Bobby Joe Long: The Serial Killer a 17-Year-Old Girl Took Down

0:00 She's 17 years old, riding her bike home from a shift at Krispy Kreme. An stranger pulls her off that bike with a gun to her head. What she doesn't know yet is that surviving him is going to take everything she's got. And what he doesn't know is that she is about to memorize every single detail of the next 26 hours. This is the story of Bobby Joe Long and the girl who caught it. [Music] Robert Joseph Long, the guy everybody eventually knew as Bobby Joe, was born October 14th, 1953, in a little town in West Virginia called Kenova.

0:56 And if you'd met him as a toddler, there's no way you would have guessed where this story ends up. His parents split when he was two. His mom moved him to Florida and his childhood became a back and forth of reunions, second divorces, and crashing with relatives until the family got its own place, in Hylaya in 1965. Money was always tight. And his mom worked as a waitress and a bartender, jobs that meant certain outfits, which left Bobby Joe carrying real shame about it. School wasn't kind either. He failed the first grade, got teased about a jaw that never really grew in right. He started skipping classes around 12, and he dropped out of school in the 10th grade, twice, he kept going back, and then he eventually just got expelled.

1:40 And the story from here gets really strange. The kid physically could not stop getting hurt. He nearly drowned at a beach when he was four. At five, he fell off of a swing and a stick pierced his eyelid on the way down. At six, he got launched headfirst off of his bike into a parked car, and that made him lose some teeth. At seven, he fell off of a pony. He stayed dizzy after that fall for weeks. He also got hit by a car, possibly twice. One source sums it up, flat, saying he survived numerous blows to the skull. Bobby Joe was also born with an extra X chromosome, which raised his estrogen and gave him breast development at puberty.

2:21 Kids, of course, as you can guess, were merciless about it. As a teenager, he had breast reduction surgery, and multiple sources land on the same detail. Roughly six pounds of tissue were removed. Any time he ever went swimming, he kept his shirt on. Then there's his mom, the most contested relationship in this whole biography. Bobby Joe later claimed that his mother would bring home a string of boyfriends, and he would get pulled out of the bed at night, because he slept in his mom's bed and stuck out on the couch so that one of them could take his spot in the bed. His mother has always flatly denied it, and nobody has ever exactly settled on who is telling the truth in this. What is documented is a pattern of resentment that built in him for years.

3:05 Around age 13, he shot and killed the family dog. He shot this dog specifically in the genitals, reportedly because his mother fed the dog's steak while he ate hamburger. Bobby Joe met Cynthia, who everyone called Cindy when they were both around 13. They married in January of 1974 at a chapel on the Air Force Base where he was stationed. Six to eight weeks in, riding his motorcycle on US one, a driver who never saw him plowed straight into his bike. He was thrown somewhere between 60 and 100 feet, landed on his head, and his helmet split clean and half. The paramedics who showed up didn't think that he had made it.

3:46 They thought he was dead. He survived, but according to Cindy, the man who walked out of that hospital wasn't the man that she married. Nurses reported him masturbating five or six times a day when they come in to check on him, even in a body cast. And he demanded sex from her constantly, from Cindy, not the nurses, every time that she would come to visit. Before the crash, their sex life had been normal, she said, a couple of times a week. For it, nothing about him settled back down. Cindy asked the doctors if this would pass. They told her to give it some time. It never did pass. This became the new normal. She said since that Bobby Joe just never came back from that hospital.

4:27 What followed was years of abuse. Cindy has described him pinning her to the bed, choking her, punching her in the face while she couldn't even scream. One time he slammed her head into a TV and told her that if she told the truth about her stitches, he'd kill her the moment that she got home. She's admitted that she considered a far darker way out before choosing divorce, filing in June 1980. She said she sometimes wondered if she should have gone with Plan A. After the divorce, Bobby Joe drifted. Jobs came and went. Electricians assistant, X-ray technician, always fired within months for the same complaints. He was watching porn on shift, talking about sex constantly, being rude to female staff.

5:11 During a stretching California in 1982, he picked up the method that would define him, answering classified ads for furniture or homes for sale to get inside women's houses while they were home alone. That's where his nickname came from, the classified ad rapist. By March of 1984, on probation for an unrelated assault, he raped and strangled a young woman named Artis Wick, whose age was reported as either 18 or 20 depending on the source. Over the following eight months, in a county that usually saw 30 to 35 homicides a year, long-killed roughly one woman every two weeks, ten women confirmed dead, most working Tampa's Nebraska Avenue corridor or hitchhiking.

5:56 Several estranged enough from family that weeks passed before anyone filed a missing persons report. Then on November 3rd, 1984, the case tilts because Bobby Joe pulls a 17-year-old off of a bicycle. Her name was Lisa McVey, fresh off of an overnight shift at Krispy Kreme Donuts. He pressed a gun to her head and told her to shut up or he'd blow her brains out. But Bobby Joe had no way of knowing that surviving something unthinkable was not new territory for Lisa. She'd spent three years being abused by her grandmother's boyfriend and the night before this abduction she'd written a suicide note. Blindfolded in his car, she contorted her face, clenched her jaw just enough to open a small gap that she could see through the blindfold and started memorizing everything.

6:43 The white seats, the dark red carpet, the word magnum on the dashboard. Inside his apartment she counted 19 steps and registered every turn. Over roughly 26 hours, she built an actual relationship with this man in real time. She gave him a fake name. She invented a sick father who desperately needed her home and asked to touch his face so that she could memorize his mustache and the shape of his nose. She left fingerprints on his walls on purpose, just in case her body ended up being the only evidence anyone would find. Bobby Joe let her go just before dawn near NATM, telling her that the only reason he didn't kill her was because of her made up father.

7:23 When Lisa pulled off her blindfold, she later said that that was the moment she decided that she did actually want to live. She didn't want to take her own life anymore. Her memory is what cracked this case open. FBI fiber analysts linked the red carpet fibers from multiple murder scenes to fibers on her own clothing. Her memory of the word magnum led investigators pull every registered 1978 Dodge Magnum in the county by hand. Since this is 1984 and that meant a paper list and Bobby Joe's name was on it. There's traced an ATM withdrawal to almost the exact minute that Lisa remembered being let go. On November 16, 1984, they arrested Bobby Joe walking out of a movie theater.

8:06 In the movie, he had just watched in a detail that sounds made up but isn't. Chuck Norris in the movie "Missing in Action". He ended up confessing to nine murders in a 45-page statement, but he only pled guilty to eight of them. The ninth, the murder of Michelle Sims, was carved out of that deal for a jury to decide separately. That jury recommended death. The legal fight afterward dragged on for over three decades, full of reverse convictions and technical arguments that had nothing to do whether or not he actually did it. Because everyone already knew that he did. The governor signed his death warrant April of 2019 and Bobby Joe was executed by lethal injection on May 23, 2019 at Florida State Prison.

8:51 Asked for final words, he essentially said nothing. Lisa McVeigh, the girl he kidnapped at gunpoint after her shift at Krispy Kreme, sat in the front row that day, wearing a shirt that said "long overdue". Lisa had spent the decade since becoming a sheriff's deputy in the very same county that once arrested her attacker, working sex crimes and protecting kids. She read a statement naming all 10 victims out loud and thanked Bobby Joe, pointedly, were choosing her instead of another 17-year-old girl. Bobby Joe's daughter, Sarah, stood across the street that night at a vigil against the execution. She'd spent years defending her father, arguing his untreated head trauma explained the violence and waited until 2001 to visit him in prison.

9:36 Afterward, she said that her father made her a victim the same way that he made those women and their family's victims. Five different psychiatrists offered five different explanations for what made Bobby Joe long capable of any of this. Or monodamage, brain injury, disassociation, a shattered childhood attachment, or calculated psychopathy. None of them ever fully agreed, and the jury didn't buy the psychiatric defense either. What's left isn't a tidy explanation wrapped up with a bow. It's a man who spent his whole life colliding with the world, and a 17-year-old girl who collided with him and came out on the other side and kept living for decades while he was put to death.

10:27 Thanks for listening to 10-minute murder, binge-able true crime stories. Hello? I'm Joe. I'm the host. Here's an email subject. A very important update. Hi, Joe. Remember how people always say they fall asleep listening to podcasts, and more specifically, you've talked about on your podcast how people have written in and said that they fall asleep listening to yours? Well, I tried that with your show exactly one time. Turns out, hearing about murder isn't as relaxing as I thought. Lesson learned. Alicia and Yakim al-Washington. Alicia joined the club. Doing this podcast gives me nightmares sometimes. I talked about that on the podcast pretty extensively.

11:08 I don't think it's a secret. When you dig into the details of all these crimes and these murders, as much as I have to to do this show, it's going to do some things to your brain. And that always manifests for me right as I'm about to fall asleep. It's like, "Oh, you're going to sleep now. How about we replay the details of this horrible murder that you just read about?" And so that's what goes through my brain sometimes, and I'm trying to fall asleep. So I totally get what you're saying. However, there are, I have evidence of literally hundreds of emails of people that have written in saying that they do listen to this podcast as they're falling asleep, and they love doing that. So I know it's possible. It's just not for everyone, I suppose.

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