Solved cold cases in Florida
13 documented cases.
Adam Walsh
Adam Walsh, six, disappeared on July 27, 1981 from the toy department of the Sears store at the Hollywood Mall in Hollywood, Florida, where his mother had left him for a few minutes watching older boys play video games. A teenage security guard had told the older boys to leave, and investigators believe Adam followed them out and was taken outside the store. On August 10, 1981, two fishermen found his severed head in a drainage canal beside the Florida Turnpike more than a hundred miles north; dental records confirmed the identification and the rest of his body has never been found. In October 1983 Ottis Toole, a Jacksonville drifter already jailed for murder, confessed to abducting and killing Adam, then recanted, then confessed again, two dozen documented times in all. Blood was found in his Cadillac and on a machete, but it could not be typed in 1983, and by 1995, when DNA testing was possible, Hollywood police had lost both the bloodstained carpet and the car. Toole was never charged with Adam's murder and died in prison on September 15, 1996, serving life sentences for other killings. After a fresh review ordered by a new chief, Chadwick Wagner, the Hollywood Police Department announced on December 16, 2008 that Toole had abducted and murdered Adam, closed the case, and apologized to his family for its mistakes. The case reshaped how America searches for missing children.
Bonnie Haim
Bonnie Haim, 23, disappeared from her family's home on the west side of Jacksonville, Florida, in January 1993. Her husband, Michael Haim, said she left late one night after an argument; her friends said she was planning to leave him and take their three-year-old son. The morning after she was last seen, her purse was found in a dumpster at a hotel near Jacksonville International Airport, and her car was later found in an airport parking lot. A child protection worker interviewed the boy the next day, and detectives said he told her that his father hurt his mother. Investigators searched the property several times but, with no body, nobody was prosecuted. On December 14, 2014, the couple's son, by then a man in his twenties who had been awarded the house in a wrongful death suit against his father, found a skull while doing work in the backyard. DNA confirmed the remains were Bonnie's, a medical examiner ruled her death a homicide by unspecified means, and a .22-caliber shell casing lay near the remains. Michael Haim, who owned a .22-caliber rifle, was arrested in Waynesville, North Carolina, on August 24, 2015. At trial in April 2019 two jailhouse informants testified that he confessed. A Duval County jury convicted him of second-degree murder on April 12, 2019, and on May 21, 2019 he was sentenced to life in prison. A state appeals court affirmed on April 30, 2021.
Carla Lowe
Carla Lowe, a 21-year-old woman, was beaten to death and run over by a car on November 13, 1983, near the Amtrak train station in Delray Beach, Florida, where she had been waiting for a train she never boarded. Ralph Williams was arrested that same day on unrelated grand theft auto and burglary charges and was long viewed as a person of interest, but for nearly four decades investigators lacked the physical evidence to connect him to the killing. After the Delray Beach Police Department created a dedicated cold case unit in January 2021, Detective Todd Clancy reopened the file and sent crime-scene evidence that had sat in police storage since 1983 to the United Kingdom forensic firm Foster + Freeman, whose RECOVER chemical vapor-fuming process was able to develop a latent fingerprint that traditional methods could not. The recovered print was identified as Ralph Williams. A Palm Beach County grand jury indicted Williams for first-degree murder on November 30, 2021, and he was arrested in Jacksonville. On November 15, 2022, Williams accepted a plea agreement, pleading guilty to the reduced charge of first-degree manslaughter with a weapon; Judge Cymonie Rowe sentenced him to one year in jail and ten years of probation, and with credit for time served he was released the same day. The outcome left Carla Lowe's family bitterly disappointed even as it brought the only criminal conviction ever obtained in her death.
Carol Ann Barrett
Carol Ann Barrett, 18, of Zanesville, Ohio, was on spring break in Daytona Beach Shores, Florida, with a group of high school friends when, at about 2 a.m. on March 23, 1980, she was abducted from the Treasure Island Motel. Project: Cold Case, a Jacksonville nonprofit, wrote that a gunman forced his way into the friends' room, robbed them, and said he would take one of them with him; when a friend panicked, Barrett volunteered to go instead. A passerby found her body the next day in a ditch along Interstate 95 in Jacksonville, more than 100 miles north. A police sketch was made from her friends' descriptions, but the case went cold. The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office cold case unit reopened it in August 2017. In 2020 it identified Billy Mansfield Jr., a convicted serial killer then in prison, as the suspect. After interviews over two years, the sheriff's office said, Mansfield said in September 2022 that he was the man in the sketch and confessed to abducting and killing her. On January 25, 2024 the sheriff's office announced the case closed. The State Attorney's Office for the Fourth Judicial Circuit declined to prosecute because Mansfield is serving life in California plus four concurrent life terms in Florida for other murders.
