Horror In Ybor City

October 17, 1933

Blood soaked the beds and dripped off the sides, forming thick red puddles on the wooden floors of the Ybor City casita. Mangled and mutilated bodies were strewn throughout the house. A dying boy lay in his bed, struggling for his next breath. And under the front porch, a dog caked in its own blood let out one final whimper before joining the afterlife. The home looked like something out of a modern day horror flick. Just hours before, sadistic acts turned this once peaceful home into hell on earth. Yet, no one in Ybor City knew anything was wrong.

Ybor City went about its business as usual that morning. The streetcars rumbled down their tracks laid upon the brick streets of the Latin District, dropping off the cigar workers at the factories. The cafés were filled with Latinos sipping their café con leche and arguing politics.  Kids rushed off to school; the boys exclaiming that they would rule the schoolyard baseball games that day while the girls whispered about which boys they thought were cute. The clickity-clack of dominoes slamming onto tables echoed throughout the Cuban Club and Centro Asturiano. And the Seventh Avenue merchants unlocked their doors for another day of business. Everything seemed normal in Ybor City- well, almost everything.

The casita located at 1707 Fifth Avenue, the Licata family’s home, was quiet, which was far from normal. The patriarch of the family, Michael Licata, owned two successful downtown barbershops. In the late morning hours, neighbors began to think, surely Michael should have left for work already, yet they never saw him leave the home that morning. The Licata’s have two school-age children, yet the neighbors never saw them leave for school. And the family has a dog, but no one has walked it. If the Licatas had gone on vacation, they would have told somebody, whispered the neighbors. As minutes turned to an hour and there was still no noise coming from the home, neighbors finally contacted the police.

When the police arrived, they had to enter the home through a rear window; all outside doors were locked. Once inside, they found the horror that was hiding behind those locked doors.

On the bed in the front room they found Michael Licata lying in a welter of blood, killed with one swing of an axe. In the adjoining bedroom they found the bodies of the family’s 22-year-old soon-to-be-married daughter, Prudence, and her 8-year-old brother, Jose, both hacked to death. In the rear bedroom they found the murdered mother, 44-year-old Rosalie. On the bed beside her lay her 14-year-old son, Philip, alive but suffering from numerous axe wounds. And lying on the floor next to the bed was the murder weapon–a blood-stained axe.

After removing the dying boy from the room and getting him to the hospital, the police continued their search, finding the Licata’s 21-year-old son, Victor, cowering in the bathroom, dressed in a clean white shirt and well-pressed trousers. Underneath his clean clothes, though, his naked skin was stained in blood. Police didn’t need to strip search him to finger him as the killer, though. Victor Licata was a tiny man–just 5’8 and 127 pounds. He was soft spoken and often described as possessing “queer manners” by friends and family.  But he was long known to be dangerous and mentally unstable, so much so that his father slept with a pistol between his mattresses. A drunk and a habitual marijuana smoker, the police tried to commit Victor a year ago but his family refused, claiming they could take better care of him themselves. But the family underestimated the demons that lived inside Victor. It wasn’t until the police interrogated Victor that anyone could truly understand how insane he’d become.

According to Victor, he didn’t kill his family. Actually, he told police, his family had attacked him.

He told police that on the night of October 16, 1933, he drove around town on the back of a friend’s truck drinking moonshine and smoking marijuana. He returned home sometime between 8 and 10 p.m. His sister Providence was out. His mother was in the kitchen. And Philip and Jose were in bed. He said he then went to bed and fell asleep, but woke up a few hours later when his father came charging into the room, pulled him from bed and held him against the wall. According to Victor, his mother then entered the room wielding a kitchen knife and jeered and taunted him as his brothers and sisters pointed and laughed at him. He said his mother then sawed off his arms with the knife and jabbed homemade wooden arms with iron claws as hands into his stumps.  Victor said that when the attack ended and his family left the room, he sought revenge. He said he found an axe on the porch; but it wasn’t a normal axe. He said it was a “funny axe,” rubbery, like something out of a slapstick cartoon. He said he then took the funny axe and whacked his family members in their heads with it, knocking them unconscious, but never killed them. He did say, though, that when he finished the attack he found it odd when he was able to wring blood out of the axe, which caused great pain in his stomach.

