Post by Joanna on Sept 28, 2015 1:21:22 GMT -5
Who Murdered 12-Year-Old Georgia Crews?
Two days after Georgia Jane Crews went missing from her home in Montverde, Florida, the Lake County Sheriff’s Office received a call. “You know that 12-year-old girl you’re looking for? She’s dead,” the caller said. Then he hung up. Georgia’s grandmother received a similar call, as did the town police marshal’s wife. It was April 10, 1980, and the calls were never traced.
Georgia was a fifth-grader who loved her bulldog, Tigger; Kenny Rogers; and sewing her own clothes, sometimes stitching dresses and colorful two-piece outfits by hand. The blonde girl with bangs that fell right at her eyebrows lived with her family in the small, tightknit town on the shore of Lake Apopka with a then-population of 397. “Everybody thought the world of her,” said her mother, Linda Crews. Georgia disappeared Tuesday, April 8, 1980. In the 35 years since Georgia’s death, officials have not made any arrests. Her case remains unsolved.
The case now hangs on the hope that whoever killed Georgia is still alive and willing to confess or that Georgia’s killer told someone else about the crime. “Somebody out there has done this horrible, horrible thing to this child,” Mrs. Crews added. “And somebody might come forward.”
Searching for Georgia. The afternoon of April 8, Georgia’s parents, Linda and Mike Crews, left her at home with her eldest brother and went to lay some catfish lines. Around 5:30 p.m., Georgia left the house. She was never seen alive again. Law-enforcement officials and local volunteers spread out around the family’s home, searching for the girl in lakes and swampy areas. “There were so many people coming out, and I appreciate it, you know,” said Mike Crews, a retired commercial fisherman. “But the thing about it is, there were so many that they were just stomping and trampling over evidence, destroying any way that the cops could have found any evidence. Just so many people.”
Georgia’s two brothers, Tony and Chuck, took it especially hard. The three were close in age, and their parents often took them fishing and swimming together. When Georgia went missing, 16-year-old Tony did not sleep for three days. Someone brought Chuck a cake when he turned 14 on April 11. He’s disliked birthday cakes since. “Me and them two boys, we searched places that hadn’t been seen by man in probably 100 years. There were places we had to carry ladders in and just walk across swamps,” Mike Crews continued. “And of course, that’s around where we live. And then she’s found two counties over.”
A body found. Georgia’s body was found Wednesday, April 16, 1980, in a sparsely-wooded spot in Fern Park, an area of Seminole County about 25 miles from her home. The area was commonly used as a shortcut between a shopping complex and nearby apartments. A passer-by saw the body and called law enforcement. Georgia was lying on her back, one leg bent at the knee and tucked under the other. Someone had stabbed her in the back once. That was the cause of her death She wearing a pair of jeans and a denim top. Though the top button of her jeans was undone, there was no sign of sexual assault said Seminole County Investigator Robert Jaynes.
Investigators who searched the scene also found a silver-colored cross. It wasn’t the cross Georgia usually wore, a little gold pendant on a delicate chain that her grandmother got her the previous Christmas. The cross looked homemade. It was two pieces of silver-colored metal with holes drilled into them, welded together and attached to a thick silver chain. It didn’t look like anything her parents had ever seen their daughter wear. “I have no idea how she came to be in possession of that cross or how long she had that cross,” Jaynes said.
Georgia’s parents first heard about a girl’s body being found in Fern Park through a family friend who saw a news report on TV. Mike Crews called deputies in Lake County, then Seminole County. Investigators from Seminole County came to Montverde that night to speak to the family. Nobody in the family got to see the body. “It took me many years to believe it was her,” Linda Crews admitted.
When she was found, Georgia was “in an advanced stage of decomposition,” Jaynes explained. If her family members had seen the body, they probably would not have been able to recognize her, he added. She was identified in part because of an unusual bone spur in her foot. Georgia’s remains were cremated and buried near her father’s family members in Bell, a small town in Gilchrist County. For two decades, a small part of Linda Crews hoped that the girl found in the woods was not Georgia after all. She just hadn’t seen any proof, she reasoned.
In the early 2000s Jaynes picked up the case and agreed to conduct a DNA test, comparing the genes of Linda Crews to a small bone sample investigators kept. The DNA was a match. It was Georgia. “Now we know, we can put that part of our lives to rest, that it was her,” Mrs. Crews related. “The next step is to figure out who done it. And we might never find out.”
Looking for clues. In the 12 years that Jim Manna served as Montverde’s police marshal, Georgia’s as the only homicide case in the town. “It was a pretty quiet area,” he recalled. “Well, at that time, we only had 200 people, about 300 people in Montverde. It’s not as big as it is now, not as commercialized as it is now.”
Because Montverde was so small, Manna worked security at Disney World, then came home and put in hours at the Police Department. When Georgia was reported missing, the Lake County Sheriff’s Office got involved. Because she was found in Seminole County, deputies there took on the case as well. The different jurisdictions sometimes did not cooperate with one another. “We had more rough times with the police” than with Georgia’s death, Linda Crews remembered.
Since Georgia’s murder, investigators have gone through a long list of possible suspects: neighbors, family friends, her father’s co-workers, people who just passed through town. “Everybody was centered on who knew the family, who had access to her. Would the girl get in the car with a stranger?” Jaynes asked rhetorically. “Everybody was going in different directions.”
In September 1980, Lake County deputies announced that a man in an Iowa prison had confessed to killing Georgia. Albert Lara had pled guilty to raping and strangling to death a 15-year-old in Iowa. He also confessed to a number of other murders and violent crimes all over the country. But his confession in Georgia’s case didn’t match some of the facts investigators had, prosecutors said at the time.
A local state attorney later threw the case out. “The questions they asked him were almost like answers,” Manna remembered. “They more or less told him the way she was murdered. And for some reason he admitted to it.” Lara, who is still in an Iowa prison, did not respond to a letter seeking comment.
‘Maybe we can get a resolution.’ Linda and Mike Crews see Georgia’s face every day, smiling at them from photos in their living room in Suwannee County. They now have grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They speak with Jaynes about once a month, hoping he’s found a new lead in the investigation. “Maybe we can get a resolution to it,” Jaynes said. “But it’s going to be very difficult, in a case that lacks physical evidence, to directly link somebody.”
Source: Gal Tziperman Lotan, The Orlando Sentinel, September 26, 2015.