The Case of the Miami Vigilante: The Fairlington Lavender Detective Series

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© 2011 by S.N. Bronstein. All rights reserved.

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First published by AuthorHouse 09/09/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4567-9583-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-9582-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-9581-8 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011915121

Printed in the United States of America

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For all of those in our midst who labor each day to help others understand themselves and cope with the demons that haunt them.

CONTENTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter One

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose

William Shakespeare

This account, related to a series of homicides that recently occurred, will disturb most readers. All events discussed in this book took place in the city in which I live and work; Miami, Florida. For a number of months after meeting Mr. Michael Jerome, a convicted murderer, I wrestled with the question of how we should, in the end, judge him. Some people called Michael Jerome a violent serial killer and some called him a righteous vigilante.

Very few people would say that the things Michael Jerome did were acceptable. We live in a society based on the rule of law. On the other hand, as we think about the terrible things that happen to innocent people, we all demand that justice be done. If the criminal justice system fails us and justice is not done, is it right for ordinary citizens to step in and take the law into their own hands?

Whether such vigilante behavior is right or wrong is difficult for me to decide. I’m not a psychologist or philosopher. I leave that decision to you once you read this book.

I’m a private investigator with almost ten years experience in the field. Before turning to this line of work, I spent thirty five years as a police officer. I have witnessed the aftermath of almost every type of crime imaginable and have had the opportunity to interview hundreds of suspected or convicted criminals. However, during my entire career I was never afforded access to anyone like Michael Jerome.

In May of 2009, while working a missing person case in Miami Beach where I maintain an office, I visited the Miami-Dade County Jail to interview an inmate who I thought might shed some light on my case. Michael Jerome was housed in an isolation cell on the same floor as my person of interest. I recognized him instantly as a result of the extensive media coverage his case received both locally and nationally.

The case I was working at the time was strictly small potatoes. A man, according to his wife, disappeared after being reunited with her following his release from the county jail on a drug charge that netted him just under a year of incarceration. He wasn’t a missing person. He took off.

I had to wrap up some details before submitting the final report to my client. I visited the jail to interview one of the missing guy’s former cellmates. My client’s husband was housed with this guy for eight months.

It was during this visit that my interest in the Michael Jerome case first began.

I wanted to speak with Michael Jerome. When you’ve spent your entire adult life in police work it’s impossible to pass up an opportunity to meet with an infamous criminal and see what he’s all about. This was not about me having to do any detective work. His cases had already been legally resolved.

His attorney negotiated guilty pleas for a sentence of life without parole for the nine premeditated murders he committed. What I was seeking after years of doing the investigative work involved in many criminal cases was something much more than police work. I wanted to speak with Jerome and try to understand his thinking. I wanted to know what it was that led him to kill nine people.

I had to know what drove this seemingly ordinary man to commit multiple killings. During my entire career I never gave much thought as to why a perpetrator committed the crimes that led to my involvement in their lives. I was too busy doing the leg work to bother myself with the business of the professors who studied these things in their ivory towers. Now, after all of the years I spent as a cop and PI, I felt it was time to work the other side of the street and look at things from another angle. I was interested for the first time in my career in actually meeting and talking to someone guilty of this degree of heinous behavior not as an investigator, but rather as an observer and student. When the opportunity arose to delve into the story of Michael Jerome, I knew this was not just another case. It was a case that would allow me to study the inner workings of the criminal mind after so many years as a detective on the street.

Through my connections with two shift commanders at the jail, I was able to visit with Mr. Jerome over the course of the next few weeks. I received permission from both Jerome and his attorney to meet with him and speak freely. During our visits, at which times he remained handcuffed, shackled, and accompanied by two officers, we sat in an interview room and spoke. He said very little concerning the charges that led to his life sentence.

Most of the time he discussed conditions within the jail and what the incarceration experience meant to him personally. However, on our last visit at the jail, he gave me a hand written, fifty three page narrative. What follows is that narrative word for word.

