Paul Durousseau is a suspected serial killer known as the “Cabbie Killer,” who is behind bars for murdering 24-year-old Tyresa Mack inside her home in Jacksonville, Florida.
On July 26, 1999, Mack failed to pick up her children from a daycare center, and she missed a doctor’s appointment for her youngest child.
At around 7 p.m. that same day, her stepfather and sister decided to stop by her east-side home, located on A. Philip Randolph Boulevard, to check on her.
When they reached her second-floor apartment and went inside, they found Mack dead on her bed, laying in a semi-fetal position.
Mack was naked from the waist down, and she had a white cord wrapped around her neck.
The responding officers searched her apartment for evidence.
It was then that they noticed her television from the living room was missing, as well as an X‘s and O‘s necklace and bracelet set that her family said she would often wear.
Mack’s body was transported to the medical examiner’s office for an autopsy, which revealed she died from strangulation, the Florida Capital Cases reported.
Police learned through an investigation that before Mack was killed, a witness saw Durousseau leaving her apartment with her television.
For several years, Mack’s murder case went unsolved.
It wasn’t until fiber analysis, cell phone calls, and DNA evidence, which was found inside Mack’s vaginal area, that Durousseau was linked to the killing.
On Aug. 26, 2003, Durousseau was arrested. However, before he was taken into custody, he was already known as The Jacksonville Strangler and the Cabbie Killer.
He was accused of strangling six other African-American women: Tracy Habersham, Nicole L. Williams, Nikia Kilpatrick, Shawanda Denise McCalister, Jovanna Jefferson, and Surita Cohen—two of the women were pregnant.
Two years prior, on June 24, 2001, Durousseau was arrested for sexually assaulting a 19-year-old woman, and he was sentenced to probation.
Florida authorities believe Durousseau used his job as a taxi cab driver to meet most of his victims.
On Feb. 11, 2003, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office arrested Durousseau again. He was charged with five counts of first-degree murder and two counts of child abuse.
Prosecutors opted not to try him for the killings of the six other women for strategic reasons. Had Durousseau been tried for the murders and exonerated in one of the cases, it could have jeopardized the others.
Georgia law enforcement officers also suspected Durousseau of killing a woman in 1997 near Fort Benning before he was dishonorably discharged from the military in 1999 for having stolen goods.
Following his discharge, Durousseau and his wife, who was also a soldier in the United States Army as well as the mother of his two daughters, moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where he met most of his victims while working as a taxi driver.
Durousseau was eventually brought to justice and found guilty of killing Mack. He was sentenced to death by lethal injection, but it was thrown out by the Florida Supreme Court in 2017.
It was reported that sentencing someone to death was deemed unconstitutional if there wasn’t a unanimous jury vote.
“The ruling requires a 12-member jury to unanimously agree the case deserves the death penalty,” according to Action News Jax. “Paul Durousseau’s death sentence was imposed under an unconstitutional capital sentencing statute.”
The Florida Supreme Court “ruled that non-unanimous Florida death penalty cases after 2002 have to be re-sentenced.”
In 2021, Durousseau was sentenced to life in prison.