Bobby Joe Long: the ‘Classified Ad Rapist’, eight Tampa murders and the girl who got away

• BornRobert Joseph Long, 14 October 1953, Kenova, West Virginia; raised mostly in South Florida
• Known asBobby Joe Long; the ‘Classified Ad Rapist’, a name investigators gave the man behind a series of rapes
• Convicted ofEight murders, Hillsborough County, Florida, 1984, plus kidnappings and sexual batteries; he confessed to ten killings
• Arrested16 November 1984, Tampa, after a 17-year-old he had abducted and released gave police the details that identified him
• SentenceDeath for one Hillsborough murder (1986, reimposed 1989); life terms for the rest. A second death sentence, from Pasco County, ended in an acquittal in 1997
• DiedExecuted by lethal injection at Florida State Prison, 23 May 2019, aged 65

Bobby Joe Long raped women across Florida in the early 1980s, answering newspaper ads for furniture and appliances and attacking the women he found home alone, and in 1984 he killed at least eight women in and around Tampa. He was convicted of eight murders, all in Hillsborough County, under a plea deal made in September 1985 that spared him the death penalty in every case but one. He confessed to ten killings. He was caught in November 1984, less than two weeks after a 17-year-old he had abducted persuaded him to let her go and gave detectives enough detail to find him. He spent 34 years on Florida’s death row, and on 23 May 2019 he was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison. He was 65. He was sentenced to death twice, in two counties; one of those cases ended in an acquittal.

This account rests on court records – the Florida Commission on Capital Cases, opinions of the Florida Supreme Court and the Eleventh Circuit, a 1991 state brief – and on reporting by UPI, the AP, the Tampa Bay Times, NBC News, Fox 13, the News Service of Florida and others listed at the end. Where they disagree, it says so. The women Long killed or raped, the survivor who escaped him and his family are not named.

West Virginia and South Florida

Robert Joseph Long was born on 14 October 1953 in Kenova, West Virginia. His parents separated when he was young, and he spent most of his childhood with his mother, who moved to the Miami area and supported him by working as a cocktail waitress and barmaid. Both parents testified for him at his 1989 sentencing hearing, according to the state’s summary of that hearing, and his mother described head injuries he had suffered; the Florida Supreme Court later summarized the defense evidence as a deeply troubled family life and numerous head injuries that had caused brain damage.

After high school he married his childhood sweetheart. The marriage, which produced two children, became violent: his former wife later told the Associated Press that he once choked her unconscious, and that she feared for her life. Around 1974 – the year they married, according to Biography – he was badly hurt in a motorcycle accident. Biography reports that his wife said his temper worsened afterward. The couple divorced in 1980.

By 1984 he had moved to the Tampa area. According to UPI, he had trained in radiology at a Broward County junior college and worked as a radiology technician, but was unemployed; he had an arrest record going back to 1970 and was on probation for an assault.

The ‘Classified Ad Rapist’

Beginning in the early 1980s, Long found victims through the classified pages. He answered ads placed by people selling furniture or appliances, made an appointment to see the item, and if the woman who opened the door was alone, he raped her. Investigators trying to solve the attacks called the unknown man ‘the Classified Ad Rapist’. According to Oxygen, the first attacks were in Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Ocala and the rest of Dade County.

After his arrest he admitted that he was the Classified Ad Rapist. How many women he attacked has never been settled; reports range from dozens to more than 50. Most of those attacks never came to court, but some did. In July 1985 a Pinellas County court gave him life sentences for a sexual battery, kidnapping, armed robbery and armed burglary committed on 29 May 1984.

Eight months in 1984

In 1984 the attacks turned into killings. The first woman was killed in March, and over the next eight months nine more were killed, most of them in Hillsborough County. They were young women, aged from 18 to 28. Most were strangled; others had their throats cut or were beaten. Many were found bound, and their bodies were left in remote places.

Investigators had few leads. The one consistent clue was trace evidence: red fibers found at several of the scenes. Without a suspect to compare them with, the fibers led nowhere.

The survivor

In early November 1984 – on 3 November, according to Oxygen – Long seized a 17-year-old girl as she rode her bicycle home from her job at a doughnut shop. He blindfolded her, took her to his apartment and raped her repeatedly over about a day. She told the AP years later that she knew fighting could make him more dangerous, and that she had to study him. She won his sympathy – the Tampa Bay Times reports that she told him she was the only one caring for a sick parent – and he let her go.

