Arnette Tukes was 20 when she was raped and strangled in Broward County on February 22, 1980. Her killing occurred amid a string of sexual assaults and murders in northwest Fort Lauderdale. She left behind a three-year-old son, Dominick Richardson, who later named a daughter Arnette in his mother’s memory.

Detective Doug Evans identified Fort Lauderdale suspect Eddie Lee Mosley as the leading suspect in a series of rape-murders that included Tukes’s case, and Evans told the family he believed Mosley had killed Arnette. Broward Sheriff’s Office detectives instead pursued Jerry Frank Townsend, who was arrested in September 1979; Townsend was never prosecuted for Tukes’s death and later was exonerated by DNA in other cases. Mosley was arrested for an attempted rape in April 1980 and was later linked by DNA to several Fort Lauderdale murders, but the record does not show a completed trial or conviction tying him formally to Tukes’s killing.

No one was ultimately convicted of Arnette Tukes’s murder. Her family has long maintained that focusing on the wrong suspect allowed the real attacker to remain free and cost her life. Did anyone in the northwest Fort Lauderdale community remember Arnette or notice suspicious activity around February 22, 1980?