Freddie Farah
Freddie Farah, 34, was shot in the head on May 22, 1974 while working the counter of the Grand Park Food Store, the grocery he owned on Kings Road in Jacksonville, Florida. A teenage gunman had carried a box of cake mix, a can of frosting and a soda to the counter, announced a hold-up and fired once when Farah moved, then ran without taking anything. Technicians lifted fingerprints from the cake mix and frosting and a partial palm print from the soda can, but nobody on file matched them, and a 1998 search of the federal fingerprint database found nothing either. In December 2016 the sheriff's cold-case detectives resubmitted the prints through the upgraded system and got a hit on Johnie Lewis Miller, who had been 17 in 1974 and had since become the New Orleans French Quarter human statue known as Uncle Louie. The fourteen-year-old customer who had watched the shooting was found, aged 57, and identified the sequence of events. Miller was arrested in the French Quarter on May 16, 2017. When the witness died suddenly in December 2017, a month before her deposition, prosecutors offered a plea in exchange for a face-to-face meeting with Farah's family. Miller pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on April 25, 2018, was sentenced to the 344 days he had served, and returned to New Orleans.
Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore
Harry T. Moore founded the Brevard County NAACP in 1934, became its first statewide executive secretary in Florida, organized a league that registered more than a hundred thousand Black voters, and in 1946 he and his wife Harriette lost their teaching jobs for it. On the night of December 25, 1951, their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, a dynamite bomb under the bedroom floor of their house in Mims exploded minutes after they went to bed. Harry died that night. Harriette died nine days later at the hospital in Sanford, thirty miles away, the nearest that treated Black patients. FBI informants pointed to two violent central Florida Klansmen, Earl Brooklyn and Tillman Belvin, but both died within a year, and a third Klansman, Joseph Cox, shot himself the day after his second FBI interview. The file closed in 1955. In 1978 a dying former Klan officer, Edward Spivey, told Brevard County investigators that Cox had confessed to being paid $5,000 to plant the bomb; a grand jury presentment was being prepared when the state attorney lost his seat, and the case sat untouched. Attorney General Charlie Crist reopened it in December 2004. After a twenty-month reinvestigation that interviewed more than a hundred people, excavated the bomb site and ran title searches, Crist announced on August 16, 2006, at the park on the Moores' home site, that Brooklyn, Belvin, Cox and Spivey were responsible. All four were long dead. The Justice Department closed its own file in 2011.
Hiram "Ross" Grayam
Hiram "Ross" Grayam, 47, a World War II sergeant and Purple Heart recipient who delivered milk for the Borden Dairy in Indian River County, Florida, failed to come home from his route on April 11, 1968. A witness had seen him talking to two men on the side of the road. The next day a sheriff's office airplane spotted his milk truck in woods near Gifford, with his body beside it. He had been shot, and about $70 was missing. Investigators found little forensic evidence and made no arrest through sixteen investigations; it became the oldest cold case in the Indian River County Sheriff's Office. In 2006, after Grayam's son gave media interviews, a Vero Beach man named Thomas J. Williams wrote a letter to a newspaper denying any involvement, and was questioned and dismissed. Williams died of natural causes in 2016. In February 2022 a jail inmate asked to talk to detectives about the case, and in December 2023 detectives spoke with Williams's ex-wife in Miami; the ex-wife and a friend of Williams's sister each said he had confessed to them. On April 11, 2024, the 56th anniversary of the killing, Sheriff Eric Flowers announced the case solved. No one was ever tried, and a second man remains unnamed.
Linda Lois Little
Linda Lois Little, 43, a North Carolina native who had lived in the Daytona Beach area for about two years, finished her shift as a waitress at the Chart House restaurant around 1 a.m. on October 11, 1991 and rode her bicycle across the International Speedway Boulevard bridge. She stopped at a bar and was seen at a 7-Eleven after 2 a.m. She missed work the next day, and a friend reported her missing on October 14. Police found no evidence of foul play at the time, and her family's fliers and billboards brought nothing. Police said there were little to no leads for 29 of the 31 years that followed. In January 2020 Michael Townson, who was serving a life sentence for a separate Brevard County murder, was moved to a prison in Volusia County and asked to speak to Daytona Beach detectives. He confessed to killing Little after meeting her at a hotel bar. Police spent time verifying the confession, and a Volusia County grand jury indicted him on October 24, 2022. On December 20, 2022 he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole after 25 years. Her body has never been found.
