“. . . They should be ashamed of what they did.”
On July 13, 1993, a group of six teen girls and boys from the pleasant community of Hollywood, Florida, a middle class suburb of Fort Lauderdale, gathered at a local Pizza Hut, as many do during the carefree days of summer. This congregation, however, wasn’t meeting up to nosh and socialize but to discuss how they were going to commit murder.
Their chosen victim was 20-year-old Bobby Kent, the only son of Fred and Farah Kent, who had immigrated to the States from Iran, changing their surname in the process. Fred was a successful stockbroker, allowing his family a privileged lifestyle. Bobby, popular, gregarious and handsome, had graduated from high school and attended community college. He was serious about bodybuilding and had entrepreneurial dreams — although those dreams were of a questionable nature.
Bobby’s best friend was Marty Puccio. He and Marty had met in the third grade and developed a friendship that was dysfunctional at best. Marty’s parents would recall the young boy coming home, after spending time with Bobby, covered in bruises and, at time, bleeding. The Puccios believed this was some form of roughhousing and encouraged their son to cut off contact with Bobby or at least limit it but apparently did not take any other kind of action. Sadly.
This love-hate relationship, with Bobby both being playful and punishing toward Marty, continued into adolescence. The bullying became so bad at one point that Marty begged his parents to move away from Hollywood so that he might escape. His parents refused, leading their son to live temporarily with relatives in New York. Before long, though, Marty returned to Florida and back into his cruel relationship with Bobby. He seemed unable to break away from the abusive connection.
It was during their adolescent years that both young men took up bodybuilding, spending a great deal of their time at the gym. It was also said that they both began taking steroids, causing Bobby’s already volatile and aggressive nature to worsen.
In the 11th grade, Marty dropped out of school. This added to the list of grievances Fred and Farah Kent had against him as they ironically believed Marty was a bad influence on their son and wished to stifle the friendship.
At some point after Bobby himself graduated from high school, he entered the business arena as a filmmaker. As the gay subculture was at the height of its popularity in south Florida, he came up with the idea to film men masturbating and sell the tapes. The pornographic venture did not go as planned, however, as the generally poor quality of the films made them difficult to sell. It was also rumored, after the events of July 1993, that Bobby had pimped Marty, his taller, muscular friend, out at gay clubs.
Marty had met Lisa Connelly, a shy, overweight 18-year-old high school dropout and the two had fallen quickly in love, spending all their time together. Lisa quickly noticed how Bobby treated his so-called friend and, hoping to take his mind off abusing Marty, introduced him to her friend, Alice “Ali” Willis. Ali, like Lisa, was also 18; she had already been married and given birth to a child that her parents cared for.
While friends dating friends would have made for a cozy quadrangle, Ali and Bobby only dated for a few weeks. Bobby began abusing Ali, subjecting her to “bizarre” sexual behavior and, according to Marty later on, threatening both her and her child’s lives.
Meanwhile, Lisa discovered she was pregnant with Marty’s baby. Feeling her boyfriend, and now the father of her child, would never escape Bobby Kent’s torture, she began to plot how she could eradicate Bobby from both their lives. Permanently.
She recruited her friend Ali — Bobby’s most recent girlfriend — and Marty, of course. She also added Ali’s new boyfriend, Donnie Semenec; her own cousins, Heather Swallers and Derek Dzvirko; and Derek Kaufman to their murderous band. Kaufman was 22-years-old and claimed to be a mafia hit man; Lisa felt his so-called contract killing knowledge would come in handy for their plans.
They chose July 14 as the day Bobby would meet his maker, one day after their Pizza Hut meeting in which all the future killers had attended — with the exception of Marty.
Ali, the former girlfriend who Bobby had allegedly raped, was used as the bait. Marty called Bobby and invited him to a remote canal near Weston, stating they were going to race cars. As an added incentive he assured Bobby that Ali would be there and was anxious to have sex with him. Bobby agreed and was picked up from his home by the seven who would kill him around 11:30 p.m.
Upon arrival at the chosen site, Ali took Bobby off to a more secluded spot, on the pretext she wanted to talk with him. Those remaining assembled their weapons: a pipe, an aluminum baseball bat, and two knives.
