songs on the set list that night included Knock ‘em Dead, Kid and Looks that Kill. Although Lt. Terry and his detectives did not know it at the time, Lana Long’s killer lived less than a mile from that busy college campus.

Lana Long

Crime Scene Photo of Lana Long

Crime Scene Photo of Lana Long

Crime Scene Photo of Lana Long

TWO

Sunday, May 27, 1984

Two weeks after the discovery of Lana Long’s body, the corpse of another nude female turned up in the Tampa Bay area. As Lt. Terry drove to the homicide scene north of Plant City in another remote area of Hillsborough County, he had a bad feeling about it.

I hope this one isn’t bound, he told himself.

When he arrived at the site off Park Street, that was the first question he asked the deputies who had secured the scene.

Yes, sir, this victim is bound too, they told him.

Terry’s heart sank. During his tenure as a detective at the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, investigations rarely involved murder victims whose hands had been bound. Now he had two such cases within almost two weeks of each other.

Like Lana Long, the second victim’s hands were both tied behind her back by clothesline rope, and more rope tied as a ligature looped around her neck like a collar. But this victim exhibited other injuries, too, ones that Lana did not have. The most obvious difference consisted of the stab wounds clearly visible around her neck. Indeed, her throat had been slashed so deeply that she had almost been decapitated. The unidentified woman also had multiple blunt trauma injuries to her head.

Investigators found some important physical evidence at the crime scene. They recovered red fibers from the victim’s body near her left breast and right thigh, and they discovered tire impressions on a dirt road located less than 10 feet away from the victim, apparently left when the killer’s vehicle turned around after dumping her body. The tire impressions from the right rear wheel of the vehicle were subsequently identified as having been made by a Goodyear Viva tire. Impressions from what would have been the left rear of the vehicle were identified by a tire expert in Akron, Ohio, as those of a Vogue tire, an expensive tire typically only found on Cadillacs.

On June 1, Hillsborough County Sheriff Walter Heinrich called a special press conference with news media from around the Tampa Bay area to discuss the status of the two homicide investigations. Heinrich expressed concern that the two murders appeared to be linked since both victims were young females, found nude, bound by rope, and murdered in remote areas. He appealed to the community to provide any information that could potentially be relevant to the two murders, while warning women in Hillsborough, Pasco, and surrounding counties to take extra precautions for their own safety.

In conjunction with the news conference, the Sheriff’s Office released a composite sketch of the second victim in the hope that someone would recognize her and come forward. The Orlando Sentinel reported that investigators were circulating the sketch of the unidentified victim throughout the state because her body was found near I-4, indicating that she might have been killed from another area.

On Saturday, June 2, Gary Terry and his colleagues in the Sheriff’s Major Crimes Bureau were able to identify the victim by comparing fingerprints taken from her body to prints on file at the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office in Fort Pierce. They subsequently learned that 22-year-old Michelle Simms, 5 feet, 4 inches tall and 119 pounds, had last been seen alive on Kennedy Boulevard in downtown Tampa during the early morning hours of May 27.

Michelle Simms

Crime Scene Photo of Michelle Simms

Crime Scene Photo of Michelle Simms

Although Michelle had sustained five blunt trauma injuries to her head, including a massive blunt trauma shock . . . to the left side of the brain, after completing her autopsy, the medical examiner determined that she had died as a result of the knife wound that nearly decapitated her, severing her right jugular vein, carotid artery and trachea.

After the unsettling discoveries of two similarly bound bodies within two weeks of one another, Lt. Terry was grateful when two, then three, weeks passed with no new corpses being found. He was able to focus at times on other cases, all the while hoping that the two murders had been an anomaly and that there would not be any copycat killings to come.

THREE

June 24, 1984

On the morning of June 24, Ronnie Barnes reported for work at one of the properties he maintained, an orange grove off Whitehead Road near Turkey Creek Road in Pleasant Grove. Facing another of south Florida’s steamy summer days, he wanted to finish his work before the monstrous afternoon humidity reared its ugly head. After planting some new trees on part of the property, he made his way to the shed. He added gas to his old riding mower, started it up, and began to weave his way around the grove shortly after 9:00 a.m. He had been mowing for quite some time, creeping slowly up and down the rows of citrus trees, when he noticed something ahead of him sticking out from underneath one of the trees. Moving closer to the spot, he could see a pair of shoes protruding from the overgrown grass surrounding the tree.

Then he noticed the stench, like something rotten, like some meat that had been left out in the sun and gone bad. The smell grew worse the closer he came to the tree. He stopped the mower to investigate. He had not taken more than a couple of steps toward the tree when he