Paul Durousseau was born in Beaumont, Texas. In 1970, he moved to Los Angeles, California, to live with his mother’s family after his father, who was not married to his mother, left them. There is not much known about his childhood.

After finishing high school, Durousseau became a security guard at 19. His first trouble with the law happened on December 18, 1991, and January 21, 1992, when he was caught carrying a hidden gun.

In November 1992, Durousseau joined the United States Army and was stationed in Germany. There, he met Natoca, who later became his wife. They got married in 1995 in Las Vegas. In 1996, they moved to Fort Benning, Georgia. On March 13, 1997, Durousseau was arrested for kidnapping and raping a young woman, but he was cleared of these charges in August. However, he was later found with stolen goods and was court-martialed in January 1999. He was found guilty and dishonorably discharged from the Army.

After his discharge, Durousseau and his wife moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where they had two daughters. He struggled to keep a job and often argued with his wife about their finances. In 1999, after allegedly slapping his wife and grabbing her by the neck, the police advised her on how to get a restraining order. She later testified that he got very angry when she mentioned divorce. Durousseau spent 48 days in jail for domestic battery in September and October 2001.

Despite his criminal record, Durousseau found various jobs. In 2001, he worked as a school bus driver and an animal control worker. By 2003, he was driving a taxi for the Gator City Taxi Company, which led him to meet some of his victims. It was wrongly reported that the taxi company did not do a background check on him; actually, the City of Jacksonville did the check and issued his taxi driver permit.

Neighbors and friends described Durousseau as a "lewd womanizer." He often asked young women when they planned to "make flicks" with him. One witness recalled seeing him flirt with a girl who looked around 13 or 14 years old.

Less than a month after being acquitted of rape charges, the nude body of 26-year-old Tracy Habersham was found on September 7, 1997, in Fort Benning. She had been missing for 48 hours and was last seen leaving a party. Tracy had been raped and strangled with a cord. Initially, Durousseau was not a suspect, but DNA evidence later connected him to the crime. After his arrest, he confessed to killing Tracy.

In 1999, Durousseau raped and killed 24-year-old Tyresa Mack in her apartment. Witnesses saw him leaving her place with a television. In 2001, he was arrested for raping a young woman in Jacksonville. He spent 30 days in jail and received two years of probation. On December 19, 2002, the body of 18-year-old Nicole L. Williams was found wrapped in a blue blanket at the bottom of a ditch in Jacksonville. She had been missing for two days.

On January 1, 2003, family members of 19-year-old Nikia Kilpatrick went to check on her because they hadn't heard from her for several days. They found her body in her apartment bedroom. She had been raped and strangled with a cord two days earlier. Her two sons, an eleven-month-old and a two-year-old, were found alive but malnourished. Nikia was about six months pregnant at the time of her death. 

Eight days later, 20-year-old nurse assistant Shawanda Denise McCalister, who was also pregnant, was raped and strangled in her Jacksonville apartment. Her murder scene was almost identical to that of Nikia Kilpatrick. Shawanda was killed on Durousseau's first day of driving a cab for Gator City Taxi. Her body was found the next day.

The next victims were 17-year-old Jovanna Jefferson and 19-year-old Surita Cohen. Their bodies were discovered close to each other in a ditch near a construction site on New Kings Road in Jacksonville on February 5. Police estimated that Jovanna was murdered around January 20 and Surita ten days later. Witnesses saw both victims with a taxi driver matching Durousseau's description on the nights they disappeared.

Durousseau was arrested and charged with five counts of murder on June 17, 2003. On December 13, 2007, he was sentenced to death by lethal injection for the murder of Tyresa Mack. As of August 18, 2013, he was still on Florida's death row at Union Correctional Institution. In January 2017, Durousseau's death sentence was overturned by the Florida Supreme Court. The jury that sentenced him had been split 10-2, and the high court declared split decisions unconstitutional in capital sentencing. He was resentenced to life in prison without parole on December 10, 2021, after another jury split 10-2 in favor of the death penalty.