EXCERPT:

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 Daily Sun-Journal 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 the local media 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 intention 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 relocated to the Daily Sun-Journal from a newspaper in the north, he was told Brooksville was 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 fifty-five or so miles north of Tampa.

“Then bodies were being dug up in Billy Mansfield’s backyard. 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 backyard. They (his 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 backyard–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 faraway 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 when a couple prisoners actually kicked a hole in the wall at the new jail 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 that 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.”

Then 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 a 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 ten-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 tenure 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.