I have altered nothing. Michael’s diary describes in detail the trip taken by a deeply troubled man from grace to perdition. The narrative traces the troubled thinking that began over time to torture his mind, and reveals his reasoning as he planned and conducted a total of nine murders in the South Florida area over the course of almost three years.

After receiving Michael’s diary, I read newspaper accounts of his alleged crimes. I looked at tapes that were broadcasted by the local, national, and cable networks about his case. I read the entire court file including all police reports, and I had the opportunity to speak to some of the detectives who were assigned to his cases. Nothing I saw, read, or heard from the detectives I spoke to prepared me for what Michael Jerome had to tell the world in his own words.

Chapter Two

I was shipwrecked before I got aboard

Seneca

5 February 09

M. Jerome

I was arrested about a week ago and I’ve been placed in what they call an isolation cell. They told me this was to protect me from the other prisoners, but I think it’s to protect the other prisoners from me. They don’t want a scandal where a serial killer gets his hands on someone else inside the jail. I told my lawyer and the prosecutor many times that I object to the media calling me a serial killer. Yes, I killed nine people. Yes, it was over a three year period. Yes, I admitted to everything. But I did not do these things for the same reasons that true serial killers like Ted Bundy did. Those guys like him were sexual perverts who chased and killed for sexual pleasure. My killings were goal directed as one psychiatrist told me.

I will be forty two on June 8th. I was born in 1968 into a world that looked nothing like today. I was raised in Bangor, Maine, and in those days people acted like they knew what a sense of community was. Stores were for shopping, not robbing. Walls held up buildings. They were not designed to be places where slobs spray painted Chinese looking scribble that was supposed to mark off their territory like a dog trying to find a place to crap. We locked our doors when we left home, but what idiot would not? Why make it easy for a burglar? We had burglars but not home invaders like today.

There was always crime everywhere. Read the history of the world or the U.S. and you find that there were times when bands of thieves and murders came down from the hills and wiped out entire towns. New York at the turn of the 20th Century had gangs that were just as violent as the vermin that crawl the streets of our big cities today. They just used knives or pop-guns, not AK47’s. There were prostitutes in New Orleans and the pimps that went with them. During the 1970’s and 1980’s a trip to New York City or Chicago was not complete unless you got mugged by a guy with a knife or gun. But he took your wallet and ran like hell.

In Miami, where I moved to in 2000 when I was thirty two, they had the cocaine cowboys who shot up the town like it was Dodge City back in the old west. Castro fooled the hell out of all of us with his Mariel Boatlift in 1980 when he sent thousands of criminals and moral degenerates to Florida to get rid of them. Crime went wild here for years. Neighborhoods deteriorated, schools were turned into sewers, and South Florida went to hell.

We can thank Jimmy Carter for his immigration policy during his term from 1977 to 1981 which led to crowding in the cities, a country that no longer accepted English as its language, and a lot of people that used up our hospital, welfare, and police services. I’m not against immigration. My great-grandparents came from Ireland around the time of the turn of the 20th Century, but they came in legally. Today, immigrants come to visit and stay for life. No one cares. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans sneak over the border and take our work, deal in the drug trade, and commit crimes. No one cares.

It’s not just immigrants or inner-city, young, black men that are turning our cities and suburbs from neighborhoods into war zones. Plenty of white, American born kids and adults have lost their way and morals. Rich white kids buy designer drugs from other white kids and then overdose on them. White guys get drunk and beat the hell out of their wives and then go driving down the street and kill innocent people while they are DUI. White kids in schools pretend they’re black after watching too much MTV and then get themselves into all kinds of trouble that’s way over their heads.

I began to realize around the time I came to Miami that our country was going in the wrong direction. I wasn’t knowledgeable of this until I moved to South Florida. This was because the problem of decay was not so obvious in Bangor, and I really didn’t travel around to other cities all that much.

My family is Irish-Catholic and somewhat traditional in religious matters. We all went to church on Sunday and my sister and I both had Confirmations. We went to Mass and attended Confession. No