Eileen Truppner came to South Florida from Puerto Rico to start a new life, detectives say.
Instead, the 41-year-old mother of two was raped and murdered in southwest Broward in 1998, her body found by a boater on a weekend outing. She became a Jane Doe, her case unsolved for the next 25 years.
Now, detectives with the Broward Sheriff’s Office say they’ve finally found her killer: Lucious Boyd, a suspected serial killer who traveled Florida throughout the late 1990s and is already on death row for the vicious murder of 21-year-old Dawnia Dacosta only two weeks before Truppner died.
“The wound is open, it hurts and it hurts like it was yesterday,” Truppner’s sister, Nancy, said Tuesday at a news conference announcing the closure of the case. “Never in my life was I planning to receive a notice like this.”
Only months earlier, detectives had identified Truppner as the woman killed that day and informed Nancy of what happened to her.
The case comes amid a series of breakthroughs using forensic genetic genealogy to identify victims and criminals in cold cases. Sheriff’s detectives employed the technology to identify Truppner and then to connect her DNA to Boyd’s.
Their success also shows why BSO’s cold case unit, launched in 2019, is so necessary, Sheriff Gregory Tony said at the news conference.
“Boxes sitting in closets are not boxes, they’re people,” he said. “Their memories, their dreams, their passions. They’re all things we’ll never see again.”
Tony was joined Tuesday by BSO Cold Case Homicide Detective Zack Scott and Capt. John Brown. The two men spearheaded the case, which was Scott’s first when he became a detective 24 years ago, according to Nancy Truppner.
“Her never gave up on Eileen,” she said Tuesday.
Eileen Truppner was a kind Christian woman with a good heart, her sister said. She had worked in Puerto Rico before moving to South Florida to take English classes.
After she had her children, though, she suffered from post-partum depression, Nancy Truppner said.
Then, almost 25 years ago to the date, she encountered Boyd, her body later found in a grassy area near U.S. 27. Detectives aren’t sure what led Truppner into his path that day, but they believe he preyed on the vulnerable, whose disappearance may not immediately raise alarms.
“She did not deserve to die the way she died,” Truppner said Tuesday. “Brutalized.”
Boyd is connected to several other rapes and murders, but is only convicted of Dacosta’s, also investigated by BSO. On Dec. 5, 1998, he offered the young nursing student a ride when she ran out of gas on Interstate 95 on her way home to Deerfield Beach from church. He raped her and stabbed her 36 times with a screwdriver, then dumped her body in an alley near Oakland Park Boulevard.
For years, Nancy Truppner wondered what happened to her sister when she disappeared. Finally, in May of this year, detectives used forensic genetic genealogy to identify Eileen Truppner as the Jane Doe, and Scott reached out to her.
“I said, ‘Did you find her?’ and I was happy, but when he started talking and said what happened to her. … The story changes,” Truppner said in May, according to a BSO media release.
The next breakthrough came months later, when detectives connected Eileen’s DNA to Boyd’s DNA, which was already in evidence after Dacosta’s murder.
Scott requested to meet with Boyd in prison after connecting him to Tuppner’s murder, but “he did not wish to discuss the case,” he said.
A grand jury indicted him on Nov. 29. He now faces additional charges of first-degree murder and sexual battery.
Though Boyd is currently only charged in two murders, Scott and Brown believe he killed others while he traveled throughout the state from 1995 to 1999, which, if true, would make him a serial killer.
They encouraged anyone who might know anything to contact them. Anyone with information can contact Detective Zack Scott at 954-321-4214 or Broward Crime Stoppers at 954-493-8477.
