Lisa McVey was riding home in downtown Florida after a double shift at a doughnut shop – the same route she took every time – one November night in 1984 when she was ripped off her bike.
“I felt the cold steel of a gun on my left temple,” she now tells The Mirror.
“A man dragged me across the street. I couldn’t see his face, but he got me to his car … he threw me in the driver’s side.”
There had been a string of murders along the Tampa Strip in Florida at the time.
All of the dead bodies belonged to women. And McVey was next.
But after being held at this man’s house – blindfolded and bound – and being forced into the shower before being sexually assaulted, McVey talked her attacker into letting her go.
Going straight to the police, McVey’s attack was not initially linked to the other murders as most killed were prostitutes and McVey escaped alive.
But the red fibre found at the crime scenes of all slain women before and after McVey was the same fibre found on the 17-year-old.
They eventually found the fibre in Bobby Joe Long’s home. His red carpet.
The serial killer admitted to murdering eight women which police were aware of, and two more. He also owned up to raping over 50 women.
There was a hatred there.
Bobby grew up with a single mother, Louella Long, who worked in a downtown bar to provide for her son and herself.
They shared a bedroom. She brought home men.
Lisa McVey.
But Bobby grew up to find love, marrying his childhood sweetheart, Cindy Gutherie Brown who he met in a local park.
He also had rare medical condition where he had an extra chromosome, and had also taken a few falls as a child – hitting his head – but it was a fall as an adult that changed everything.
Bobby was riding his bike one day when he was knocked off, changing his personality instantly, says Cindy now.
The pair had been married only a few months, but Bobby became violent, and after two children and an altercation leaving Cindy in hospital, she filed for divorce.
Multiple women were found dead in downtown Florida four years later.
“If I didn’t do it, if I tried not to do it, I’d be OK for a day or two days, but it wouldn’t stop. This would go on until I did it,” Bobby told police during his admission.
“Then when I would do it, I’d be OK for a month, two months, three months, sometimes longer… sometimes a couple of weeks… sometimes a week. And then it would hit again.”
Lisa McVey was the only one to survive. And where is she now?
“I wasn’t going to allow anybody to hurt me again and the only way I knew how to do that was to get into law enforcement,” McVey, now a Sheriff’s Deputy, told The Mirror.
“My empowerment comes from being so helpless and lost, that feeling I had when I was 17 years old. I’m not lost any more. I’m on top of my mountain and it feels pretty good.”