Mack Lavell Proctor
On May 17, 1972, a fisherman found a decomposed body in a marshy field near the canal between Lake Lulu and Lake Shipp in the Eloise area of Polk County, Florida, southeast of the US 17 overpass. The man had been shot twice in the left side of the head with a small-caliber pistol and robbed of his wallet and identification. With no leads, he was buried as a John Doe and the case went cold for more than five decades. The break in identifying the killers had actually come less than two years after the murder: in January 1974, a Florida State Prison inmate named Charles Williams told investigators that a fellow prisoner, Clarence Ingram, had confided that he and a friend named Edgar Todd murdered a man they met at a Winter Haven bar in 1972, shooting him during an argument in the victim's car and then selling his tools and vehicle. That account named the killers but was not enough to identify the victim or to bring charges at the time. In 2017 the body was exhumed for DNA, and in 2023 the Polk County Sheriff's Office Cold Case Unit submitted bone evidence to the forensic genetic-genealogy lab Othram. In May 2024, DNA from the victim's son confirmed the John Doe was Mack Lavell Proctor, a 57-year-old master mechanic from Ellijay, Georgia. With the victim finally named, detectives matched the 1974 informant's decades-old statement to the case and publicly identified Edgar Todd and Clarence Ingram as the men responsible. Both had long since died, so neither could be prosecuted.
Mike Williams (Jerry Michael Williams)
Mike Williams, 31, left his home in Tallahassee, Florida before dawn on December 16, 2000 to go duck hunting on Lake Seminole in Jackson County, with plans to celebrate his sixth wedding anniversary that evening. His truck, trailer and boat were found, a 14-day search turned up no body, and the case was classified as a drowning, with alligators blamed. His mother kept pressing for an investigation. Years later, while his widow Denise was divorcing Brian Winchester, who had been Mike's best friend and whom she married in 2005, Winchester kidnapped her at gunpoint in 2016. Facing a possible life sentence, he agreed to cooperate, confessed in October 2017 that he had killed Mike, and led investigators to the remains. The state announced a homicide that December. A grand jury indicted Denise Williams in May 2018, and a jury convicted her in December 2018. In 2021 an appeals court reversed her murder conviction but upheld her conviction for conspiracy to commit murder, and she was resentenced to 30 years. Winchester was sentenced to 20 years for the kidnapping and was not convicted of the killing.
Mildred Matheny
Mildred Matheny, a 78-year-old widow with dementia, wandered from her sister's Lake Worth, Florida home on the afternoon of April 27, 1985, was lured into a car, driven roughly 30 miles north, sexually assaulted, and beaten so severely she died of her injuries eleven days later. The case went cold for nearly 36 years until the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office Cold Case Homicide Unit ran male DNA from the 1985 rape kit through the state CODIS database in 2021 and matched it to Richard Curtis Lange, whose DNA was on file from later weapons convictions. Lange was convicted of first-degree murder, kidnapping, and sexual battery in February 2023 and sentenced to life in prison.
Sondra Better
Sondra Better, 68, of Highland Beach, Florida, was working alone on the afternoon of August 24, 1998 at Lu Shay's Consignment Shop on South Federal Highway in Delray Beach when a man came in and killed her. It was her last week at a part-time job; she and her husband Seymour, known as Zeke, were about to travel to New York to renew their wedding vows. Police said the killer left a trail of blood from her body to the cash register and out to the sidewalk, and fingerprints on a decorative marble ball. The prints were put into a national fingerprint database at the time and produced no match for two decades, and DNA samples from 36 men also failed to match. In December 2018 or January 2019 (reports differ), Todd Barket of Brandon, Florida, then living near Tampa, gave his fingerprints for a nursing-assistant background check. The prints matched the ones on the ball. FDLE agents and Delray Beach detectives surveilled him, obtained his DNA, and the Palm Beach County Sheriff's crime lab matched it to blood from the shop. Barket was arrested at his home on March 27, 2019. At trial in August 2019 he admitted his prints and blood were in the store but denied the killing. A jury deliberated less than 90 minutes on August 23, 2019 and convicted him of first-degree murder and robbery with a weapon, and he was sentenced to life in prison.
Tiffany Sessions
Tiffany Sessions, a 20-year-old University of Florida finance student, left her off-campus apartment in Gainesville on the afternoon of February 9, 1989 for her daily power walk along Williston Road, carrying a Sony Walkman and wearing a two-tone Rolex, and never came back. She left her wallet, keys and identification behind. Her father, a South Florida real-estate developer, organized what the FBI has called the largest search in Florida's history, with hundreds of volunteers and a reward that reached $250,000, but no trace of her was found. In 1992 another student, Elizabeth Foster, was raped, beaten to death and buried in a shallow grave about a mile away. Twenty years later the Alachua County Sheriff's Office cold case unit matched DNA from the Foster scene to Paul Eugene Rowles, a paroled Miami murderer who in 1989 had delivered pizzas and scaffolding in Gainesville along Tiffany's route. Rowles died in prison in February 2013. Detective Kevin Allen spent a year reconstructing his life, and among Rowles's belongings investigators found an address book listing his victims, with the date 2/9/89 written between two notations of "#2". On February 6, 2014, Sheriff Sadie Darnell named Rowles as Tiffany's abductor and killer, calling it highly probable. Excavations in 2014 and 2020 found nothing. Her remains have never been found.