Crime Junkie - MURDERED: Karen Gregory

Episode Date: April 4, 2022

Karen Gregory dies a violent death in the hallway of her own home, on a quiet residential street in Gulfport, Florida. After a two-year search for justice, police find out that their killer was right in front of them all along.   For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-karen-gregory/

Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Brett. And the story I have for you today is a lot of things. Brutal, tragic, shocking, frustrating, and so much more. It's about a woman who at the prime of her life was violently murdered in her own home. She almost escaped, and her killer almost did too. This is the story of Karen Gregory. At around 8.30 in the morning of Thursday, May 24th, 1984, the phone rings at Amy Bressler's

house. Amy lives on a quiet street in Gulfport, Florida, and when she picks up the phone, on the other end, she hears the voice of her 29-year-old neighbor, David Mackie. And Amy can tell right away by the tone of his voice that something is wrong. David says that he's been trying to reach his girlfriend, 36-year-old Karen Gregory, since Tuesday evening, but he hadn't been able to get a hold of her. You see, he's in Rhode Island for work at a conference this week, but even so, it's not like Karen to be out of touch for this long.

He says he's called the house, he's called her friends, her sister, even her new boss, but no one has seen or heard from her since Tuesday. David said they'd even tried the police stations and hospitals thinking maybe there was some kind of accident, but no one had a record of Karen Gregory. According to a book by Thomas Frenge called Unanswered Cries, David asked Amy if she could just take a look out of her living room window and see if Karen's car is in the driveway. Amy looks and tells him it is in the driveway. So David asked her then if she could go over to the house and just check on Karen for him.

He's too nervous to even wait for a call back, so David stays on the line while Amy puts the phone down and walks up the street to David's house. She knocks first on the side door because that's the first one she comes to, but there's no answer. So she walks around to try the front door, but before she can even get to it, she sees that a few panes of glass on the porch door are broken, like the green tinted glass is scattered all the way out along the walkway, almost to the street. Amy knocks on the door, but there's no answer.

Then she walks around to the back of the house where she finds the bedroom window open. The curtains are drawn so she can't see in, but she calls out for Karen, though all she gets in return is silence. Amy notices a little slit in the window screen, big enough for her to slide her hand in and move the curtains aside, and when she does, immediately her heart sinks into her stomach. In the hallway, outside the bedroom door, she can see a woman lying on the floor. Because of the angle, she can't see more than her lower half, but what she can see is blood and a lot of it.

She calls Karen's name again, hoping to hear a groan or see movement, anything, but Karen doesn't so much as stir. Amy runs as fast as she can back to her house filled with absolute terror and dread knowing David is waiting on the phone for her. She's in hysterics by the time she gets there, but manages to choke out that something horrible has happened. She doesn't know what, but she knows she needs to call police. An officer arrives within minutes, the paramedics right behind her, and she enters the house

through that window with the ripped screen. Once she's inside, her eyes sweep across the room, there's a fan still running on the floor, an unmade bed stained with a bit of blood, and in the hallway, just outside the bedroom, a woman's body laying on her left side, nude from the waist down, facing the wall covered in blood. As the officer walks towards her, it's the blood that strikes her most. There's just so much of it. Blood spattered on the walls and doors, blood pooled on the carpet.

Even in the dimly lit hallway, the officer knows that this woman on the floor is dead. Before long, the crime scene tape is up, the house is filled with people involved in what is now a homicide investigation. According to a series Thomas French wrote for the Tampa Bay Times called A Cry in the Night, that includes police officers, detectives, the police chief, crime scene texts, people from both the state's attorney's office and the medical examiner's office. Now, the ME can't actually say for sure what happened to Karen or how she may have died because her body, again, is just covered in so much dried blood.

