The Everglades may be a major Florida tourist attraction, but they can also be a dumping ground for things unwanted — including human bodies.
“It’s a convenient place to dump people because there are gators out there to eat them,” said Davie Police Capt. Dale Engle.
In what has become the latest mystery involving the Everglades, authorities on Tuesday were working to identify a man found a day earlier by fishermen who spotted two alligators eating human remains in a canal west of U.S. 27 in Southwest Ranches.
“We are treating this as a homicide until we find out otherwise,” Engle said.
The body “appeared to have been in the canal for some time,” and the reptiles are not suspected of killing the person, Engle said. But the alligators had consumed the body’s midsection, making a quick determination of the person’s gender impossible, he added.
The Broward County Medical Examiner on Tuesday said the body was that of a man, but had not determined the cause of death, Engle said.
If the man was the victim of a homicide, it would not be the first time the Everglades was used as a disposal site.
In a Broward County case that continues to haunt investigators, the remains of teenage runaway Melissa Karp were discovered on Aug. 19, 2002, in a large green plastic garbage bag on a bridge embankment along the L-28 Canal off Alligator Alley, just north of the Collier County line. She had been beaten and shot in the chest.
No one has been charged in her death.
In another Broward case, the head of a missing Long Island woman, Lorraine Hatzakorzian, 41, was found floating in an Everglades canal off Alligator Alley in April 2007. During a 2013 trial, a witness testified that two men accused of killing her prayed to a small, concrete “alligator god” that a reptile would eat all evidence of the murder.
That did not happen. The pair were convicted.
And in a 1993 slaying that ranks as among the most infamous in local history, 20-year-old Bobby Kent was stabbed and bludgeoned to death by acquaintances after he was lured to a meeting on the eastern edge of the Everglades near Weston. The murder was the basis of the 2001 film “Bully.”
Finding bodies in the Everglades has become frequent enough over the years that in 2010 the first episode of the A&E network crime drama “The Glades” opened with a couple stumbling upon a headless body floating in the sawgrass.
“Two and a half million acres of open land, shifting water, canals and sawgrass and plenty of reptiles to eliminate all traces: a perfect disposal site,” writes novelist and former Sun Sentinel staff writer Jonathon King in his 2005 thriller “A Killing Night.”
Whether alligators are an effective or reliable means of getting rid of human bodies, however, is not clear.
“The Everglades can be hard to get at, so if you drop a body out there it could probably go undiscovered forever,” said Bob Freer, who runs Everglades Outpost Wildlife Rescue in Homestead. “But alligators normally don’t want to eat people, unless they have been out there soaking for a while. They are not like crocodiles.”
Yet, said veteran Collier County alligator trapper Bob Regel, “A wild alligator is just out there trying to survive, and if somebody dumps a body, then I do believe an alligator will go there and try to get a meal.
“An alligator is not interested necessarily in a dead body; it is interested in food.”
Bodies are not all that’s tossed into the Everglades. Freer said he has found lots of trash, dead pets and even live horses and donkeys that were apparently dropped off to die.
“It’s remote,” he said.
When officers from the Davie Police Department, which patrols Southwest Ranches, arrived Monday to recover the body, the two alligators which had been eating it retreated, Engle said.
A dive team was called in, and officers armed with AR-15 rifles stood ready to shoot any reptiles that approached. When the body was removed from the water about 10 p.m., four alligators were seen in the area, Engle said.
An alligator trapper from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission was sent to the scene in case the animals were determined to have caused the death. Officials decided they did not, according to spokeswoman Carol Lyn Parrish.
Staff writer Barbara Hijek contributed to this report.
