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He Stopped at a Hardware Store - Janet Acosta · Dead Serious

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hey guys, and welcome back to Dead Serious.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Ames Murray.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: I am back from vacation and I had the best time.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: I was definitely not ready to leave.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Very sad.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: But here we are.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: And today's story is one I had not heard of, which surprises me because it is a pretty crazy one.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's the story of Janet Acosta, of what was done to her, and of the 25-year legal road that followed.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, so who's Janet?
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: I know a lot of times the perpetrator has this gravitational pull towards them, and I get that.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, clearly there is something not right about them.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that we don't care about the victim, it's that the perpetrator is clearly messed up, and as humans, we want to know why.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Janet Acosta was born in 1951.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: By April of 2000, she was 49 years old living in Miami and had spent 25 years, the bulk of her adult working life, at the Miami Herald as a production worker.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: The Herald, for context, was not just a newspaper.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: It was an institution, one of the most important papers in the Southeast.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: And Janet had been there for a quarter century.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: 25 years is not a career.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's a commitment.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's the kind of tenure that means you are the person who knows where everything is, who knows everyone's name, who other people rely on without fully realizing how much.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's not nothing.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's a life built somewhere.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing that gets me is that her disappearance wasn't even noticed for two days because her coworkers just assumed she'd be back.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like, of course, Janet's coming back.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Janet is always here.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Which is both a testament to how reliable she was and one of the saddest details in this whole case.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: But we'll get there.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Janet had a sister named Julie Andrew and a niece named Janet Vanderwear, who was named after her.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: So Janet was a person with roots and people and history.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: And she had a habit.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: On her lunch breaks, she'd drive to Watson Island Park at the Japanese Rock Gardens and read.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: By the water, quiet, away from everything.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a very human thing to do, by the way, like having a spot.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Most of us have one.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the coffee shop where you know the barista's name, the bench in the park, the parking lot where you eat your lunch and pretend for 20 minutes that you have no responsibilities.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Janet's spot was the Japanese Rock Gardens on Watson Island, and she was there regularly.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Enough that it was just known that's where she'd be.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: On Tuesday, April 25th, 2000, she drove to her spot, she parked, she had her book, it was lunch.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the thing about this case that I noticed immediately when I started digging, it has almost no profile.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: I don't mean that it was under investigated, we'll get to the actual investigation, which was fast and thorough.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean that in the vast catalog of true crime content, the documentaries, the podcast episodes, the Reddit deep dives, the YouTube explainers, Janet Acosta barely registers.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: I searched, I looked, there is almost nothing.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: A case involving abduction, sexual violence, a 140-mile crime speed spanning two counties, a full confession to two murders, and a 25-year death row odyssey.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And somehow it didn't get a six-part docuseries.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm flagging it now because I want you to hold it.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: This is a case that deserved way more attention than it got.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the reasons it didn't get it are worth examining.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: On this Tuesday, a young man approached Sharon's van.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: His name was Michael Anthony Tansy, 23 years old.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: He'd grown up outside Boston and had been drifting around Florida for a few months.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Transient, broke, and though nobody in Florida had any idea yet, he had killed someone eight months earlier, 900 miles away.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: We'll spend some time on who Tansy was, but right now let's stay with what happened on Watson Island because it matters to walk through it in order.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: So he approaches the van, he asks for a cigarette, asked for the time.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Normal enough as a service interaction, the kind of thing that happens a hundred times a day in a city like Miami, to very ordinary requests.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Then he punched her in the face repeatedly.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: He forced his way into the van, grabbed her wrist, produced a razor blade, and drove south.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: The van she'd driven to her quiet lunch spot became a moving cell.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: And at that moment, nobody knew.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: She hadn't come back from lunch yet.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: There was no alarm, no one looking.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Just Janet went to lunch.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's the cruelest part of the timing.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: She was in a window of time that nobody was watching.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: She would have been back at her desk in an hour, except she wasn't.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: I want to walk you through what happened over the next several hours, and I want to be specific about the geography because the geography of this crime is one of the things that makes it so difficult to fully absorb.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Watson Island to Kajoke is roughly 140 miles by road south on US 1 through Homestead, over the bridge, and into the Florida Keys.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's more than two hours of driving under normal conditions.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Tansy drove that entire stretch with Janet Acosta in the back of her own van.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: First stop, Homestead, about 35 miles south of Miami.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: He pulled into a gas station.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: While there, he bound and gagged Janet with rope and a towel he found in her own van.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: He went through her things, took$53 in cash, took her ATM card, and he sexually battered her.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then he kept driving south.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: The Florida Keys, for listeners who don't know the area, it's beautiful country, a chain of islands connected by the overseas highway stretching off the southern tip of Florida.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the further south you go, the more remote it gets.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: Remote was what he was looking for.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: But first, Tavernier, Upper Keys.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: He stopped at an ATM and used Janet's card to withdraw money.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's a transaction, that's a timestamp, that's a thread.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then, this is where the episode gets its name.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: He stopped at a hardware store.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: He went inside, he walked the aisles, he bought duct tape and razor blades, which, okay, as a cashier, you know, someone coming up to you that has duct tape, razor blades, a big tarp.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's like you do have to kind of question like, what are you buying this stuff for?
