This is an excerpt from Pedro Medina León’s book TOUR: A Journey Through Miami’s Culture where each chapter highlights an underknown aspect of Miami’s unique history.
On July 11, 1979, around two-thirty in the afternoon, a truck stormed into the parking lot of Dadeland Mall, Miami’s busiest shopping center at the time. Armed men emerged and unleashed a hail of bullets inside Crown Liquors Shop. The aftermath left a trail of injured victims, bullet casings, blood-stained asphalt, shattered glass, riddled car bodies, and the lifeless bodies of Germán Jiménez Panesso and Juan Carlos Hernández. Jiménez Panesso, a Colombian drug lord, and Hernández, his bodyguard, had become casualties of a targeted hit—an act of retribution amidst the Cocaine Cowboys War, attributed to the infamous “Black Widow,” Griselda Blanco, also known as La Madrina.
The year 1979 is etched into Miami’s history due to its rampant violence, recording 360 homicides. The following years, 1980 and 1981, saw even higher numbers, with 569 and 622 murders, respectively. Maybe the most significant event that scared the city was the Dadeland Mall massacre. These were Miami’s savage years, but they were also the years when newsrooms buzzed late into the night with the aroma of strong coffee, including that of Edna Buchanan at The Miami Herald.
Edna Buchanan was born and raised in Paterson, New Jersey.
From a young age, she displayed a keen interest in creative writing. Regardless of taking a few workshops, financial necessity led her down different paths, and at age twelve, she began working to help her mother, starting at a coat factory, then at Woolworth’s, in a baby clothes store, and even at a photo studio. Attending college was never an option after high school.
In the summer of 1961, Edna and her mother vacationed in Miami, and it didn’t take long for her to realize that Miami Beach would be her new home. She sought out creative writing workshops, which serendipitously led to a column at the Miami Beach Daily Sun, where she spent five years covering local news. Her big break, however, came at The Miami Herald. Despite initially battling sexism from editors who relegated her to minor stories, Buchanan went on to cover 5,000 crimes over sixteen years, including 3,000 murders.
Buchanan’s approach was more detective than journalist.
It was she who traced the owner of the truck from the Dadeland Mall massacre back to his home. Following two failed marriages, with only her cat waiting for her at home, she spent countless hours immersed in newsrooms, morgues, police stations, and crime scenes. She gathered the clues needed to craft stories worthy of the front page because, as she always maintained, the difference between her job and others’ was that her readers would find themselves engrossed in a compelling narrative.
In 1986, Edna Buchanan won the Pulitzer Prize for her investigative work. That same year, The New Yorker published a profile of her, “Covering the Cops,” written by Calvin Trillin, which stated that two of the most talked-about figures in Miami were Fidel Castro and Edna Buchanan. By the end of that decade, she retired from journalism to pursue her passion for writing books. To date, she has authored more than twenty works of fiction and non-fiction, including the Britt Montero series, featuring a crime reporter for a major Miami newspaper, a character now emblematic in local literature.