It's impossible to even see any wounds, let alone guess what might have made them. There are several hand prints also in dried blood on her lower back and her legs, and basically just the way that they're positioned, the ME knows that they aren't Karen's own hand prints. And you said the blood is, like, really, really dried. Well, the descriptions of this scene that I've read don't say that, like, all the blood is dry, but it does note, like, a few places where the blood has dried. And so the assumption that police are making, which is, I think, likely the one that you're

making, too, is that Karen's body had been here for some time, though how long is something police still need to figure out? Based on the blood evidence alone, investigators are able to start to piece together a sense of what happened when Karen was murdered. They believe the attack began in the bedroom and then continued into the hallway, and at some point, police think that Karen may have broken away from her attacker and fled, making it all the way to that covered porch where she either fell or was pushed into the exterior door because there's blood on the inner door knob, and both blood and hair, long, brown

hair like Karen's, tangled in a hole in the glass. Oh, so that's why it had been shattered outward, like, towards the walkway versus inward, like someone broke in there. Right. After that escape attempt, police believe that Karen's killer pulled her back into the house to that hallway between the bedroom and bathroom where the bulk of the attack and the murder itself took place. So if the killer didn't break in through that front storm door, how did they get in?

Like, was it through that rip in the bedroom window screen? Well, actually, it's possible, but that tear they actually know wasn't new. That had apparently been there the entire time that David owned that house. In fact, there actually is no obvious signs of forced entry. So police are thinking at this point that the killer either got in somehow undetected through an unlocked door or window, or it's possible it was someone that Karen knew well enough to have invited inside. But according to a 2005 episode of American Justice, police are pretty sure that Karen's

killer at least left out that bedroom window since there is blood on the windowsill and on the curtains. That same day, police start canvassing the tight-knit community hoping some of the neighbors might have seen or heard something, something that might help them put this puzzle together. They speak to this one guy, Arthur, who tells them that he actually happened to be awake late on Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. He was reading in bed, and just after one, maybe 1.15, as Thomas French wrote in Unanswered Cries, he heard a, quote, high-pitched agonizing scream, end quote.

He says he got up right away, turned off the lights, and went to look out the window, but he couldn't see anything really. He stood there for like 15 minutes looking out into the street, being super quiet, but there was nothing else. He didn't call the police? No, but neither did the woman across the street, Martha, who heard the same scream, followed by what sounded like a door slamming, or Glenda, who lived in the house kitty corner to Karen and David's, who said that that scream woke her up from a dead sleep and scared her half

to death. Her partner, George, also heard the scream from the garage where he was working on his motorcycle. Wait, so four people heard this woman scream in the middle of the night, and no one called the police? Well, actually, the more doors police knock on, the bigger that number gets. It's more like a dozen people who heard the scream. All of them say it was around 1.15 Wednesday morning, and not one of them called police.

But in their defense, it was one scream, and not everyone described it as long or even agonizing like the one witness. Some people were startled awake by it, but no one heard a second scream or a struggle or anything like that. Like a few people, including Martha, say that they heard what they thought maybe was a door slam afterward, but not everyone. So most people chalk the scream up to someone like waking up from a nightmare or like a neighborhood teenager goofing off, maybe even a cat or some other animal, like that kind

of thing. It scared some people, including Glenda, but no one's first thought was that this was the sound of a woman being murdered. In fact, of all the people who heard the scream, only one even ventured outside to check it out. That was Glenda's partner, George. You see, George is a firefighter for the city of St. Petersburg, and he volunteers with the Gulfport Fire Department too.

And so he's kind of like the unofficial captain of the neighborhood watch in his community. A lot of the officers from the Gulfport PD know George well, so the fact that he actually did something after hearing the scream is no surprise to them. They also know that if there was anything even remotely out of order or suspicious going on, he'd notice. Now George is at work on the day Karen's body is found when they're out canvassing, but one of the detectives calls him at the station and says, hey, Glenda told us that you heard that scream the other night.

Can you do us a favor and like write down everything you remember from that night? Everything suspicious you saw or heard even in like the days before. Was there anyone you saw coming or going from Karen and David's house? So George actually leaves work and heads to the police station to write out a statement for officers. In his statement, he says that he'd been working in the garage with his radio on when he heard a faint scream. He said he turned off the light and the radio and walked out to the end of his driveway,

where he looked up and down the street, waited for a minute, but he didn't see or hear anything else. Later, he did see a guy drive by on a bike, though by that time he was back in the garage working again. George says he didn't recognize the guy on the bike, but he had seen two middle aged white guys biking around the neighborhood earlier that evening, and it might have been one of them, but he couldn't be sure. Okay, but the fact that someone is out on a bike, you know, in the middle of the night

