Hayes guilty in Tavernier rape, kidnapping case

A six-person jury took about an hour and a half Thursday to find John Lee Hayes guilty of rape, kidnapping, theft and aggravated battery in a March 2016 case that shocked the Upper Keys due to its randomness and brutality.

“There are crimes that deflate the human spirit,” Assistant Monroe County State Attorney Val Winter told jurors during closing arguments at the Plantation Key courthouse Thursday. “This one questions its very existence.”

Hayes, 56, is accused of lying in wait in the woods for the 39-year-old victim as she walked along a tree-lined sidewalk on her way to Dillon’s Pub and Grill in the Tavernier Towne Shopping Center shortly after 9 p.m. March 13, 2016. The woman, who this newspaper will not name because she is a rape victim, lived nearby and decided to walk instead of drive to the bar to meet a co-worker and his girlfriend because she knew she’d be drinking.

Hayes is convicted of popping out of the woods, punching the woman and dragging her behind the trees, where he viciously beat her and then raped her.

“That was his plan,” Winter said. “Stealth, darkness, ambush and attack and flee. Period.”

Once in the woods, Hayes forced the woman’s face into the ground. She inhaled dirt and dust as he repeatedly punched her, breaking her eye socket, jaw and several ribs. This was before the rape began.

“Consider the dirt that ended up in [the victim’s] mouth and fingernails and body,” Winter told jurors. “Consider the dirt that ended up in her vagina.”

During the rape, he “told me to kiss him like he was my boyfriend,” the woman testified on Day 1 of the three-day trial. When he finally stopped, the woman, who does not have children, fabricated a story that she did and had to get back to them. Hayes, the woman said, asked her where she lived. Not being able to think of a lie on the spot, she told him.

“He told me he’d done this to six other women,” she told prosecutor Colleen Dunne. “I was just going with it. I didn’t want to die.”

When it was over, Hayes told the woman to wait 15 minutes before she left the woods. He told her he didn’t want to kill her but warned her he’d raped six other women before. Hayes also took about $100 from the victim.

After Hayes departed, the woman crawled in the pitch dark trying to find her pants, underwear, shoes and cell phone. Of these items, she was only able to locate here pants and one shoe before limping her way to the Tavernier Towne parking lot.

Klara McGary, bartender and manager at Dillon’s, was called by a colleague after 9 p.m. who wasn’t feeling well. She agreed to come in and relieve him of his shift. Right after she arrived in the parking lot and exited her car, she saw the victim, who was so disheveled and badly beaten that McGary did not recognize her despite having waited on her several times in the past.

‘Rocky Balboa’

“She was beaten up so badly, I didn’t know who she was,” McGary said. She called 911. The victim’s friend, Daniel Dalton, who was worried about the victim after she failed to show up at the bar, saw her outside after being told by bar staff she was being treated in the parking lot by first responders. Dalton testified Tuesday that his friend looked like “Rocky Balboa.”

Finding the rapist was a top priority for the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office. While sexual assaults are not rare, random rapes are, especially in the Keys. Detectives got their break two months later after an DNA taken from the victim’s body partially matched Hayes’ DNA, which was in the system because he is a nine-time convicted felon.

After his arrest in May, detectives swabbed the inside of Hayes’ mouth so they could send another DNA sample to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to match it with the DNA found on the victim. Daniel Baker, a forensic biologist with the FDLE, testified Wednesday that DNA matching the sample the detective took from Hayes was found on the victim’s face, underneath her right-hand fingernails and inside her vagina.

The possibility the DNA could belong to someone else exists, Baker said, but that possibility is not statistically significant.

“I would expect the frequency of the DNA to be greater than one in 700 billion,” Baker said, adding, “The found DNA matches the DNA of Mr. Hayes.”

After the initial DNA match, detectives began reviewing security camera footage from businesses in Tavernier Towne, as well as a camera system the Sheriff’s Office has set up at mile marker 106 in Key Largo that snaps photos of vehicles coming and going and records their license plate numbers. It turns out Hayes’ Dodge pickup truck was in the Key Largo and Tavernier area that whole night, despite him living and working in Marathon in the Middle Keys.

His truck was photographed by the Sheriff’s Office camera traveling northbound at 7:40 p.m., then southbound at mile marker 106 at 7:55 p.m. At 8:54 p.m., a security camera at the Tavernier Towne Dunkin’ Donuts filmed the truck leaving and turning south on U.S.1. At 9:02, the Dunkin’ Donuts camera films the truck entering the shopping center. It was filmed leaving the shopping center again at 9:39 p.m.

Dunne said Hayes spotted the victim about to walk over the Tavernier Creek bridge at 8:54 p.m., turned around, pulled back into the Tavernier Towne parking lot, and waited in the woods so he could spring his attack.

“He waited for [the victim] so he could rape her,” Dunne said.

When Hayes took the stand to testify in his own defense, he told his attorney, public defender Jerome Gilhooley that the truck shown on the Dunkin’ Donuts footage was his. Hayes said he was in the Upper Keys because he had a doctor’s appointment in Homestead March 12 and decided to stay the night after doing some yard work at this sister’s house.

On the way into the Keys, he said he stopped off at the Last Chance Saloon in Florida City to get a bottle of Bacardi rum. He said his next stop was in front of the Made to Order restaurant on the ocean side at the south end of the Tavernier Creek bridge. He said he was going to fish underneath the bridge.

His defense

In rambling, often incoherent testimony, Hayes said that as he was emptying out an iced-tea bottle to make room in it for the rum, a drunk woman, who he said had the same name as the victim, came out of nowhere and came on to him physically and asked him for cocaine.

Hayes, who is a convicted drug dealer, said the woman gave him $60 and he went to his truck to drive off and score some cocaine for her. But he said when he got to his truck, the woman was gone. He said he traveled back across the bridge to Tavernier Towne so he could find her and return the money, but she was not there.

“When I left out of there, I hadn’t seen her since,” Hayes said.

Dunne noted that Hayes’ testimony differed wildly from when he spoke to detectives in May 2016, when he said he not only never met the victim, he was also unfamiliar with the Upper Keys area.

“He’s going to buy her some cocaine, but he’s not familiar with the area,” Dunne told jurors during closing arguments. “So I’m not sure where he’s going to get it.”

Monroe County Circuit Judge Luis Garcia, who presided over the the trial, is scheduled to sentence Hayes on Jan. 30 at 3:30 p.m. Hayes is facing life in prison for the rape charge.

“He will be leaving prison in a box,” State Attorney Dennis Ward said.

This story was originally published December 14, 2017 at 3:56 PM with the headline "Hayes guilty in Tavernier rape, kidnapping case."