She had also been collecting evidence. According to the AP, she left blood in the back seat and fingerprints in the apartment, and noted the route, the light on the car’s dashboard and the stairs up to the apartment. Her description of the man and his car led detectives to Long; Oxygen reports that she identified a red Dodge Magnum with red carpet, and that investigators later spotted it while watching him. Fibers on her clothing matched fibers from the murder scenes. He was arrested in Tampa on Friday 16 November 1984.

She later became a deputy with the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, the agency that helped arrest him, and in 2019 she sat in the front row of the witness room at his execution. NBC News reported that a Lifetime television film had dramatized her story the year before.

Arrest and confession

Sheriff Walter Heinrich announced the arrest the same day, UPI reported, and another body was found in north-east Hillsborough County using information Long had given detectives. By the next day, according to UPI, he faced nine counts of first-degree murder, and fibers from his clothing found on the survivor had been matched to fibers on five of the dead women. Questioned at the sheriff’s office, Long confessed. In the killing near Plant City that would bring his death sentence, he told a detective how he had picked the woman up, tied her up and raped her, and how he had killed her. Asked why he had killed her, he said it was his secret, according to the state’s summary of the detective’s testimony. He never offered a motive.

On 28 November 1984 a Hillsborough County grand jury indicted him for the May 1984 murder of a 22-year-old woman whose body had been found near Plant City, and for the kidnapping and sexual battery of the survivor.

The plea deal

Long was tried first in Pasco County, for the death of an 18-year-old woman whose remains had been found in a pasture on 6 November 1984. In April 1985 a jury convicted him and recommended death, and in May the judge sentenced him to death.

On 23 September 1985 Long entered a plea agreement covering every charge there: eight counts of first-degree murder, with kidnapping and sexual battery counts, and the charges in the survivor’s case. He agreed not to challenge his confessions or the physical evidence. In return the state agreed to life sentences on everything except the murder near Plant City, for which it was free to seek death before a jury. It also agreed not to use the other Hillsborough convictions as aggravating factors in that penalty hearing. In December 1985 Long tried to withdraw his pleas, was allowed to, and then chose to keep them.

In July 1986 the jury voted 11 to 1 for death, and the judge sentenced him to death.

Two death sentences, one acquittal

In November 1987 the Florida Supreme Court threw out the Pasco conviction over the way his confession had been obtained, a Miranda violation. That in turn undid the Hillsborough sentence: the judge had counted the Pasco conviction as an aggravating factor, so in June 1988 the court ordered a new penalty hearing. It was held in 1989 before a new jury, in a different county after a change of venue. Defense experts testified about brain damage, a traumatic brain injury and temporal lobe epilepsy, and said he had acted under extreme emotional disturbance; the state’s experts disagreed. This time the jury voted unanimously for death, and he was resentenced. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed in October 1992, and the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 1993.

The Pasco case went the other way. A retrial ended in a second death sentence in 1989, which the Florida Supreme Court reversed in 1992. A third trial, in 1994, ended in another death sentence, on a 7–5 jury vote. In March 1997 the court found the evidence too weak to prove guilt, in large part because the Hillsborough plea barred the state from using those convictions, and ordered an acquittal. His confession to that killing had been thrown out ten years earlier. What remained, the court noted, was two hairs consistent with the victim’s and a carpet fiber that could not be tied only to his car; no one had seen him with her.

Thirty years of appeals

A motion for postconviction relief filed in 1994 was still pending in 2010, according to the Commission on Capital Cases. The Florida Supreme Court rejected his challenges to the plea in 2013, a further motion in 2016, and in 2018 his claim for relief under Hurst v. Florida, the 2016 ruling that struck down Florida’s death-sentencing scheme. A federal habeas petition was also denied.

On 23 April 2019 Governor Ron DeSantis signed his first death warrant, for Long, and set the execution for 23 May. Long’s lawyers argued that new science on brain injury showed he could not control his behavior, and challenged the lethal injection drugs; NBC News reported their argument that his epilepsy could cause a seizure. On 17 May the Florida Supreme Court unanimously rejected his claims. The Eleventh Circuit refused a stay on 22 May, and the US Supreme Court declined to intervene on the day of the execution.

The execution

The execution was set for 6 p.m. on Thursday 23 May 2019, but it did not begin until 6:43, while the Supreme Court considered his final appeal. Asked whether he wanted to make a final statement, Long said no. He was pronounced dead at 6:55. He was 65 and had spent about 34 years on death row, one of the longest stays in Florida. Fox 13 reported that he was the 98th person executed in Florida since 1976; he was the first under DeSantis.

Among the witnesses were relatives of the women he killed, the survivor who had escaped him, and a woman he had raped in 1984.

