Florida brute gets life sentence for savagely beating, gagging housekeeper to death
A Florida man will spend the rest of his life behind bars for fatally beating and strangling a motel housekeeping manager, whose battered and unconscious body was found by her husband.
Stephen Havrilka, 34, was handed a life sentence on Monday after he pummeled the 46-year-old woman and shoved a towel down her throat at the Rodeway Inn in Venice in April 2021, according to police and local outlets.
Authorities said the brute, who had stayed at the motel for nearly a week, attacked Tina Stradler when he followed her into a room she was cleaning.
Strader’s bruised and bloodied body was discovered in a closet by her wheelchair-bound husband, who went searching for her when a series of text messages went unanswered for nearly an hour – after the couple agreed to remain in touch whenever she entered and left a room.
“She texts me when she starts the room so I will know,” Gerald Strader told WFLA.
“Nobody had seen her. Then when I went and finally opened the door, I found her.”
The devastated husband called for help and a worker removed the towel from Strader’s mouth and rendered CPR until she was taken to a local hospital, according to Sarasota County Sheriff Kurt Hoffman.
The mother of four, who also had two grandchildren, was pronounced dead later that day.
Deputies uncovered video surveillance which captured Havrilka entering the motel room at around 8:50 a.m. – just one minute after Stradler had gone inside and texted her husband.
The tattooed killer was seen leaving 14 minutes later carrying a white towel and his shoes, deputies said, before he was apprehended by five officers a short distance away from the motel.
“We could never discern a motive,” Assistant State Attorney Karen Fraivillig told People.
“However, he is an extremely violent person with prior episodes and I think he just wanted to kill another human being. He needs to go away forever. There was no relationship between the defendant and victim.”
Havrilka, who has a lengthy and violent criminal history that includes 36 prior arrests, several felony convictions and four stints in prison, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, according to the Miami Herald.
He was also slapped with another life sentence for an incident in the Sarasota County Jail in 2024, the Herald-Tribune reported.
“In the same hotel, there was a violent man, a murderer, who was just released from jail over brutally assaulting his own mother, and in a rage-fit, decided he would then go for mine,” Stradler’s family wrote in a letter read by Fraivillig in court, according to the Herald-Tribune.
“To sum up what all has been taken from her, and from us, is quite frankly, impossible to subdivide into measurable increments.”