basically, that is kind of odd. I mean, it would strike me as odd, but also to me no more odd than this guy working in his garage at the same time of night. I mean, I guess I would say the same thing, except we know he's a firefighter, right? So he's probably got a pretty strange sleep schedule, like working night shifts or long stretches of time and just, I don't know, keeping odd hours in general. That's true. Anyway, George also notes a few people who he'd seen at David and Karen's house in

the last little while, people that might be worth police checking out. He says two black men had been at the house taking care of the property maybe like a month back, which he remembers vividly because one of them had a seizure and an ambulance had to come. It was like a whole thing. But the most interesting tip George gives them is about a man who he says came to Karen and David's house in a van the day before on Wednesday, and he did something truly bizarre. George said this guy he'd never seen before drove up to the house, knocked on Karen and

David's front door, went back to his van for a few minutes, then got out again and put a note or something on the windshield of their car, then he waited like another few minutes in his van and then just left. Interestingly, there had in fact been a note found tucked under the wiper of David's car when police processed the house. And Brett, I'm going to get you to read that note. It says, quote, Karen and David, hello, stopped by about 7.15 or so but saw no signs of life. Many things to do tonight, so I probably won't be back, but I have something you wanted.

We'll be home not too late, end quote. And this note was left after Karen was murdered? Yeah. And who exactly was it from? Well someone named Peter, but before they can start looking for Peter, the autopsy happens, and it shows that Karen had been stabbed at least 13 times in the neck. According to Pat Masel's reporting for the Tampa Bay Times, one of the stab wounds completely severed her jugular.

Also she hadn't been beaten like the Emmy initially thought at the scene. Well no, the Emmy does find blunt force trauma to her head. But it's not like she'd been struck with an object, but like she had struck an object, like if she'd fallen or something, which police believe might have happened when she hit that front door during her attempted escape. There were also defensive wounds on her hands, cuts, bruises, even a broken finger on one hand. And the autopsy shows that the killer tried to slit her throat.

Were they able to determine if she was sexually assaulted? Yeah, the Emmy found traces of semen inside her body. And police suspected sexual assault from the start because of the blood on her bed and because she was naked from the waist down and wearing a white t-shirt. And she also had this, it was so weird, this black teddy on her, like when she was found. Oh, and the other thing I thought was so interesting that I feel like never really gets explained in this case is the Emmy said that based on the way the t-shirt and teddy are positioned on her body, it looked like Karen had been wearing the teddy over the t-shirt.

Okay, I guess I don't even know what to make of that. Like someone put it on her for her over this t-shirt she was wearing? Well, so that's what they're thinking, like maybe her attacker tried to force her into lingerie first, but like without undressing, it's just really bizarre. It's not a way you would normally wear it. So why? Oh yeah. So anyways, they get this report and they go back to looking for their suspect.

Of course, they start by focusing on the boyfriend, David. Remember he'd been in Rhode Island for a work conference when Karen's body was found. He'd flown in on Monday and he arrived back Thursday after he found out about the murder, like he came right back. When police asked him where he was during the hours the murder actually was committed overnight Tuesday to Wednesday morning, he says that he was at his motel room sleeping. He was alone the whole night and there's no one who can verify that he was in fact in his room.

And when police look into it, they find that it actually would have been possible, not ideal, but possible for David to get to Gulfport and back in time for the conference. They check flights and get copies of his credit card charges, but they can't find any evidence of a flight. But according to a 2021 episode of an unexpected killer, they did find a copy of a Providence newspaper at the crime scene that was dated the day of the murder. And their big question was, well, how could that have gotten there unless he brought it with him?

Yes. When police asked him about it, he says, no, you've got it all wrong. Like I bought that paper at a Gulfport newsstand before I left for Rhode Island. He said he got it so he could check the weather. Okay, but you said it was dated after he left. David can't explain that part, but it doesn't take long for police to find out that I guess this particular paper, which was the village voice comes out two days early. And when they go to the newsstand where David said that he bought it, the guy working there

says that he actually remembers selling it to David. They give David a polygraph, too, which he passes, and he provides them with prints and hair samples, too. And while they never really rule him out 100%, they know that they need to look for other possible suspects. Police look into those two men who George noted were at the property doing work the month before and they look into a colleague of Karen's who had a reputation as kind of a sleaze bag, and they rule all of them out.