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: So he pays for this.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: He walked back out to a van where uh 49-year-old Janet Acosta was bound, gagged, and terrified.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: A hardware store.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like he made a shopping trip, which, you know, just acting normal.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this was the year 2000.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: No smartphones, no Twitter, no ring doorbell footage going viral.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: No one is posting the ATM receipt to Reddit.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: No one is posting the hardware store transaction to Reddit.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: This case unfolds in what now feels like an almost eerie analog silence.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: A time before the true crime internet existed in any meaningful way.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been thinking about what would have happened if this had occurred today.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: The ATM's timestamp in Tabernir, someone would have made a map.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: The hardware store purchase, that receipt would have been posted in 17 different Facebook groups, and at least three podcast episodes would have covered it before the arrest.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: People would have been identifying random men on the overseas highway as persons of interest within 48 hours.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: There would have been a TikTok, there would have been a counter TikTok, an influencer would have driven to the hardware store and filmed a reaction.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: And somehow, none of it would have helped because investigators already had everything they needed without any of that.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: I find this both comforting and kind of funny.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: The mundanity of evil is genuinely one of the most disturbing things you encounter when you do this kind of research.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: The way a person can exist inside the normal world, do ordinary transactions, interact with clerks, pay for things at a register, while doing something unfathomable.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't make it more mysterious, it makes it more unsettling because it refuses to look like what we want evil to look like.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: So he continues south past Marathon over the Seven Mile Bridge, down to Kajo Key, about 20 miles from Key West, the end of the road essentially.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: He found an isolated area, he pulled off, and he told Janet Acosta what was going to happen.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: We know what he said because he said it himself later in his confession.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: He described it in detail.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: And in his own words are in the court record, he said, if I had let her go, I was gonna get caught quicker.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to get caught.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: I was having too much fun.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: I told her, I says, I can't let you go.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: If I let you go, then I'm gonna be in a lot of trouble.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: I was having too much fun.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: The courts heard those words.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: The jury heard those words.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: They are part of the permanent record of what happened on April 25th, 2000.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: He applied the duct tape over her mouth, her nose, her eyes, and he strangled her.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Janet Acosta, 49 years old, 25 years at the Miami Herald, her spook still back at Watson Island somewhere, died on Kudjoke.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: He left her there in a remote area and drove the remaining 20 miles to Key West.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: He spent the next two days there on her money, bought new clothes, got some food, got marijuana, lived his life while Janet Acosta's body was in the brush on Kudjoe Key, 20 miles up the road.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the other thing: this was not the first time he'd killed someone.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now, let's talk a little bit about Michael Tansy.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: He was born February 27th, 1977, and he grew up in the suburbs of Boston.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: By almost any measure, his childhood was brutal.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: His father, who was later diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died, was physically abusive.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Around age eight, Tansy was reportedly sexually molested by an older boy.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: He struggled in school, documented learning disabilities, and later came a list of mental health diagnoses.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's long enough to take a breath before reading.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Polysubstance dependence, PTSD, exhibitionism, sexual sadism, voyeurism, ADHD, antisocial personality disorder, bipolar disorder.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: One evaluating expert said he could not rule out schizophrenia.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: That list is extraordinary.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the legal system had to grapple with all of it.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: What it explains, what it doesn't, excuse.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll get to how the court weighed it, but I want to address the mental health picture separately for a second because I think it deserves more than a bullet point.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so mental health diagnosis and true crime.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about what happens to this information when the internet gets a hold of it, because we all know what happens.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Someone reads a list like Tansies, sexual sadism, antisocial personality disorder, bipolar, possible schizophrenia, and within 48 hours there are 17 reddit comments from people who have never met a clinician saying things like, he's clearly a narcissist, and I could have told you that just from looking at him.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: There are threads about which diagnosis explains the violence.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: There are people who are personally offended that he has a diagnosis at all, as if naming a condition is the same as excusing behavior.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: And there are other people who've decided that because he has a diagnosis, the sentence is automatically unjust.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Both camps are wrong, and both camps are confident.