Who Killed Rebecca Young?

The Story

On May 1st, 1991, the Miami police got a very disturbing call. Dispatch spoke with a man who claimed to have been a direct witness to a murder that occurred in Belle Glades. The initial details of the call were murky because the caller was speaking primarily in Spanish and at a rapid pace. Detective Burt Blanco took over the call at this point. The caller clarified that he had actually seen this murder take place several days prior to the call. He was hunting in a sugar cane field (illegally hunting) and heard a car approaching in the distance. Out of fear of being caught, he hid in an area nearby. He then saw a blue Ford Bronco pull up from a distance. Both a man and a woman got out of the vehicle. The rest of his story is as follows:

The man and the woman almost immediately began to argue. He was telling her that she needed to give him “the money”. She told the man — whom she referred to as “Ricardito” — that she didn’t have the money yet to give to him. At one point, another man got out of the Bronco and started approaching the woman. She began to see where this confrontation was going. The woman shouted “don’t kill me, Ricardito” more than once, but to no avail. “Ricardito” pulled out a machete and struck the woman repeatedly until she was dead. Then, he and the other man dragged her body out of sight of the witness. The man was able to take down a 7 and 2 from the license plate as the car pulled away. The man was scared and left once the coast was clear. It wasn’t until days later that he gathered up the nerve to call the police.

Unsolved Mysteries Segment(Unsolved Mysteries)

The case landed in the hands of Detective Frank Mayo of Palm Beach County. He was able to obtain the location of the sugar cane field from the witness and went to check it out. The field was located behind an ice cream shop called the “Twisty Treat”. As the detective walked around the area, he saw a small brown object in the distance. When he got closer, he realized that it was the decomposed body of a woman.

The team of investigators swarmed the scene.

The Investigation

Mark Lewis, another detective, was appalled by the brutality of the crime scene. He felt that the killer had absolutely no regard for the life of another human being. The woman died from several wounds to her body caused by the machete (most likely). She was laying in the field for at least a week. The body was so far along the decomposition process that her fingers had already started to turn into a skeleton. However, the investigators still managed to pull a fingerprint from her right thumb. The young woman was identified as 21-year-old Rebecca Young. When Rebecca was just 12 years old, her mother was tragically murdered (that case is unrelated). Afterward, Rebecca began living with her aunt Lucille. Lucille became very close to Rebecca and grew to love her shy, quiet personality. She couldn’t understand why someone would want to kill her.

The police were trying to find the answer to that question as well. During their investigation, they learned that Rebecca started dating a known criminal after she graduated high school. This man turned out to be a bad influence and a negative presence in her life. He had gotten her involved in drugs and prostitution for his own financial and personal gain. He was also physically abusive. Witnesses recalled that he had beaten Rebecca up on more than one occasion. Those physical threats were how he got Rebecca into doing those dangerous and illegal activities. The police, however, determined that he was not the man who had killed her. They did theorize, though, that he perhaps ticked off the man that did.

Then, there was a break in the case.

On May 14th, 1991, a suspect was in custody. Just three weeks after Rebecca’s murder, a prostitute reported that a man she was with confessed to the murder of a black woman. The police tracked him down while he was driving and pulled him over. To help with their detainment, it turned out that he was driving under the influence. Oddly, when Detective Mayo sat down with the man, he immediately asked him if their conversation was about a murder. Shortly after that, the man walked back his question and asked for his lawyer to be present. Since there was no evidence to tie the man to Rebecca’s murder in any way, he had to be released.

The Status

Rebecca Young’s murder remains unsolved. The police are still looking for the witness that called dispatch. All they have to go off of is the name “Antonio”.