Famed Miami detective Mike Gonzalez dies at 95
MIAMI (AP) — For four decades, police detective Mike Gonzalez was Miami’s undisputed master of solving murders.
Long before DNA tests and video surveillance, Gonzalez cracked cases the old-school way, chasing down leads, working witnesses and cajoling suspects into confessions. He tracked down a man who refused to pay a 10-cent toll, then shot and killed a Florida Highway Patrol trooper. He uncovered a vast cocaine network during another homicide probe. And more than a decade after a woman’s body was found naked and strangled in her bed, the murderer not only confessed to Gonzalez but admitted to another murder two years earlier.
Famed Miami Herald crime reporter and novelist Edna Buchanan considered him the best of the best, once declaring, “he has solved more murders than anyone else in the world other than Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter.”
Last week, more than three decades after he retired as the dean of Miami’s homicide bureau, Gonzalez died quietly among family members, including his wife Gloria, at his home in South Miami-Dade after a short illness. He was 95.
“Mike never solved a case using today’s DNA successes. But he personally solved more murder cases using his verbal skills than dozens of DNA Investigators have done today,” said retired Miami Police Department Lt. Jerry Green. “Mike lived a very long and important life for the MPD and Miami community. RIP Mike.”
Gonzalez was born on Dec. 21, 1926, in Brooklyn, New York. He served in the Merchant Marines during World War II, then moved to Miami in 1946 and within five years joined the Miami Police Department. By 1956, he’d been drafted from the streets to homicide. There, as Miami changed from a sleepy town to one of the drug-smuggling capitals of the world, his legend and case count quickly grew.
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