The Cape Coral Monster

In May 1990, 11-year-old Robin Cornell lived with her mother, Jan, in a townhouse in Cape Coral, Florida. Lisa Story, 32, a hospital coworker of Jan’s, had just moved into the spare bedroom and was looking after Robin on the night of May 9 while Jan was out.

Jan came home at about 4 a.m. on May 10 and found the back sliding door open and the living room ransacked. Robin and Lisa were both dead. Each had been sexually assaulted and suffocated. Investigators collected DNA and other evidence, including a keychain with a horseshoe charm that did not belong in the home, but they had no suspect. The case went unsolved for more than 26 years.

In August 2016, Joseph Zieler was arrested for shooting his grown son with a pellet gun, and a DNA sample was taken. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement matched it to the 1990 evidence, and he was charged with the murders that fall. At trial he claimed he had once been intimate with Robin’s mother. A jury convicted him in May 2023 and voted 10 to 2 for death. On June 26, 2023, after striking his own lawyer with his elbow in the courtroom, he was sentenced to death. The Florida Supreme Court upheld the sentence in April 2026.