It was one of the more brutal crime scenes in recent Key Largo history when firefighters knocked down flames at a small house behind the local Veterans of Foreign Wars bar to find the body of a 70-year-old woman — whom investigators said was stabbed in the neck.

The Keys community was still recovering from Hurricane Irma when the firefighters made the grisly discovery around 9:40 p.m. Oct. 21, 2017.

And many of the people looking for work cleaning people’s yards from the damage caused by the Category 4 storm lived on boats in a mooring field behind the Murray Nelson Government Center on the bayside of U.S. 1, right across the street from the VFW where the victim, Mary Bonneville, went to drink and play video poker just about every night.

That’s also where the man — who prosecutors charged with Bonneville’s murder two years later — lived. Investigators said 59-year-old Eddy Lopez-Jemot stabbed Bonneville that night and then set her house at the 700 block of Ponce de Leon Boulevard ablaze.

But he’s not in prison; instead, he landed in Alligator Alcatraz, the tent city the state of Florida built this summer on an airstrip in the middle of the Everglades to temporarily hold migrants before they’re to be deported.

Lopez-Jemot pleaded no contest to first-degree arson June 30 and was sentenced to nearly four years in prison, but given time served for that entire time since he’s been in Monroe County jail ever since the week Bonneville was found dead. In exchange for his plea, the state dropped the murder charge.

Star witness became uncooperative

Chief Assistant State Attorney Joseph Mansfield told the Herald this week that the second-degree murder case was getting increasingly difficult because one of prosecutors’ star witnesses became uncooperative and the other disappeared.

Monroe sheriff’s homicide detectives tied Lopez-Jemot to the murder through DNA they found on a beer can and on a towel found outside of Bonneville’s house. Since he had done work at the house in the past, it was reasonable that his DNA could be on the towel without him having committed the murder, Mansfield explained.

“Proving homicide was becoming more and more problematic,” he said.

Monroe Circuit Judge James Morgan III also sentenced Lopez-Jemot to two years of probation, and as part of the plea deal, he had to promise to stay out of Monroe County, according to court records. Mansfield said that after his June 30 conviction, Monroe authorities notified federal immigration officials that Lopez-Jemot was in the U.S. illegally from Cuba.

It’s not clear when he arrived at Alligator Alcatraz, but his name turns up in the list the Miami Herald obtained of the more than 700 people being held at the detention facility, which opened July 1.

His court-appointed attorney, Philip Massa, declined to comment on the case.

Person of interest from the start?

Keys detectives focused on Lopez-Jemot from nearly the beginning. That’s because about 20 minutes before firefighters arrived at Bonneville’s burning house, Lopez-Jemot threatened to cut off his then-girlfriend’s head and burn her house down. The confrontation occurred in the VFW’s parking lot, located just 660 feet west of Bonneville’s home, investigators said.

And as he tried to force his way inside the woman’s van, armed with a knife, he bragged that he had killed people in a similar manner several times in the past — stabbing them and burning their homes down — according to the sheriff’s office.

Detectives arrested Lopez-Jemot two days later on charges of felony assault with a deadly weapon and burglary. He ended up pleading no contest in January 2018 to aggravated assault. A judge sentenced him to a year in county jail, with credit for time served, plus three years probation.

It would be nearly three years after Bonneville’s death before Monroe detectives arrested Lopez-Jemot in connection with the murder. But a raid on his boat behind the Murray Nelson government center a month after she died gave early indication investigators had their eyes on him from the start.

The victim in the aggravated assault case, Magdalena Soutelo Rodriguez, 57, was one of the two witnesses prosecutors were relying on for a murder conviction against Lopez-Jemot, Mansfield said.

However, she has since become uncooperative after being arrested on felony cocaine possession in May 2024 and another felony arrest on two counts of possession of prescription drugs this May, according to Mansfield.

Soutelo Rodriguez has pleaded not guilty in both cases, which are pending in county court.

“She’s being uncooperative, and she has recanted statements,” Mansfield said.

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