Man indicted in 2011 slaying may have other victims, detectives say

Daniel Jacob Craven Jr., 27, is indicted on first-degree-murder charges in Ronald Justice's death, but detectives think he may have other victims.

The cocky 27-year-old boasted Orange County sheriff's detectives would find nothing in the backyard where he is suspected of burning Ronald Justice's body while he and his friends played cards inside, investigative documents revealed.

He spent months mouthing off about his alleged murderous exploits to anyone in his Apopka-area neighborhood who would listen.

Daniel Jacob Craven chuckled each time detectives mentioned the name of the man he's accused of killing.

But the earth did yield clues — and enough evidence to indict Craven on first-degree-murder charges in the death of Justice, a 30-year-old father of two and romantic rival who disappeared in 2011.

"He almost got away with us not finding anything," said Sgt. Mike Ruggiero, head of the Sheriff's Office homicide unit. "He thinks he's smarter than he is."

A handful of bones surfaced in April after crime-scene investigators sifted through the dirt from a swimming-pool-sized hole they dug in the ground behind Craven's home on Slote Drive.

The human remains corroborated the stories of a chilling slaying detectives say Craven circulated in order to inspire fear.

It worked.

Rumors of the killing — unsubstantiated at the time — reached Justice's ex-fiancé, Susan Holmes, months after he stopped showing up to see his children and the child-support checks stopped coming, a report said.

Holmes initially blamed Justice's absence on his prescription-drug habit, but when no one — including his current wife — could tell Holmes where he was, she reported him missing in May 2012. It had been more than a year since Justice was last seen.

"Every time I met someone [Craven] knew, they would give me different pieces," Holmes told the Orlando Sentinel. "I heard different times from several different people that he had killed Ron."

'A very dangerous man'

Craven was "well-known and well-disliked" in the community where he lived, Detective Danny Garcia Pagan said.

In a 2012 protective-order petition, his neighbor William Fielder described encounters in which Craven — at 6-feet-3 and 280 pounds — yelled obscenities at him, threw things on his property, stalked him and ran him off the road.

In a letter to the judge handling his petition, Fielder said neighbors heard Craven threaten to kill him. And Fielder heard that Craven had killed before — and that the teardrop tattoos on his face represented the murders he committed.

"I believe Daniel Jacob Craven is a very dangerous man..." Fielder's letter read. "…I think given half a chance, Craven would kill me, too."

The terror Craven instilled kept silent those who had heard him brag about Justice's murder. Then homicide detectives started asking questions, and at least four people recounted the same story: