Covering crime was new to me when I moved to Florida's west coast and
started working for the Daily Sun-Journal.
For a couple years prior to giving up the north for the Sunshine State, I
wrote for a newspaper in Kankakee, Illinois. Before that, I was a
co-editor/co-publisher of a literary magazine, wrote feature stories and a
newspaper column about children, and had stories and poetry published
here and there. That was it. Zip. A far cry from crime.
I had been living in Florida for three weeks when I returned to my
apartment after a photography job interview and noticed the light blinking
on my telephone answering machine. That is when I got the most rewarding
call of my career as a journalist.
The recorded voice was that of Ken Melton, a man I didn't know but one
who would become my boss and friend.
Ken was editor of the Daily Sun-Journal and needed to replace his crime
reporter who was leaving for a bigger newspaper in another county. A copy
of my resume had crossed Ken's desk. Needless to say, I returned the call
immediately.
I reported to Ken the following morning, was hired and remained with the
newspaper for the next three-and-a-half years, until the newspaper went to a
weekly and along with more than half the staff, I got the ax. Ken's eyes were
teary when he said, "We're family here." On that sad day in 1991, the Daily
Sun-Journal had started to fold--a process that would take a year to
complete.
The memories of working at the Daily Sun-Journal are lasting. Daily
briefings in Sergeant "B" Frank Bierwiler's office were nearly always
fascinating. Sergeant B and some of the five reporters from local medias
would usually come out with jokes or funny remarks that would bring
humor to the morning. We sat in Sergeant B's office and read sheriff reports,
sometimes with a chuckle, repeating aloud and commenting about
off-the-wall incidents, like somebody picking mushrooms out of cow
manure with the intentions of boiling them and drinking the juice to get high.
But there were many reports far from the light side.
While a lot of incidents reported as criminal seemed somewhat
ridiculous, the amount of hard crime in the small county was inconceivable.
Recently, some of the former Daily Sun-Journal staff gathered on Ken's
patio to talk about the old days. He said that when he first arrived at the
Daily Sun-Journal from a newspaper in the north, he was told Brooksville
was a "lousy news town," a place where nothing ever happened. In the
early-to-mid 1980s the county's population stayed pretty much at 20,000.
"You used to really have to concentrate to find this place," Ken said,
jokingly, of the area some 55 or so miles north of Tampa.
"Then bodies were being dug up in Billy Mansfield's back yard. I
thought, 'My God!' Come to find out, Billy would take these girls home, rape
them, kill them, and bury them in his mother's back yard. They (family)
talked about hearing people screaming back there. Of course, nobody ever
did anything. They'd say, 'Oh, that's just Billy.' It's amazing to me how his
family didn't turn him in. I don't think there was any question whether they
knew what was going on. It was like they thought: 'He's just killing
somebody in the back yard--don't worry about it.' Mansfield was kind-of
scary, like Charles Manson."
Ken recalled a jailbreak when Mansfield was locked up in the "old jail" in
downtown Brooksville. Mansfield thought guards had arranged the jailbreak
and were waiting for him to try to escape so they could kill him. A "bunch"
of prisoners left the jail, but not Mansfield. "He stayed right in the cell. He
actually thought the ordeal was a plot so somebody could shoot him if he
left."
In an unrelated incident a few years later, four men showed up at a house
for various reasons at different times and were murdered. One man, later
convicted of the crime, ran off to a far-away island in the South Pacific. A
couple years later, detectives followed his mother when she went to visit
her son. "Now why would a killer have his mother fly in for a visit, as if he
weren't being hunted anymore?"
Putting murder aside, some wild happenings in the county covered
everything from a horse drinking too much wine to a man attempting to
drown his wife in the waterbed because he didn't like her new hairdo. And
there was the time, during one of the jailbreaks at the new jail, when a
couple prisoners actually kicked a hole in the jail wall and escaped through
it. Laughing, Ken said, "Didn't they consider when they were building the
jail that there might be people locked in who want out?"
Ken recalled hilarious happenings occurred in the old days, too.
Deputies in cruisers were chasing a car and the driver got away. When cops
found him a little later, after he had smashed up his car, he was beside a
garbage bin on the parking lot at a convenience store having sex with a
woman he had just met. "It is the funniest story I've ever heard and it
happened here."
The man got away from officers again. "I think the cops must have been
laughing so hard that night they couldn't even catch the guy. Now what are
the odds a man would meet a woman who would do that," he said, laughing.
"They told me Brooksville was a lousy news town. Then they started
digging up bodies in Billy Mansfield's yard and another guy got beat to
death with a rock--then all hell broke loose. Brooksville was no longer a
sleepy little town."
In this book, I am sharing with you some of the criminal acts that have
occurred in Central Florida's once far-removed swampland adjacent to the
Gulf of Mexico. The "swamp" collection also includes extensive accounts of
lawmen and their search for clues in one of the most horrific cases in
Tampa Bay history after the boater's sighting led to the discovery of the
bodies of a mother and her two teenage daughters weighted with concrete
blocks and floating in the bay.
As well as covering most of these murders for the Daily Sun Journal, I
wrote accounts of the cases for the various true-crime magazines over a
10-year-period. In some stories, the names of witnesses and defendants'
families have been changed; some have not. Several cases in this collection
occurred before and after my tender with the newspaper. But they are of
crimes that still haunt folks who remember. Be forewarned, some details
herewith are gruesome.
I used literary license in writing these stories. Some quotes are assumed,
as nobody really knows what was said during the crimes. Many quotes
were taken directly from court records, including police reports,
depositions, confessions, and trials. The happenings and moods are as
close to truth as I could detect while studying the cases
No comments:
Post a Comment