Where the sources disagree

• The number of victims: he was convicted of eight murders. The Tampa Bay Times and Oxygen say he confessed to ten; NBC News says he was suspected of ten; Fox 13 says ‘at least eight’; UPI reported in November 1984 that he was charged with nine. One of the ten was the Pasco case that ended in acquittal; the sources used here record no charge for the tenth.
• The plea counts: the Commission on Capital Cases and the 2013 Florida Supreme Court opinion list eight murders, eight kidnappings and seven sexual batteries, plus the survivor’s case; the Eleventh Circuit lists eight murders, nine kidnappings, eight sexual batteries and a probation violation – probably the same plea, counted with the survivor’s charges included.
• The life sentences: the AP and Fox 13 say 28; NBC News says 33; Biography says more than two dozen; an AP photo caption adds 401 years.
• The rapes: the AP and the Tampa Bay Times say dozens; NBC News says he admitted about 40; Biography says police attributed more than 50 to him.
• The death sentence date: Fox 13 says 1985, the year of the Pasco sentence; the Hillsborough sentence he was executed for dates from July 1986, reimposed in 1989. The first Pasco sentence is dated 3 May 1985 by the Commission and 10 May by the 2013 opinion.
• The survivor’s ordeal: UPI reported in 1984 that she was released after 24 hours; the Tampa Bay Times, Oxygen and the Washington Examiner say 26. UPI, the Tampa Bay Times and Biography say she was taken while cycling home from work; the AP says outside a church.
• The first killing: the AP, Fox 13 and Biography date it to March 1984; Oxygen says the first body was found on 13 May 1984.

The portrait

The portrait above is a detail of Long’s page in Bloody America, which gives one killer to each state. He is its Florida page. For other Florida cases, see Aileen Wuornos, Christine Falling and the Ted Bundy timeline.

If you find an error in this account, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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Questions people ask

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Sources

Every date and name on this page was checked against at least two of the following. Where they disagree, the disagreement is stated in the text rather than resolved silently.

1. Robert Jo Long (Bobby Joe Long), DC# 494041: case historyFlorida Commission on Capital Cases, last updated 4 February 2010
2. Robert Jo Long, DC# 494041: procedural historyFlorida Commission on Capital Cases, last updated 4 February 2010
3. Long v. State, No. 83593 (Pasco County acquittal)Florida Supreme Court, 6 March 1997
4. Long v. State, No. SC12-103Florida Supreme Court, 11 July 2013
5. Long v. Secretary, Department of Corrections, No. 19-11942US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, 22 May 2019
6. Robert Joseph Long v. State of Florida, No. 74,512: brief of the appelleeFlorida Attorney General, filed 28 October 1991 (FSU College of Law collection)
7. Long v. Florida, No. 18-9358: application for stay of executionUS Supreme Court docket, 20 May 2019
8. Long v. Florida, No. 17-9380: petitioner’s appendix (Hurst claim)US Supreme Court docket, 12 June 2018
9. Police arrest suspect in serial murdersUnited Press International, 17 November 1984
10. Serial killer who took 10 women’s lives executed in FloridaAssociated Press (Brendan Farrington), via the Philadelphia Inquirer, 23 May 2019
11. Serial killer who once terrorized Florida set for executionAssociated Press (Brendan Farrington) and WFTS (Michael Paluska), Tampa Bay 28, May 2019
12. Man who killed 10 women in Florida is executedAssociated Press, via WPEC CBS12, 23 May 2019
13. Tampa serial killer Bobby Joe Long is executed in silenceTampa Bay Times (Kathryn Varn), 23 May 2019
14. Bobby Joe Long is executed in Florida for killing eight women in 1984NBC News (Alex Johnson), 23 May 2019
15. ‘Long overdue’: Florida serial killer executed after 34 yearsFox 13 Tampa Bay, 24 May 2019
16. Long prosecutor reflects on 34 years spent waitingFox 13 Tampa Bay, 24 April 2019
17. DeSantis signs first death warrantNews Service of Florida, via Orlando Weekly, 24 April 2019
18. Court rejects appeal, execution looms for Florida serial killer Bobby Joe LongNews Service of Florida, via Orlando Weekly, 19 May 2019
19. Crime History: Serial killer captured after last victim is releasedWashington Examiner (Scott McCabe), 15 November 2012
20. Who is serial killer and ‘Classified Ad Rapist’ Bobby Joe Long?Oxygen (Courtney Brogle), 23 May 2020
21. Bobby Joe LongBiography.com, updated 3 October 2023

The facts on this page come from public records and the published sources above. If you find an error, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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