On June 22, 2000, the body of 35-year-old Kimberly Dietz-Livy was found stuffed inside a suitcase on the side of a road in Cooper City, Florida. She had been beaten to death. Detectives collected DNA and fingerprints from the scene. Seven weeks later, on August 9, 2000, another woman was found dead in a duffel bag a few miles away.
The victim was 21-year-old Cidy Demis, who had also been beaten to death. More than a year after that, on August 30, 2001, the body of 24-year-old Jessica Good was pulled from Biscayne Bay in Miami. She had been stabbed. Forensic evidence linked all three murders to a single unidentified man.
DNA collected from all three crime scenes pointed to the same person, and fingerprints from two of the scenes matched each other. Investigators had a pattern, but they did not have a name. The women had all struggled with substance abuse and had turned to sex work in the Miami area. That shared vulnerability is what investigators believe brought them into contact with the same predator.
It is also the reason their cases did not draw the same attention as other murders in South Florida at the time. Kimberly had a husband, Michael Livy, who reported her missing before her body was found. He kept asking questions for two decades and never stopped waiting for an answer. Soon after Jessica Good’s body was discovered in Biscayne Bay, suspicion fell on a man living in Miami, a Brazilian national who worked as a flight attendant and had reportedly also worked as a pilot.
Detectives wanted to bring him in for questioning, but he boarded a flight and left for Brazil within days. That single act ended any realistic chance of prosecution. Brazil’s constitution bars the extradition of its own citizens to face charges in other countries. No matter how strong the DNA evidence was, Brazil would never hand over one of its own citizens to face an American murder charge.
The suspect was Roberto Wagner Fernandez. He had been living in Miami through the late 1990s, working a job that involved international travel. He was not a stranger to violence before arriving in Florida. In 1996, he had been accused of murdering his own wife in Brazil.
He was acquitted. In 2005, investigators received word that Fernandez had died in a small plane crash in Brazil while traveling to Paraguay. On paper, that news should have ended the case. There was no extradition barrier left to overcome because there was apparently no longer a living suspect.
But the case did not close quietly. Detectives in Broward County and Miami kept the files open and continued working to confirm that all three murders truly belonged to Fernandez. The first real break came in 2011. A fingerprint taken from Fernandez years earlier following the death of his wife in Brazil was compared against fingerprints collected from the Florida crime scenes.
It matched. DNA collected from the Jessica Good crime scene was also compared against the DNA profile already linked to the other two murders. It matched as well. For the first time, three separate homicide files worked by two different police departments were officially confirmed as the work of one man.
The only problem was that Fernandez was supposedly already dead. Investigators refused to accept a secondhand crash report and close three murder cases on that basis. If Fernandez had faked his death, he could still be free somewhere. If he really had died, his remains might still hold the one thing that could tie him to the murders: his own DNA.
Investigators built relationships with the Brazilian National Police, the US Department of Justice, and the FBI, coordinating across two legal systems to secure permission to exhume Fernandez’s grave. That permission finally came through in late 2020 and early 2021, more than 15 years after the reported crash. A team of investigators coordinated with Brazilian authorities to open a grave sealed for a decade and a half. The remains were exhumed, and DNA samples were sent for testing.
The results confirmed two things at once. First, Fernandez really was deceased. The plane crash story was not a cover. He had genuinely died in Brazil in 2005.
Second, his DNA profile matched the unknown suspect profile pulled from all three Florida crime scenes. Miami police sergeant Nikolai Trofanov, who had worked the Jessica Good case as a detective years earlier, described the moment plainly: “We were able to confirm ultimately that Mr. Fernandez was deceased, the body was exhumed, DNA was taken, and it all matched the profile. ”
The confirmation also resolved a detail that had sat at the center of the case for over 20 years.
The suitcase and the duffel bag that had once looked like a strange coincidence were not a coincidence. They were the pattern of a man who traveled for a living and packed his victims the same way he packed for a flight. Fernandez had been identified as a suspect in a 2003 rape case in Brazil and had been a person of interest in several other violent incidents there as well. His 1996 acquittal for the murder of his wife meant he had likely been getting away with violence against women for years before he ever set foot in Florida.
On August 31, 2021, Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony stood in front of reporters and delivered the news that closed three homicide cases at once, more than 20 years after the first one began. “This suspect, Roberto Fernandez, was indeed responsible for the brutal murder of all three of these women,” Tony said. There was no defendant, no trial, no sentencing. Fernandez had been dead for 16 years by the time his name was formally connected to these murders.
The press conference had to do the work a courtroom usually does, laying out the evidence piece by piece in front of the public. Tony walked through the entire case: Kimberly Dietz-Livy found in a suitcase in Cooper City in June 2000, Cidy Demis found in a duffel bag near Dania Beach seven weeks later, Jessica Good found floating in Biscayne Bay in August 2001, fingerprint evidence connecting two of the scenes, DNA evidence connecting all three, a suspect who fled the country the moment police wanted to talk to him, and an exhumation on foreign soil that confirmed everything. “Justice never expires,” Tony said. Broward County Detective Zachary Scott made clear that even this announcement was not necessarily the final word.
“I believe there are other cases out there,” he said. “And that is part of our ongoing investigation. ”
The possibility that Fernandez may have had other victims is a sobering part of the case. He had a documented history of violence against women in Brazil, an international job that put him in contact with people across borders, and a pattern that likely spanned years.
Some other victims may never be identified, and their families may never receive the answer that Michael Livy finally received. Kimberly’s husband had waited two decades for that answer, even knowing there would be no courtroom at the end of it. His statement when it finally came was not about revenge. “My heart goes out to the loved ones of every victim,” he said.
“I hope this gives them a sense of closure, as it does to me. ”
The case proved that neither the passage of time nor the death of a suspect has to be the final word on an investigation. DNA sits in evidence storage for decades. Fingerprints sit in old files.
And sometimes the truth is waiting on the other side of a border in a grave that has not been asked the right question yet.