‘It’s over.’ Killer of beloved Miami Herald employee is executed 25 years after her murder
Janet Acosta’s family saw the face of the man who carjacked, sexually assaulted and murdered their beloved sister and aunt, a longtime Miami Herald employee, for the last time Tuesday evening.
Michael Tanzi, 48, was strapped to a gurney inside the death chamber of Florida State Prison when he died at 6:12 p.m. Tanzi was executed by lethal injection 25 years after he brutally killed Acosta.
Julie Andrew, Acosta’s sister, said she made a promise to her after she was murdered: She would do everything in her power to get justice — and witness justice carried out. For Andrew, that meant seeing her sister’s killer be executed.
“It’s over. It’s done,” Andrew told reporters outside the Raiford prison. “My heart just felt lighter, and I could breathe again.”
Hours before his execution, Tanzi was offered a final visit, meal and shower. He requested fried pork chops, bacon, baked potato, corn, ice cream, a candy bar and a soda, prison officials say. A spiritual adviser visited Tanzi in his final hours.
His final words were difficult to decipher, muffled by the buzzing of an AC unit in the prison’s small witness room. Tanzi’s face wasn’t visible. His body was covered under a white sheet that prison officials say obstructed the view of his face because of his large size. (Tanzi cited health issues, such as morbid obesity and sciatica, in his final appeals.)
“I apologize [to the Acosta and Holder families] for taking the lives...” Tanzi said in his brief statement. He recited a prayer before the drugs took effect: “Heavenly Father... who do not know what they are doing.” The prayer was likely a reference to Luke 23:34 in the Bible: “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”
The more than two dozen witnesses peering into the florescent-lit room remained stoic as Tanzi appeared to hyperventilate. He stopped moving at 6:06 p.m., his hands turning grayish white.
A Florida Department of Law Enforcement agent shook him and shouted what sounded like “Dead, dead” before a medical professional flashed a light in Tanzi’s eyes and placed a stethoscope to his chest.
When one of the agents announced Tanzi’s sentence was carried out, the curtain on the death chamber window rolled down. Tanzi’s body will be transported to the Alachua County Medical Examiner’s Office for an autopsy, according to prison protocols.
Dozens of protesters against the death penalty gathered outside the prison. In a statement, Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty expressed sympathy with Acosta’s family for her brutal killing but said executing Tanzi, who grew up with an unstable home life and suffered child sexual abuse, wasn’t justice.
According to the group, Tanzi acknowledged the severity of his crimes: “When I look back on my life my regrets are endless. I’ve taken full responsibility for my actions . . . prison saved my life.”
“If only there had been help and treatment for the 2-year-old, the 6-year-old, the 8-year-old, or the 20-year-old,” the group said in astatement. “If only the people and agencies who were supposed to protect him could have saved his life instead of prison. They could have saved Janet Acosta’s life too.”
The attack in the rock garden
On April 25, 2000, Tanzi, a 23-year-old Massachusetts drifter, confronted Acosta, 49, as she was reading a book in her Plymouth Voyager van on her Herald lunch break at the Japanese Rock Garden on Watson Island in Miami. He asked her for a cigarette, then punched her in the face before tying her up and throwing her into the back of the van.
Tanzi headed to the Keys, threatening Acosta with a box cutter to get her bank password so he could withdraw money from her account at multiple ATMs as he drove south. He sexually assaulted her before strangling and dumping her body in thick mangroves near a public boat ramp in Cudjoe Key, 20 miles north of Key West.
READ MORE: A Herald employee was brutally murdered 25 years ago. Her killer is set to be executed
A Monroe County judge sentenced Tanzi, who confessed to Acosta’s murder, to death in 2003.
Acosta, a 25-year Herald employee, was a supervisor in the Herald’s paper make-up department. Former coworkers said she had a gentle — but firm — hand as she dealt with editors and advertising department representatives pushing her to give them more space on the page.
Acosta would often spend her lunch break reading at the garden, which was a short ride over the MacArthur Causeway from the Herald’s former headquarters off the Causeway, overlooking Biscayne Bay. But she always returned precisely an hour later, knowing she had deadlines to meet.