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: The actual mental health picture here is genuinely complex.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: A person with a documented traumatic childhood, documented abuse, documented clinical findings across multiple evaluations, who nonetheless made deliberate, methodical, calculating choices across 140 miles.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: The court found 10 mitigating circumstances based on his background and still found death was appropriate.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a satisfying answer for the Internet.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: The Internet prefers clean takes.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: This case just doesn't have any.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: In 1998, Tansy was arrested in Brockt, Massachusetts, south of Boston for van theft and home burglary, sentenced to 18 months, served six, released August 1999.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: Within weeks of walking out, he killed someone.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Her name was Caroline D.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Holder, 37 years old, mother of two.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: She was doing laundry at a laundromat in Brockton, Massachusetts on August 11th, 1999.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Michael Tansy stabbed her and beat her to death.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: Her case went unsolved.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: Tansy moved on.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: By early 2000, he was in Florida, and on April 25th, eight months and 14 days after murdering Caroline Holder, he walked up to Janet Acosta's van on Watson Island.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Two women, two states, less than nine months apart.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: The only reason we know Tansy killed Caroline Holder is because he told investigators himself after his Florida arrest, volunteered it, brought it up.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll get to the why in a moment.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's a quote from this case that has stuck with a lot of people who've covered it.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Miami police detective Frank Casanova worked the Janet Acosta case.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: In 2003 at the time of the trial, he described Michael Tansey as, and I'm quoting directly, a fledgling serial killer.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Fledgling.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Not yet fully developed, still becoming.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: The implication being, if not stopped, there would have been more.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's a law enforcement observation, not a clinical diagnosis, but a tracks with a pattern.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Released from prison, killed within weeks, crossed state lines, killed again, by his own admission, had no intention of stopping.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: The detective wasn't editorializing.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: He was describing what the evidence showed.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: Before I move on, I do want to hold on Caroline Holder for a moment because she's at risk of becoming a footnote in this story and she shouldn't be.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: She was 37, a mother of two, killed at a laundromat on an ordinary day.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: Her case never went to trial.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Her killer confessed to her murder in a different state and was never separately charged because Florida's death sentence was considered sufficient.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how her family feels about that.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: I imagine it's complicated.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: I imagine sufficient is a complicated word.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: She deserves to be said by name.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Two victims who didn't get the same kind of legal closure in very different ways.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: Let's move on to the arrest.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: April 27, 2000, two days after Janet Acosta was killed.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Her coworkers at the Miami Herald reported her missing.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: She hadn't come back from lunch on Tuesday.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was now Thursday.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Alarms were now going off.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Something clearly was very wrong.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: Police began looking for her vehicle.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: They located it or located where it would come back to in downtown Key West and they put it under surveillance.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: Michael Tansey, who had spent two days in Key West on Janet Acosta's money, buying a new wardrobe and otherwise living his life, came back to the van.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: Police were waiting.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: He was taken into custody without incident.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't have a great psychological explanation for that.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: He had her money, he had her ATM card, he had a head start, yet he chose to go back to the van.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's the detail.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: Make of it what you will.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now, real talk about confessions and the true crime community.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: We have a complicated relationship with them.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: On one hand, true crime audiences often demand a confession.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: There's no physical evidence, is treated as an indictment of the entire case, and a confession is treated as the final word.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: On the other hand, the same community will then spend three episodes dissecting whether the confession was coerced, whether it's reliable, whether the suspect seemed guilty enough during it.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: The Tansy confession is about as complete as confessions get.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: He laid out the entire sequence of events in detail.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: He guided investigators to the body, excuse me, he voluntarily disclosed a second murder nobody in Florida had any reason to ask about.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a situation that leaves a lot of interpretive room.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, if the case had blown up online, I promise you there would have been a thread.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: There's always a threat.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: Did anyone else notice he seemed too calm?
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, someone always notices that.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: In custody, Tanzi gave a full detailed confession, not a partial admission, not lawyered up fragments.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: He laid out the entire sequence: Watson Island, the razor blade, the drive south, homestead, the binding and gagging, the ATM in Tavernier, the Hardware Store, Kudjo Key.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: He described everything he did to Janet Acosta.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then he offered to take investigators to the body.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: He guided them to the remote area on Kudjo Key where he left her.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: That cooperation, the full confession, guiding them directly to her body, would later be formally listed by the sentencing court as one of the mitigating circumstances.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: And whatever you think of Michael Tansy, whatever conclusions you've drawn about him, he didn't make the family search.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't leave them wondering where she was.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: He told them.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: He also told them about Caroline Holder.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody asked.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody in Florida had any connection to a laundromat murder in Brockton, Massachusetts.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: Tansy brought it out himself, described the stabbing, the beating, confessed to two murders voluntarily.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: Massachusetts was eventually notified.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: No separate charges were ever filed.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: The Florida death sentence, once it became clear that was the direction things were heading, rendered a separate prosecution unnecessary in the eyes of the system.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: Whether that gave Caroline Holders family what they needed, I generally don't know.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: I hope someone did ask them.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: The Florida grand jury charged Tansy with first-degree murder, carjacking with a weapon, kidnapping with intent to commit a felony, armed robbery with a deadly weapon, and two counts of sexual battery with a deadly weapon.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Tansy pled not guilty initially.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Then shortly before the penalty phase trial, he changed his plea.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: Guilty on the murder, carjacking, kidnapping, kidnapping, and armed robbery.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: No guilt phase, there was nothing to contest.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: The only question left was what should happen to him.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: The penalty phase trial was held in 2003.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: Quick explainer for anyone new to Florida Capital cases.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: Once guilt is established, you move to a separate penalty phase.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: The jury hears evidence about the crime and about the person who committed it, the aggravating factors that make a murderer eligible for death, and the mitigating circumstances that might argue against it.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: Then they make a recommendation.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: The judge weighs it independently and formally imposes the sentence.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: In Tanzi's case, the jury came back unanimous.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: 12-0 death.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: That 12-0 vote would turn out to matter enormously years later in ways nobody in that courtroom in 2003 could fully anticipate it.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: The court found seven aggravating factors prior felony conviction, murder committed during a kidnapping, murder committed during two sexual batteries, murder committed to avoid arrest, murder committed for pecuniary gain, heinous, atrocious, or cruel, which is HAC, given utmost weight by the court.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: Cold, calculated, and premeditated.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: CCP.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: So HAC and CCP together are about as serious as Florida aggravating factors get.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: The court found both.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it found them with the specific language about the hardware store, the duct tape, the 140 miles, the deliberate decision to drive further, then stop.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: This was not a crime of passion.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: This was a crime of calculation.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: And on the defense side, the court did weigh all of the mitigation.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Family members who testified on his behalf and clearly loved him.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: The court took all it seriously and found it insufficient to outweigh what he did.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Formally sentenced to death on April 11th, 2003.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: He was 26 years old.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: Then began 22 years of post-conviction proceedings, as usual.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: I just, I don't know.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how I feel about that.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I want to be clear the appeals process in capital cases exist for serious reasons, and I'm not gonna wave it off.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: People have been wrongfully sentenced to death.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: The system of review is important, but let me walk through what actually happened because the share.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Duration of it is part of what Janet Acosta's family had to live with.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: 25 years on death row.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to imagine what looks like if this case had been on social media's radar from the beginning.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: 2003.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: The verdict comes in.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: True crime Twitter hasn't been invented yet, so nothing happens online.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: 2007, Florida Supreme Court affirms.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: In 2023 world, this would be a news cycle.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: Someone would post a thread, a counter thread, then silence.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: 2008, U.S.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: Supreme Court declines to hear it, more silence.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: 2012, post fiction motion denied, silence, 2016, Hearst versus Florida drops, and suddenly every Florida death row case is back in the discourse.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: Someone has definitely made a free insert defendant Reddit threat.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: It probably has four members.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: The Hearst argument is generally complex constitutional law.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's about whether judges or juries should make specific factual findings required for a death sentence.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: But on social media, it would have been described as a technicality by half the comments and as the courts finally admitting they messed up by the other half.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: Neither camp would have read the actual opinion, and Janet Costa's family would have had to watch all of it for 25 years while waiting.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's the part that I keep coming back to.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: Not the legal timeline, but the waiting.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: Sateriary declined to hear it.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: 2012, first post-conviction relief motion denied.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: TANSI 294 SO.3D482.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: Additional state and federal petitions 2008 through 2024.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: All denied.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: Florida had been allowing judges, not juries, to make the specific factual findings required to impose a death sentence.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: The Sixth Amendment said the Supreme Court requires those findings to be made by a jury.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: This raised immediate questions for every Florida death row inmate sentenced under the old scheme, including Tansy.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: Tansy's attorneys raised the Hearst issue.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: The Florida Supreme Court reviewed it, found that yes, technically, there was a Hearst error, and then found that the error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: And here's why.