On April 8, 2025, the state of Florida executed 48-year-old Michael Anthony Tanzi by lethal injection at the Florida State Prison in Raiford. His death marked the conclusion of a harrowing twenty-five-year case that legal professionals once warned showed the early stages of a serial killer. Decades earlier, Tanzi had coldly told investigators that he murdered his victim simply because he was “having too much fun” to stop. Yet, inside the execution chamber, before the lethal chemicals ended his life at 6:12 p.m., the unrepentant monster offered a 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 twist: a solemn apology and a recitation of scripture from the gallows.
The horrific odyssey began on Tuesday, April 25, 2000, in Miami, Florida. Janet Acosta, a dedicated 49-year-old layout department employee who had spent 25 years at the Miami Herald, was enjoying her routine lunch break. She parked her van at a quiet Japanese garden on Watson Island, immersed in a book. Her peaceful afternoon was shattered when Tanzi, then 23, casually walked up to her window and asked for a cigarette. Without warning, Tanzi punched Acosta in the face, held a razor blade to her throat, and hijacked her vehicle.
What followed was a four-hour nightmare of pure terror. Tanzi drove south toward the remote Florida Keys, stopping along the way to bind Acosta’s hands and gag her with rope. He brutally assaulted her, forced her to perform 𝒔𝒆𝒙 acts, and used her ATM card to drain her bank account. He even casually stopped at a hardware store to purchase duct tape and additional razor blades. Upon reaching an isolated stretch of Cudjoe Key, roughly 20 miles from Key West, Tanzi forced the vehicle to a halt. He told Acosta he was going to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her. When she fought back, he bound her face, eyes, and mouth with duct tape, suffocating and strangling her until she stopped breathing. He hid her body in the thick coastal mangroves, then spent the next two days living high on her stolen cash, buying clothes and marijuana before police spotted him in her van and arrested him.
Upon his arrest, Tanzi confessed to another cold case murder: the August 1999 stabbing and strangulation of Caroline Holder, a mother of two in Brockton, Massachusetts. Though never tried for Holder’s death due to his immediate capital case in Florida, detectives realized they had captured a budding predator. Despite his defense pointing to a brutal childhood filled with physical and sexual 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮, a unanimous jury sentenced him to death in 2003.
Tanzi spent 22 years fighting his sentence on death row. His final appeal in 2025 argued that his morbid obesity—weighing nearly 383 pounds—and chronic sciatica would make lying flat on an execution gurnie an act of unconstitutional torture. The courts ultimately rejected the claim. For his final meal, Tanzi requested a heavy feast of a fried pork chop, bacon, a baked potato, corn, ice cream, and a candy bar. Strapped to the gurney with 24 witnesses watching—including Acosta’s sister—Tanzi’s final words through the speaker were low and measured: “I want to apologize to the family of Janet Acosta and Caroline Holder for taking their lives.” He then quoted Luke 23:34: “Heavenly Father, please do not blame those who do not know what they’re doing.” Minutes later, the prison warden announced that justice had been executed, bringing a quiet, long-awaited relief to families who had carried a crushing weight for a quarter of a century.