When she didn’t return from her break, several of her co-workers alerted Robin Reiter-Faragalli, then vice president of human resources for the Herald, who tracked down Acosta’s bank information through the company’s payroll records and contacted the Miami police chief.
Her efforts helped detectives arrest Tanzi two days later in Key West as he was about to get into Acosta’s van.
“It makes me want to cry,” said Carolyn Green, who worked with Acosta for a decade and was a close friend. “That’s why I haven’t spoken about it. Janet was the nicest person you’d ever want to meet.”
Jennifer VanderWier, Acosta’s niece, is now four years older than Acosta when she was murdered. After Tanzi’s execution, the 53-year-old thanked prosecutors, jurors, victim’s advocates, law enforcement and Miami Herald staffers for obtaining justice for Acosta.
“Today marks the culmination of over two decades of work to get justice for Janet,” VanderWier told reporters outside Florida State Prison. “...Janet would have wanted everything possible to be done to make sure that no other person had to go through what she went through. The fact that this stopped with her... at least we can find peace with that.”
Family still mourning Acosta
From a young age, VanderWier looked up to her aunt.
“She always told us there’s a lot of world out there... you need to go out there and see what everything can see, experience everything you can experience and have adventures,” VanderWier said. “That’s how my mom and I lived our lives, especially after [Acosta’s] passing.”
Andrew and Acosta had a special bond. The sisters emailed daily, in the morning and at night. For Andrew, one of the hardest parts of Acosta’s death was she no longer had her sister to write to every day.
Acosta’s death devastated VanderWier, who considered Acosta her second mother. When she was 6, VanderWier asked Acosta why she didn’t have children. Acosta told her, “I have you.”
“If I hadn’t given birth to her, I would have sworn she was Janet’s daughter,” Andrew quipped.
Acosta was dedicated to her job at the Herald, Andrew said. She carried a briefcase with the Herald’s layout pages wherever she went, even lugging it to dinner outings with her family. She completed the New York Times crossword puzzle every Sunday morning and was usually the winner of family trivia games.
When she was in “play” mode, she would go kayaking and camping with Andrew and VanderWier, who lived in Jacksonville. She once rode her motorcycle to New England, solo.
“In her free time, she either read or went outside to explore parts of the world,” VanderWier said.
Acosta regularly volunteered at Shake-A-Leg, a sailing program in Coconut Grove for individuals with disabilities, Andrew and VanderWier said. And she once met former President Jimmy Carter while building a home in Miami with Habitat for Humanity.
Before joining the Herald, she taught English at sea and traveled across the globe. Andrew said the family spread Acosta’s ashes — and later her dog Murphy’s — in the ocean.
‘A fledgling serial killer’
Tanzi ambushed Acosta to get to Key West. He had traveled from New York City with two people who dropped Tanzi off in Miami after an argument.
Tanzi admitted to police to scouting for a remote location to kill her and came upon the secluded spot in Cudjoe Key. He confessed to murdering Acosta as he asked police for cigarettes, pizza and a soda.
Miami Police Lt. Carlos Alfaro called him “a cold-blooded animal” at the time of Tanzi’s arrest. During the taped confession, Tanzi explained why he killed Acosta:
“If I let her go, I was going to get caught quicker,” he said, the Herald reported. “I didn’t want to get caught. I was having too much fun.”
Tanzi also confessed to another murder: the Aug. 11, 1999, killing of 37-year-old mother of two Caroline Holder in Brockton, Mass. Holder was found strangled and stabbed in the throat at a coin laundry, just eight months before Acosta was killed. Tanzi was never charged with Holder’s murder.
Holder’s family couldn’t be reached as of Tuesday evening.
“What we have here is a fledgling serial killer,” Miami police detective Frank Casanovas told the Herald in 2003.
Casanovas watched Tanzi’s execution, noting afterwards that Tanzi never had remorse for killing Holder or Acosta.
“I think justice was served today,” he said. “It’s closure for everybody.”
This story was originally published April 8, 2025 at 6:50 PM.