While Ali and Heather Swallers, who had caught up to them, distracted Bobby, the five co-conspirators snuck up on him.
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The body of Bobby Kent
Donnie Semenec, Ali’s boyfriend, plunged a knife into Bobby’s neck. Seeing Marty, Bobby pleaded with him for help, apologizing for anything and everything he had done and begging for mercy. Marty responded by stabbing Bobby in the stomach. Bobby attempted to run but was outnumbered. Donnie, Marty and Derek Kaufman hit and stabbed his torso. Marty slammed Bobby’s head into the ground and cut his throat. It was Derek, the self-professed hit man, who dealt the final blow, beating Bobby’s head in with the aluminum baseball bat and making sure Bobby Kent was removed from this earth.
The body was then rolled to the edge of the marsh. They had chosen the location specifically on the belief that alligators would find the corpse and consume it, effectively destroying all evidence. They tossed the baseball bat and knives into the ocean and decided they would all agree they had been together, hanging out, on the night of the murder while Bobby had been out on a date with an unidentified woman.
Bobby’s family reported him missing when he didn’t return home that evening. Marty Puccio, as Bobby’s best friend, was contacted by the police about Bobby’s possible whereabouts. Marty feigned ignorance about where Bobby might be and professed to be worried about his friend. The cops may have had a gut feeling that something wasn’t right but had nothing to go on.
However, like most teens, the seven killers could not stay quiet.
Lisa Connelly, who claimed that Bobby had raped her, confessed to her mother about the murder. Her mother, in turn, contacted her own sister, who was Derek Dzvirko’s mother. The two sisters took their children to see their brother, who had friends in the police department. They were then directed to Detective Frank Illaraza of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. Dzvirko not only confessed everything to Illaraza, he led the detective to Bobby Kent’s remains, still where his killers had left him. The wallet in the pocket of the pants confirmed that it was indeed Bobby Kent.
Once Bobby had been found, the conspirators quickly cracked and began giving excuses as to why he had to die. They claimed they were merely bystanders to what they had thought was going to be a simple beating. Nope, they knew nothing about any murder. The prosecutors dealt with it by trying each of the seven defendants separately.
Perhaps frighteningly, not one of the alleged killers displayed any remorse at trial. Three of the defendants had not known or even met Bobby Kent prior to the evening of July 14, 1993, making their lack of remorse difficult to grasp.
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Top from left, Puccio, Willis, Semenec, Swallers, Dzvirko, Kaufman, Connelly
Marty Puccio, the so-called best friend of the victim and who himself had been victimized by Bobby Kent for years, received the harshest sentence. Charged with first degree murder, he was sentenced to death in the electric chair on August 3, 1995. Bobby’s mother, Farah Kent, believed justice had been served. “Now he will fear for his life, as my son did for his,” she remarked after sentencing. In 1997, the Florida Supreme Court overturned his death sentence and commuted it to life with parole eligibility in 25 years. He is serving his time at the Desoto Annex in Arcadia, where he has reportedly gone into the prison ministry.
Derek Kaufman, the 22-year-old who had told the younger crowd he was in the Mafia in order to impress them and who showed up for the murder party with a bat instead of the promised gun, was sentenced to life plus 30 years. He is serving his time at the Gulf Correctional Institute in Wewahitchka, where he has incurred nearly 20 infractions, including drug use and disobeying orders.
As Donald Semenec’s eighteenth birthday was on the day he helped to kill Bobby Kent, and having delivered the blow that started the frenzy, he was sentenced to life plus 15 years. He is serving his sentence, like Derek Kaufman, at the Gulf Correctional Institute in Wewahitchka. Also like Kaufman, he has racked up an impressive count of infractions , some 20 of them, ranging from weapon possession to drug and alcohol use.
Derek Dzvirko was charged with second-degree murder and originally sentenced to seven years on May 12, 1995 but received an additional four years on his sentence for his attempt to lie on the witness stand after his initial sentencing, while testifying against the others. He was paroled on October 1, 1999, after serving four years, and left Florida for Missouri, where he worked as a truck driver.