Solved cold cases in Florida
4 documented cases.
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.
Freddie Farah
Freddie Farah, a 34-year-old grocery-store owner, was shot and killed on May 22, 1974 during an attempted robbery of his Grand Park Food Store on Kings Road in Jacksonville, Florida. The teenaged gunman fled, leaving behind grocery items he had carried to the counter. Investigators lifted finger and palm prints from those items but could not match them, and the case went cold for more than four decades. After the prints failed again when entered into a federal database in 1998, Jacksonville cold-case detectives resubmitted them in December 2016, when improved Automated Fingerprint Identification System technology returned a hit on Johnie Lewis Miller. Miller, by then a New Orleans street performer known as Uncle Louie, was arrested in May 2017 and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on April 25, 2018.
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.
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.