It was 7.30 in the evening of 4 September 1975. A police car drew up next to utility pole number 136 on Card Sound Road in Monroe County, near Miami, Florida. The police had been looking for members of the Cravero gang for months, and they'd had a tip-off that the body of one of them was here.
It didn't take the searchers long to find something in the wooded area at the side of the road. But what they found could hardly be described as a body. They were confronted by a four-foot wide crater in the ground, with fragments of bone and clothing scattered all over the place.
The story had started some years previously. Modern-day Florida has always been a pretty violent place. Smuggling is rife, with access to myriad islands of the Bahamas only a short boat or plane trip away. Beyond the Bahamas lie the diverse and often poorly policed islands of the Caribbean, and only another step further is the mainland of South America.
In the 1970s the American drug problem was just beginning to spread from specialised groups into the mainstream of society. Drugs like marijuana, cocaine and heroin were being smuggled in ever-increasing quantities, much of it through Florida, and illicit fortunes were being made by the dozen.
One organisation that specialised in the importation of cocaine was controlled by gang boss Richard Douglas Cravero - a violent man who had a fatally abrupt way of dealing with competitors and was scarcely less brutal with erring members of his own gang.
The Cravero gang's drug interests were enough to place them on the FBI's surveillance list. The law was on their trail when rumours began circulating that a gang member had been 'executed'. Creighton Randall 'Randy' Bethell had not been seen since 19 February 1975. But nobody could be made to talk about what had happened.
Nobody would talk, that is, until Cravero and 17 members of his gang were arrested later that year on drug charges. Four of them, including Cravero, were also charged with the murder of Stanley Harris, a disaffected member of the gang who had been gunned down outside a North Dade bar early in 1974. With Cravero safely locked up, eyewitnesses were willing to come forward and make statements, and Randy Bethell's fate came to light.
Bethell was in trouble with Cravero for creaming off the take on drug deals. He was abducted from a friend's house in Hollywood, Florida, on 19 February 1975.
At about 10pm, Cravero and a group of accomplices took Bethell to Card Sound Road, Monroe County. There the prisoner was shot in the head with a .357 Magnum revolver and was left, with the killers believing that the body would not be found in such a remote wooded location.
Change of mind
It appears that they must have changed their minds, because they returned to the body several times and systematically tried to remove all evidence that could possibly be used in identification. In the first trip, most of the body's teeth and jaws were knocked out and disposed of, using a large boulder to smash the skull.
Later the killers discovered that Bethell had been involved in an accident during his time in the US Army and he'd had both knees pinned, which would appear on the victim's medical record. So, they went back to the body and blasted both kneecaps with a hail of shotgun bullets.
Finally, the gang decided to make the remains completely unidentifiable, once and for all. They blew the body to pieces with a bomb made from five sticks of dynamite. This, they obviously thought, would do the trick, since if the authorities lacked an identifiable body they would find it hard to prove murder.
Now that the police had found the remains, they had to prove that this scattered and incomplete skeleton was Randy Bethell. If they did so, it would corroborate the testimony of witnesses and would add another plank to the State and Federal case against the Cravero gang.
A detailed search of the area around the bomb crater turned up a surprising amount of human debris, as well as shreds of clothing. Enough of the victim's shirt had survived to be identified by Bethell's father, and he also recognised his son's wig. However, it was the bodily remains that were to prove the clincher.
Skull examination
Back at the Dade County Medical Examiner's office, examination of a large fragment of skull revealed evidence of the passage of a large-calibre bullet. That part of the witnesses' story seemed to be true. But without the teeth, how could anybody conclusively identify the remains? Fortune favoured the investigators, however, when a large fragment of the lower right jaw still holding three teeth was found.
Examination of the bone showed that one of the teeth had been filled and another had undergone more extensive rebuilding with a large silver filling. An X-ray examination showed that the silver filling had been held in place with two pins. Next to it there was evidence of an old extraction.
Now all that was required was the victim's dental record to compare it with this jaw. Fortunately for the investigators, like many Americans of his generation, Bethell had served a stint in the army.
His records were tracked down fairly quickly and were passed to Richard R. Souviron, Associate Medical Examiner of Dade County and one of Florida's most experienced forensic odontologists. Souviron noted that according to Bethell's record he'd had a bicuspid removed in 1967. The healing of the space on the jaw found on Card Sound Road was consistent with an extraction seven years previously.
Tooth number 31 on the dental records, a molar, had been filled just as the same tooth on the victim had been filled. Finally, and most tellingly, tooth number 30 had been reconstructed and had been held in place by two pins. Souviron had no doubts. The remains found on Card Sound Road had indeed once been Creighton Randall Bethell, and the case against the Cravero gang was solid.
Who was he?
It took a great deal of imagination to recognise the remains found near Card Sound Road as those of a man. Five sticks of dynamite can make a pretty comprehensive mess of a human body, and putting a name to the remains seemed an impossible task.
The forensic investigators had to carry out a painstaking, inch-by-inch search, collecting the scattered fragments of bone in the hope that something would be found that could be later identified.
Following a tip-off, police from Monroe County, north of Miami, went to a spot on Card Sound Road where they expected to find a body. What they actually found was a crater measuring four feet across. A painstaking search by forensic examiners produced most of a human body. The location of each piece of the remains was carefully mapped in the medical examiner’s report
The remains were taken to the Dade County Medical Examiner’s Office for analysis. They discovered that the victim had not only been blown up but also a systematic attempt to destroy any forensic clues to his identity had been carried out by the killers. The skull was shattered and the jaws and teeth had been ripped out. The victim’s knees had also been blasted with a shotgun, as they had been surgically pinned and could therefore have provided a clue to his identity. Enough of the skull remained, however, to show part of an entry wound caused by a bullet from a powerful handgun, probably a .357 Magnum.
Proof of identity
Proving the identity of a corpse can be difficult enough without the murderers having blown it to pieces. In such circumstances a totally unknown body might remain unidentified, since there will often be no clues at all.
However, in the case of the shattered skeleton found in Card Sound Road, the investigators already had a possible name. All they had to do was to prove it.
In the absence of a recognisable face or fingerprints, the best method of identifying the victim is through forensic dentistry, where the teeth of the victim are matched with pre-death dental records. The problem was finding the teeth, since the killers had taken great pains to mutilate any identifiable portion of the corpse.
Although the killers tried to destroy any trace of dental evidence, by a stroke of good fortune the search of the crime scene turned up a small piece of jawbone still containing three teeth.
An X-ray examination of the three surviving teeth showed that they had undergone extensive dental work at some time in the past. If the police could match these to Randy Bethell’s dental chart, then the victim’s identity could be confirmed.
The three teeth were from the right lower jaw, numbers 30, 31 and 32 in the American standard dental designation. Bethell’s dental records showed extensive work on teeth 30 and 31. Doctor Souviron’s charting of the teeth from the body showed the same work.
The Craveros
Richard Cravero was a Florida gang leader with Mafia connections. His activities in the burgeoning drug trade in Florida in the 1970s had put him at the head of the FBI's Most Wanted list, but his ruthless elimination of opponents - his gang was credited with as many as 35 killings -made people afraid to testify against him. It was not until he and 17 of his gang members were arrested that witnesses began to talk. Among other things, it was the slaughter of Randy Bethell which was to lead to Cravero’s downfall.
Paul Jacobson was a leading member of the gang led by Richard Cravero. Both received life sentences for the 1975 murder, among others, of Randy Bethell.