Manuel Pardo: The Real Dexter

Dexter Was A Real Guy, And He Died On Tuesday

Is “reality television” a genre or a description of the modern circumstance? Is it troubling to know that one could really encounter, say, The Situation, were one to make certain (incorrect) nightlife choices? Is it weird to think that Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is actually happening right now, contemporaneous with the events of your own life? Whether the cameras are rolling or not? Is it strange that the events depicted in Showtime’s Dexter, wherein a Florida cop moonlights as a vicious serial killer, really occurred? And that a man was just put to death for them?

Because this is our reality. Television, I mean. Television is our reality. To wit: In 1986, during Miami’s probably-less-fun-than-it-sounds Cocaine Cowboys period of white-blazered ultraviolence, a police officer named Manuel Pardo killed nine people. Methodically and in the spirit of a skewed, Taxi Driver-esque moralism. Drug people. Evil (in his sight) people. And on Tuesday evening, in a town called Starke (because circumstances that are too cheap or obvious for fiction often occur in real life), he was executed by lethal injection for these crimes.

Do we not like it when we find premonitory traces of our favorite dramas in the (relatively) seedy events of real life? Is this something over which we prefer to draw a polite little curtain? Because Dexter creator Jeff Lindsay has so far taken a coy approach to the whole Manuel-Pardo-actually-did-these-things question. Though the series may or may not have addressed the issue obliquely through the introduction of Season 3’s “Miguel Prado,” played by Jimmy Smits, Lindsay has not mentioned Pardo publicly, preferring to discuss the idea for Dexter as having arisen after a speech he made to an audience of distressingly Patrick Bateman-esque businessmen in the ‘90s.

According to French serial-killer expert (sorry, but we do not yet have an associated article prepared for our Career section) Stéphane Bourgoin, the parallels could not have escaped Lindsay’s notice. After all, the novelist has lived in Miami for his whole life, and was in the city during the late 1980s, when Pardo’s exploits were all over the city’s incredulous press. Like Dexter Morgan, Pardo was an odd duck — even by serial killer standards.

Maintaining the view that he was ridding the streets of “vermin,” Pardo methodically photographed and archived his crimes — although, unlike his televised counterpart, he preferred Polaroids to “blood slides.” At his trial, he solemnly told jurors, "I am a soldier. I accomplished my mission and I humbly ask you to give me the glory of ending my life.” He was a good father. Women liked him and sent him money while he waited on death row. The parallels are hard to avoid.

Manuel Pardo ate a last meal of rice, beans, pork, plantains and avocado, and sipped on eggnog (wouldn’t you?) and Cuban coffee as he sat in that cell in Starke, Florida, on Tuesday night, awaiting whatever might come. As he did so, at least some of his victim’s relatives pulled into the parking lot, exchanged formalities with the guards and sat down to watch the show. The real one. Whatever that means.