If you believe his story, Cesar Barone has been wrongly convicted of four murders and three sexual assaults in Oregon, unjustly accused of a 16-year-old Fort Lauderdale murder and mistakenly termed a serial killer.
But if you believe police, Barone is a ruthless rapist and murderer with a fixation for elderly women and a preference for killing by strangulation. Authorities also think Barone may have committed at least three more murders, but they can’t prove it.
Barone, born Adolph James Rode in Broward County on Dec. 4, 1960, was willingly extradited to Broward earlier this month to face charges in what police think was the first in a career of slayings: the 1979 strangulation murder of retired schoolteacher Alice Stock, in which he was suspected but never charged until two years ago. His arraignment is set for Tuesday.
During a jailhouse interview with the Sun-Sentinel on Monday, the first time he has spoken to the press, Barone said he hopes his vindication will begin here.
“My catalyst is Florida, getting this case off my back,” Barone, 35, said with a steady gaze, leaning forward in an interview booth in the Broward County Jail. “I think it’s going to work for me this time.”
Until now, few trials have ended with verdicts in his favor.
Barone admits he was in and out of juvenile detention centers and prison, mainly for theft, from the time he was 13 until his late 20s.
He was 18 and had been out of jail just 15 days when Stock, 72, was found dead, lying naked in her bed in a modest Fort Lauderdale neighborhood on Nov. 29, 1979.
Three years earlier, when he was 15, Barone had terrorized Stock, police said, breaking into her home wielding a knife. He served two months in a juvenile detention center for the attack, which Barone described as a botched robbery attempt.
Detectives say they always suspected Barone raped and killed her.
They reviewed the Stock murder case again and again, but couldn’t come up with enough evidence to charge Barone, said Phil Mundy, the homicide detective who originally investigated Stock’s murder and now works for the Broward State Attorney’s Office.
“Every single lead, every physical evidence had been explored. We simply did not have evidence to charge him,” Mundy said. “Had he been convicted of that, assuming he’s guilty, these other people might be alive.”
And so it wasn’t until 1993, after Barone moved to Oregon and was being investigated in the deaths of four women there, that Fort Lauderdale detectives renewed their investigation of Stock’s death.
With new information – including an alleged confession to a Florida prison cellmate and a shoeprint matching a pair of Barone’s shoes – a Broward grand jury on Jan. 6, 1994 charged Barone with her murder.
Barone says he was in a now-defunct Fort Lauderdale bar the night Stock was killed and maintains he had nothing to do with the crime. He also says police charged him with the crime to “get on the bandwagon.”
But even some of Barone’s relatives say they have a difficult time believing him.
His father, Adolph Rode of Fort Lauderdale, said that he cut ties to his son after learning he was suspected of Stock’s killing.
“I haven’t spoken to my son in 15 years,” Rode said and declined further comment.
Barone’s sister, Debra Lambert, said she “cannot ever imagine him doing any of the things they say he did.
“I would rather believe what he’s telling me than believe the other end,” she said. “I would never turn my back on him.”
Barone admits he was “into stealing” during his adolescence and early adulthood. His sister said he stole from neighbors, and even his own father, but he would always deny the thefts “until he was caught in the middle of it.”
Both she and her brother say that while he may have had a penchant for burglary, he was not violent.
Police tell another story.
Six months after Stock’s murder, Broward Sheriff’s deputies charged Barone with trying to beat his grandmother to death with a rolling pin. He was later acquitted of the crime after defense attorneys claimed the victim mistook her grandson for her attacker because she suffered so many blows to the head.
“He just beat her viciously and, I believe, left her for dead,” said Broward Sheriff’s Lt. Tony Fantigrassi.
Shortly after the trial, Barone was sent to the Cross City Correctional Institute in Central Florida for five years for burglary. While imprisoned there in 1983, Barone got three years added to his sentence for attacking a 59-year-old female prison guard.
Barone claims another inmate was the attacker and that he took the rap because he walked into the room at the wrong time. But he said he preferred to serve the extra time rather than rat on another inmate.
“I’ve never snitched on anyone. I’ve never snitched on myself. I’ve always kept my mouth shut,” Barone said.
When he was released from Florida prisons in 1987, Barone said he needed to get away and leave everything behind.
He moved to the Northwest and started a new life with his new name. He married and later joined the Army, keeping his criminal past secret. In December 1989, he was among the forces that overthrew Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.
“I had everything going for me and then, boom,” Barone said.
In the fall of 1990, he was discharged from the Army for filing a false application after an elderly Washington woman complained that Barone had been harassing her and authorities dug up his criminal past in Florida.
He moved to the Portland suburb of Hillsboro in March 1991 and was later joined by his wife and son.
It was there, between April 1991 and January 1993, that Barone killed four women and attempted to sexually assault three others, some attacks coming just weeks apart. One Oregon judge later referred to the crimes as “despicable abomination after despicable abomination.”
But, as horrible as the crimes were, Barone was not charged for years.
“We were convinced initially that a lot of these murders weren’t connected,” said Mike O’Connell of the Washington County, Oregon, Sheriff’s Department.
Barone was initially jailed in Oregon in February of 1993 after his upstairs neighbor and another woman told police he tried to sexually assault them.
It was then that police said Barone started talking to other inmates about his deeds, mentioning details only the killer would know, detectives said. And his cellmates did not share his philosophy of keeping their mouths shut.
Their testimony of Barone’s alleged confessions ultimately was used to convict him in Oregon.
“I think he was convinced that nobody would tell on him. But this was way over the line, even for criminals. It was just so sick,” O’Connell said.
Barone denies having confessed to his cellmates and says that he has alibis for the times the Oregon crimes were committed. He even says he knows who murdered two of the women.
But he never produced the alibis or took the stand in any of the trials, and his defense consisted of trying to poke holes in the prosecutors’ cases.
“When I get a fair jury, then I’ll put on a defense,” said Barone, who is hopeful he will get his Oregon convictions overturned by a higher court.
In three separate Oregon trials, beginning in February 1994 and continuing until December 6, 1995, Barone was convicted of four slayings and three sexual assaults. He received three death sentences and two 45-year prison terms.
An acquittal in Florida, he said, will give him “some momentum” to go back and win Oregon appeals.
One detective said he hopes Barone will eventually admit to the other murders of which he is suspected but has never been charged. Oregon authorities think he killed two other women and possibly committed other crimes in Washington state. Broward detective Fantigrassi thinks Barone might be responsible for the 1980 stabbing death of Josephina Verschelden in her home in unincorporated Broward.
“He’s got to realize sooner or later that he’s never gonna get out of prison. Hopefully he’ll sit down and clear his name all the way,” Broward detective Fantigrassi said, expressing hopes that Barone will confess to his crimes. “When [serial killer Ted) Bundy knew the game was up, he gave it up.”
Barone’s response?
“Tell him not to hold his breath,” he snapped. “I have no intention whatsoever to spend my life in prison or to die in prison.”