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: The jury vote had been unanimous, 12 to 0.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: Every single juror, independently, recommended death.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: The court has reasoned that when the recommendation is unanimous, any defect in the formal finding process didn't change the outcome.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: The error was real, just didn't change anything.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: That 12-0 vote from 2003 was still doing legal work in 2018.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: Still holding.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: More petitions, federal court, state court, each one denied.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: The road narrowed.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: March 10, 2025, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the death warrant.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: Execution date, April 8th, 2025.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: On April 1st, the Florida Supreme Court denied all remaining post-warrant motions.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: For Julie Andrew and Janet Vanderweer, for everyone who'd been waiting since April 25th, 2000, April 8th was finally actually coming.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: April 8th, 2025, Florida State Prison, Stark, Florida.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: Michael Anthony Tansi was 48 years old.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: He'd spent more than two decades on death row.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: Came in at 26 and lived out the rest of his 20s, all of his 30s, and most of his 40s inside Florida State Prison.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever he was at 23 on Watson Island, time it happened to him.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: I don't say that as mitigation, I say because it's true, and it's part of what execution as a legal practice actually involves.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: At 6 12 p.m.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: Eastern, he was pronounced dead.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: Third person executed in Florida in 2025.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: His attorneys had filed a last-day emergency stay application to the United States Supreme Court.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: The Supreme Court denied it.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: That was it, the road was genuinely closed.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: Tansy's final statement was brief.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: His voice, according to those present, was barely audible.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: He addressed the families of both Janet Acosta and Caroline Halder.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: He said he was sorry.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then he recited a verse.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: Luke 23, 34, the word spoken at the crucification.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to tell you what that means.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: I generally do not know.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: People will hear it differently depending on where they stand, on capital punishment, on faith, on what 22 years inside does to a person's interior life.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'll be honest about something though.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: There's a specific discomfort in being a true crime podcast, in being dead serious, specifically doing this episode at this moment.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because I know why this case came back onto people's radar in 2025.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because a death warrant got signed, and suddenly there's a news peg.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: Suddenly there's an and now the story concludes.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: Hook.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: That makes it into content.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm aware that I am doing exactly that.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: We are doing exactly that.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: I just think it's worth naming.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: Janet Acosta's family didn't get a quiet private conclusion.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: It happened in a news cycle.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: And now it's a podcast episode.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's not something I'm entirely comfortable with, and I'd rather say that than not.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: What Janet's family said, though, that I want to give full space to, her sister Julie Andrew witnessed the execution.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: She spoke afterward.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: She said, it's done.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, justice for Janet happened.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: My heart felt lighter and I can breathe again.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: My heart felt light and I can breathe again.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: Let's just sit with that for a second.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: Janet's niece, Janet Vanderweier, named for her aunt, also spoke.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: She said, This is the culmination of more than two decades of work to get justice for Janet.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: Janet Acosta spent 25 years at the Miami Herald.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: Her family spent 25 years working toward April 8th, 2025.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: Those two numbers sit right next to each other in a way I keep returning to.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what to do with it.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's just true, and true things don't always resolve.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: There were protesters outside the prison that evening.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: About 70 people gathered outside Florida State Prison in opposition to capital punishment.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: Worth saying they weren't there because they doubted Tansy guilt.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: No one doubted that.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: They were there because they believe the state should not have the power to take a life under any circumstances.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's a coherent moral position.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't require you to have sympathy for what Michael Tansy did.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: Those are two different conversations, and conflating them is a mistake a lot of people make.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think this episode is a place to resolve the capital punishment debate.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure anywhere is, but I'd rather name the protesters and what they stood for than erase them from the story.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: Julie Andrews said she could breathe again.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's real too.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: Both things are real.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's the whole problem.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: I want to leave you with Janet, not the machinery, not the appeals timeline, not the execution chamber with her.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: She was 49.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: She had given 20 years of her life to one institution, one community, one place.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: She had a spot she liked, a garden by the water in Miami, where she'd park and read a book and have 20 minutes of peace in the middle of a workday.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: She had a sister who loved her, a niece who carried her name.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: She was on her lunch break with a book in her hands on just a regular Tuesday in April.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: Janet Acosta deserved to finish her book.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: This episode meant anything to you.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: You know, share it.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: Say your name.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's generally the best thing you can do.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um please find Dead Serious wherever you listen to your podcasts.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: Leave a review.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: It really helps with the algorithm.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um and if you have a case that you think deserves this kind of attention, feel free to throw it out there.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where we're gonna end for today.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, thanks so much again for the support.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: And until next time, stay sharp, stay safe, and stay serious.