The 24-year-old was 210 pounds of professional pelvic thrust: a handsome, clean-cut adult film star with a dick to rival Ron Jeremy's. Around him flitted female porn stars, their unnatural assets packed into bulging bikinis. Behind him the setting sun blushed between Miami skyscrapers. John Snavely stood on the deck of the superyacht, all six feet and one inch of him a sex god. It's a story of lust, greed, and the most misdirected of American dreams. It is the story of a porn star stud with an endless appetite for sex, drugs, and human growth hormone the teenage beauty queen he tortured and a dead millionaire's dark double life. When they did, they would stumble onto a story even darker than Del Brocco's murder - something more akin to the twisted tales of the Marquis de Sade. It would be three years before detectives would catch a break in the September 2010 Pompano Beach killing. The dead man had been a successful businessman who split his time between Washington, D.C., and South Florida. A half-spent marijuana cigarette sat on a dresser near the body, but Del Brocco didn't smoke. Other than the knife and shoe prints, the only signs left by the murderer were two burnt matches on the armrest of a leather chair. The pudgy 60-year-old had been stabbed half a dozen times in the chest. Samuel Del Brocco lay on the marble in a pool of gore.
When Broward County Sheriff's deputies pushed open the door, they were brushed back by the fetid stench of death.
As police traced the prints to their source, the marks grew bloodier - like a grisly puzzle slowly revealing itself.įinally, the footprints disappeared up another staircase toward the bedroom. They led through the kitchen and past a bloody butcher knife hastily hidden under a throw rug. They wound up a flight of stairs to the second floor, across smooth white marble tiles, and around rich leather furniture. They began near the entrance to the expensive oceanfront townhouse: size-12 sneaker outlines, stamped in blood. The first thing cops noticed was the footprints. "This evidence is not enough," Holmes wrote in her order, according to the Washington Post. Holmes had noted problems with the case, including the fact that no eyewitnesses were ever found, that Snavely's DNA was not on the murder weapon, and that shoe prints at the scene didn't match Snavely's. Holmes threw out the murder charge against John Snavely Thursday, February 16, 2017, ruling that the circumstantial evidence was not strong enough to proceed. Update, 2/17/17: Broward Circuit Court Judge Ilona M.