Was it merely coincidence or something sinister that a man’s head was found behind a Dania Beach auto parts store named Millions of Parts?

The question is part of a grisly mystery that now covers two counties, as authorities in Miami-Dade try to determine whether that head and a torso discovered in a Miami Gardens canal the day after Thanksgiving belong to the same victim.

Police still don’t know his name, let alone who killed him, or why.

“To dismember someone is really awful … It’s quite evil,” said Dr. Joshua Perper, Broward’s chief medical examiner.

His office has custody of the victim’s head, which was found Nov. 14.

The office also has some of the victim’s other body parts, found about a week earlier inside a container that floated for days in a canal behind a Coral Shores home, near Northeast 26th Street and U.S. 1, in Fort Lauderdale. The container had been filled with cement in an attempt to sink it, police said.

Investigators say the gory finds carry an air of familiarity – these dismembered body cases are not uncommon in South Florida.

The killer dismembers the body in a frantic, and often failed, attempt to hide it, detectives say.

“These are usually isolated acts,” said Fort Lauderdale police Sgt. Frank Sousa. “It’s usually indicative of a crime of passion.”

Most of the homicides are solved, with police finding the victims were killed by someone they knew. Some, however, remain a mystery.

One is the case of Marita White, who was 22.

In December 2001, fishermen found her decapitated and severed remains in the New River near Delevoe Park, west of Fort Lauderdale.

More recently, in July 2009, state transportation workers clearing a wooded area in Palm Beach Gardens found a metal box that had been welded shut. Inside, investigators found a man’s skull, part of his torso and his left foot. Detectives have been unable to identify the victim.

In Miami, police divers scoured part of Biscayne Bay for days in June 2009 to collect a man’s severed remains that were stuffed into several plastic bags and dumped into the water. That victim, Omar Laparra, 21, was a laborer who was last seen leaving a dance club days earlier.

In Laparra’s case, police say they got a break when his brother recognized a description of the victim from news reports, allowing them to identify his remains.

Sometimes, though, identifying a dismembered victim is the greatest hurdle in the case, said Harold Ruslander, chief investigator at the Palm Beach County Medical Examiner’s Office.

“If you have the fingers you can try for fingerprints,” he said. “If not, then you go to DNA, but you have to have a potential name to match it to.”

Scouring dental records and missing-person reports are other options.

Once the victim’s identity is uncovered, it jump-starts the homicide investigation, because then detectives can study the victim in order to find out the killer and the killer’s motive.

Killers who dismember their victims usually are trying to prevent police from making that connection, Ruslander said.

“Most of them are just some form of concealment,” he said of the gruesome cases. “[The killers] put the body in the water and attempt to weigh it down.”

That’s exactly the method authorities are dealing with in the current South Florida murder mystery.

Detectives say they haven’t determined what a possible motive may have been, but they do not believe the sadistic dismemberment is indicative of a serial killer.

“There’s no reason to believe that at this time,” Sousa said.

Sofia Santana can be reached at or 954-356-4631.