What made this story even creepier was that Victor seemed to be 100 percent honest when he told it. He thought it was true. Investigators believed that he had a nightmare that his family attacked him as explained. Investigators stated that he then woke up and, in a delirious state, murdered his family and family dog with the axe, thus earning himself the nickname “The Dream Slayer.”

Philip died in the hospital soon after he was admitted and Victor was arrested for the murder of his five family members. But, just days later, friends and family came to his rescue. They refused to allow him to be tried for murder, bringing insanity proceedings against him in Civil Court.

Family and friends claimed that Victor’s insanity was due to his habitual marijuana use. But, according to a court-appointed commission’s report, the axe-murderer suffered from a form of dementia. In fact, his brother Philip was also pronounced to be a victim of dementia. Victor also had a grand-uncle who died in an asylum and two cousins who were in asylums at the time of the murder. Finally, the commission discovered that Victor’s parents–Michael and Rosalie–were first cousins.

Following the release of the report, the state attorney announced he would not even indict Victor with murder, saying that it would be a waste of money to try someone with murder who was “definitely established” as insane. Victor was instead given a life sentence at a mental institution in Chattahoochee, Florida with no parole. Victor, though, didn’t need parole. He found another way out of the institution.

On October 15, 1945–just one day short of the 12-year-anniversary of the Licata murders–Victor’s cell at the institution was found empty. Victor, along with four other patients, had escaped.

One of the escaped inmates was caught just hours after the empty cells were found and claimed that they sawed the iron bars from a cell window with a piece of tin and climbed to freedom. One of the institution’s attendants swore he checked the bars hours before the escape and they were fully intact. But, investigators said it was impossible for a piece of tin to cut through iron bars and that even with a hacksaw it would have taken days to do so, not mere hours. Investigators said the escape was made possible through inside help.

According to investigators, the escapees obtained cellblock keys from one of the attendants and used them to meet in the same cellblock. For how many nights they met is unknown, but they met enough times to saw the bars from a window in that cellblock; though never completely sawing them away, as doing so would have been noticeable. Instead, they sawed them to the point that they could remain intact but be easily broken when they were ready to escape. On the night they escaped, they broke the sawed bars away from the window and climbed down a ladder made of sheets.

Four of the five fugitives were quickly found; Licata successfully escaped the county. An axe-murderer was on the loose. And, to compound matters, cellmates stated that Victor had recently been talking about his desire to murder every member of his family.

Five years later he may have tried to make good on that desire.

In August 1950, Victor casually walked into his Cousin Philip’s restaurant in New Orleans, telling his cousin that he had been working as a laborer in Louisiana for the past nine months and as a laborer in Texas and Delaware before that. Philip played it cool, fixing Victor dinner and then buying him a few beers at a bar across the street. He then told Victor that he needed to go home, but asked him to come back the next day.

“I was afraid of him, all right, the way you’d be afraid of any crazy man,” Philip later told the media. “I decided I’d get him to come back the next day and I’d have police waiting for him.”

Victor did return the next day and spent three hours talking to the short order cook, but he disappeared before the police arrived, taking with him a bank envelope containing around $180.

But he returned to the restaurant for a third time the following day, and this time his cousin wasn’t going to let him get away. Philip waited for Victor to turn his back and then pounced on him, pinning his tiny cousin to the wall until the police arrived.

Upon his arrest, Victor was ordered to the Florida State Prison in Raiford until a court could decide where he should permanently reside. But, again, Victor had other plans.

In December 1950, a prison guard found Victor’s still warm body dangling from a bed sheet tied to the top of his cell’s double-decked bed. According to investigators, shortly after his cellmate went to the yard for exercise, Victor committed suicide by hanging, the final chapter in the bloody Ybor City story of the “Dream Slayer.”

Featured in Cigar City - Issue 27 - 2010