A Herald employee was brutally murdered 25 years ago. Her killer is set to be executed

Miami Herald

05-04-2025

Carolyn Green remembers the last time she saw her coworker and close friend Janet Acosta more than two decades ago.
Acosta was wearing a new outfit — a purple sweater, blue jeans and boots — when she showed up to work on the fourth floor of the Miami Herald's bayfront building off the MacArthur Causeway. Her hair had a new do, short and sassy, instead of her shoulder-length bob.
She told Green she cut her locks to donate them to charity.
'She looked real pretty,'' said Green, who worked beside her for a decade.
A few hours later, Acosta would vanish, never to return from her lunch break at the Japanese Rock Garden on Watson Island, where she would go to read before returning to mapping the Herald's daily pages, carving out space for stories and ads.
On April 25, 2000, Acosta, 49, was abducted by Michael Tanzi, a 23-year-old Massachusetts drifter who asked Acosta for a cigarette, punched and threw her into her Plymouth Voyager van. Tanzi then tied her up in the back of the van and drove to the Keys, stealing her money, sexually assaulting her and finally strangling her, dumping her fully clothed body in thick mangroves near a public boat ramp in Cudjoe Key, 20 miles north of Key West.
At 6 p.m. Tuesday — almost 25 years after her murder — Tanzi, now 48, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison in Raiford. Gov. DeSantis signed his death warrant on March 10; the Florida Supreme Court has refused to halt his execution. A Monroe County judge sentenced Tanzi, who confessed to Acosta's murder, to death in 2003.
'It makes me want to cry,' Green said. 'That's why I haven't spoken about it. Janet was the nicest person you'd ever want to meet.'
Acosta, a 25-year Herald employee, was a supervisor in the Herald's paper make-up department. Former coworkers say she had a gentle — but firm — hand as she dealt with editors seeking more space for their stories and ad reps trying squeeze in an ad that blew past deadline.
'She had to balance being nice to us and saying no,' quipped Ric Banciella, who worked in the Herald's advertising department at the time.
Acosta, who would make ceramic mugs and teapots that she gave to her colleagues, would usually spend her lunch break reading at the Japanese Rock Garden, said Green, who credits Acosta with giving her 'the gift of reading.' But she always returned precisely an hour later, knowing she had deadlines to meet.
When she didn't return, several Herald staffers sprung into action, contacting police, her bank and others. Their efforts helped detectives arrest Tanzi two days later in Key West as he was about to get into Acosta's van.
'I knew something was wrong when she didn't come back,' Green said. 'But for God's sake, I didn't know this would be it.'
Shock, concern from start
When she learned Acosta didn't return from lunch, Robin Reiter-Faragalli, then vice president of human resources for the Herald, pulled Acosta's personnel records to track down her banking information. She called First Union Bank and discovered that Acosta's card was last used in Key West.
She called then-Miami Police Deputy Chief John Brooks. Police traced several ATM transactions to Homestead, Marathon and Key West. Brooks, who is now retired, didn't respond to the Herald's requests for an interview.
Two days later, Key West police and Monroe County Sheriff's deputies found Acosta's body in the mangroves. Using videotape footage from the ATM cameras, Key West police found Acosta's van on Duval Street. They waited there until Tanzi showed up. When told he was caught on tape using Acosta's ATM card, Tanzi confessed to strangling her, police told the Herald.
Banciella and other Herald advertising employees scoped out the garden the day after Acosta vanished, looking for witnesses and asking if anyone had seen her.
David Landsberg, who was then the vice president of advertising and would become a Herald publisher, said the newsroom was destroyed by Acosta's murder. The Herald held a memorial service on the second-floor terrace overlooking Biscayne Bay with Acosta's family.
'It was so outlandish that this could happen,' Landsberg said. 'We lost a great one. She hasn't been lost from our memories and thoughts.'
'A fledgling serial killer'
Tanzi confronted Acosta to get to Key West, according to stories in the Herald archives. He had traveled from New York City with two people who dropped Tanzi off in Miami after an argument.
After carjacking Acosta, Tanzi tied her up and threatened her with a box cutter to get her ATM card and pin number. He then withdrew money from her bank account as he traveled through South Miami-Dade and the Keys.
Tanzi admitted to police to scouting for a remote location to kill her and came upon the secluded spot in Cudjoe Key. He confessed to murdering Acosta in what police described in a 'matter-of-fact' manner, asking for cigarettes, pizza and a soda and occasionally smiling and laughing.
Miami Police Lt. Carlos Alfaro called him 'a cold-blooded animal' at the time of Tanzi's arrest.
During the taped confession, Tanzi explained why he killed Acosta:
'If I let her go, I was going to get caught quicker,' he said, the Herald reported. 'I didn't want to get caught. I was having too much fun.'
Tanzi also confessed to another murder: the Aug. 11, 1999, killing of 37-year-old mother of two Caroline Holder in Brockton, Massachusetts. Holder was found strangled and stabbed in the throat at a coin laundry, just eight months before Acosta was killed.
Tanzi was never charged with Holder's murder.
'What we have here is a fledgling serial killer,' Miami police detective Frank Casanovas told the Herald in 2003.
When Acosta was abducted, she was reading, former prosecutor Catherine Vogel said. Throughout the ordeal, Tanzi tortured Acosta, gagging her when she made noise.
'It was one of the more brutal homicides that I've prosecuted,' said Vogel, a seasoned prosecutor who handled the Jimmy Ryce case in Miami. '... It's every woman's nightmare.'
Manny Madruga, the lead prosecutor on the case, died in 2016.
'The last chapter of Janet Acosta's life should not end at a boat ramp off Cudjoe Key,' Madruga said during closing arguments in 2003. 'The last chapter should be written that justice was done.'
Green, who identified Acosta's body in the morgue, testified in the penalty phase of Tanzi's trial. She recounted being scared of going to Key West — and coming face to face with Tanzi as she testified about Acosta and her life.
Reiter-Faragalli, too, testified, telling jurors how she helped police locate Acosta's killer.
'It was heartbreaking to watch his face, his reactions,' she said. 'What a waste of a life.'
Killing haunts jurors
The Tanzi trial wasn't the first — or last time — Karen Haak served on a jury. But it was one she'll never forget.
'That was an intense trial. I served on at least about three or four others, but nothing that graphic,' said Haak, now 66. 'It topped them all. That trial is always in the back of my mind.'
Everything about the case remains chilling to Haak — from the violence of the crime itself, to where Tanzi strangled Acosta, about 10 feet from the end of Blimp Road in Cudjoe Key, where the U.S. government operates a large balloon to track smugglers and to broadcast propaganda to Cuba.
'I still get the heebie jeebies when I see all the places where they stopped on the way down,' Haak said. 'The blimp site is where my goddaughter rides horses.'
Tanzi's body language during the trial is still seared in Haak's mind.
'It was creepy looking at him and those droopy eyes. It really affected me for a couple of years,' Haak said. 'And, watching [Acosta's] family sitting there crying.'
Haak said she had no reservations about voting to sentence Tanzi to death, especially because he admitted to killing Acosta.
'I would have put him down that day,' she said.
Matt Pearce, also a juror, said he has had flashbacks to the week-long trial: 'Still, to this day, this case weighs heavy on me.'
Pearce recounted walking into the jury room for sentencing deliberations. Moments after entering, he and the other jurors agreed on recommending the death penalty but deliberated for two-and-a-half hours to review the evidence. Tanzi's attorneys urged the jury to spare his life, which they said was marred by childhood sexual abuse, adolescent institutionalization and mental problems.
'I think about [Acosta] all the time,' Pearce said. 'I can't muster up any regret or sympathy for [Tanzi.]'
Pearce also said he ran into Madruga at a store after the trial. During their conversation, Madruga told him that the jurors 'did the world a favor because Tanzi was on his way to becoming a serial killer,' Pearce said.
Tanzi didn't blink when he was sentenced to death by former Monroe Circuit Court Judge Richard Payne. Tanzi pleaded guilty before Payne in 2003.
'You have not only forfeited your right to live amongst us, you have forfeited your right to live,' Payne said. 'May God have mercy on your soul.'
Seeking closure
More than two decades later, Tanzi will be executed on Tuesday. But the death penalty caused divisions among Acosta's loved ones.
Acosta's longtime partner John Mulcahy expressed early on that he and Acosta were against the death penalty. Mulcahy died in 2015.
'I really loved this woman,' Mulcahy said in 2003. 'But I don't want to see the guy die. Both of us didn't think it did any good killing people off.'
'Our whole reason for being here wasn't for revenge,' Acosta's sister Julie Andrew said after Tanzi's 2003 death sentence. 'We wanted to see justice done for my sister. And we wanted to make sure no one else had to go through what we went through.'
Green mulled over witnessing Tanzi's execution but decided not to go. She remembered Acosta as a bookworm and history buff as well as a lover of the arts. Acosta graduated with a degree in arts from Florida Atlantic University in the early 1970s.
Green reminisced about how Acosta, a former teacher, would tell Green about a book to pique her interest in reading.
After Acosta's death, Green visited Acosta's apartment and saw her personal library, equipped with a sliding ladder. Her apartment walls were lined with bookcases, with thousands of books neatly placed.
'Once it's over, maybe I'll have closure,' Green said. 'Right now, I don't have closure. ... It's been 25 years, and it still hurts to talk about her. I didn't realize it would be this hard.'