Ex-Officer Commits Suicide After Confessing to 3 Murders

The New York Times

Thursday, May 21, 1992

A former Oregon police officer confessed by telephone late last week to having killed three young women in the Tallahassee area, then committed suicide, the authorities said Tuesday.

The body of the 42-year-old former officer, Robert Neal Rodriguez, was found Saturday at a highway rest stop in New Mexico. A note found with the body said he had mailed a letter to the Florida authorities explaining why he fatally shot two 16-year-old girls from nearby Thomasville, Ga., at a beach south of Tallahassee this March.

John Joyce, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said today that Mr. Rodriguez called the department on Friday to confess to those two murders and to the slaying of a 22-year-old Florida woman whose body was found in a pond three months after she disappeared from a Tallahassee shopping center in 1984.

On Monday, The Arizona Daily Sun in Flagstaff, Ariz., received a handwritten letter, dated Friday, from Mr. Rodriguez. "By the time you receive this," the letter said, "I expect to be dead by suicide (cyanide poisoning and/or gunshot)."

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which received a copy of the letter on Tuesday, declined to discuss Mr. Rodriguez's motive for the killings.

Mr. Rodriguez spent two years with the Police Department of Portland, Ore., before leaving in 1977 on good terms with his superiors. He later moved to Tallahassee to be with his mother, who died several weeks ago. He left the city on May 5, after investigators had interviewed him in the beach slayings because his car matched one spotted near the scene.

SEX: M RACE: H TYPE: T MOTIVE: Sex.

MO: Shot females age 16-22, when rape plans went awry.

DISPOSITION: Suicide by cyanide to avoid arrest, May 15, 1992.