Okay, I just want to know more about No Signs of Life windshield note guy Peter. Well, according to that American Justice episode, police learn from Karen's friend that Peter is a man named Peter Cumble. Now, Peter is an acquaintance of Karen's and knows David, too, but he's not like a close friend. And when they track him down, he says that he'd run into Karen a week or so before and she had invited him by for dinner that night with her and David. Okay, yes, David had that work trip, unless the work trip was, like, totally last minute.

No, no, no, you're right. The week prior to when he's saying they ran into one another, Karen would have for sure known that David was going to be in Rhode Island. So like, something isn't adding up here. Well, and then the note said something like he had something that they wanted. Did he say what that something is? Yeah, apparently he was talking about a cassette tape that he'd borrowed, which to me is like, why so cryptic about a cassette tape?

Yeah, you could literally just say, I wanted to return your cassette. Or leave the cassette? I don't know. I feel like there are options here. Anyway, Peter tells police that what the neighbor had reported seeing was exactly what happened. He'd arrived at the house on Wednesday evening. He saw both Karen and David's cars were in the driveway. The porch door was open, so he figured they were home.

He says he stepped past that first open door, the one that leads into the cupboard porch and knocked on the interior door, but no one answered. He couldn't see any lights on in the house. It was quiet. So according to a 2010 episode of On the Case with Paula Zahn, he thought he must have like gotten the date wrong or something. But he waited in his van for maybe 15 minutes just to see if anyone came home. And when they didn't, he says that he left that note on David's car and left.

But police are like, okay, wait a second, if you stepped into that cupboard porch, that means you stepped over all of that broken glass, even past a few drops of blood that were on the floor. And you're telling us you didn't notice any of that? Yeah. Like literally the glass would have been crunching under his feet. But Peter says no, he actually walked across the lawn to the front door and knocked up the walkway, so he avoided most of the glass.

And he's like, I didn't notice any blood. This was also his first time at Karen and David's house too. So it's not like he would have noticed anyway if something was different. Like, you know, again, if you're defending this guy, like for all he knows, you know, that window could have been broken for ages. Right. But what does he say about that no signs of life comments? Just a morbid coincidence, apparently.

Just like how he says being there at all was a coincidence. But police don't buy the coincidence argument until they've exhausted all other possibilities. They ask Peter what he was doing Tuesday night into Wednesday morning when Karen's murder happened. And he said he went shopping for camping equipment and then just went home to bed. He says his roommate will corroborate that and he does. But again, it's one of those like, I was in bed all night sleeping alibis. It's actually kind of hard to prove when your roommate's not like sleeping next to

you. Right. So it's not solid enough to rule out the only person who had been to Karen and David's house while her body lay on the floor inside. But the next day, Friday, one of Karen's friends who was her former roommate, Anita, comes to the Emmy's office to officially identify the body so it can be released to Karen's family. And she brings someone with her.

It is none other than Peter Cumble. So police tell them, you know, actually we need two people to identify the body. Wait, they do? No, not usually and not officially, but police have an opportunity to watch his reaction to seeing her body. And so they decide to take it. The process is brief, maybe a minute or so, and Peter was very calm throughout. Afterward, a detective pulls Peter into a conference room to ask a few questions.

And while the questioning didn't really lead to any big breakthroughs, during the conversation, the detective noticed Peter had a scratch on one of his hands, a large one that looked pretty recent, maybe a few days old. The detective asks where that scratch came from, and he tells them that he's scratched up like that all the time, usually from working on his van or playing with his dogs. And in that 2010 episode of her show, Peter tells Paula's on that in that case it was from a dog. At this point, Peter is the best police have for a suspect, but they don't yet have the

evidence from the crime lab that might help them place Peter at the scene. And they don't want to hone in on one person too quickly. So in the meantime, investigators keep speaking to Karen's friends, and they ask them to help them plot out Karen's movements in the day or so leading up to her death. Police learn that Karen had worked that day, and then went to the apartment that she had been sharing with her friend Anita to grab the last few things left to bring to David's house. Oh, did they, like, just move in together?

Yeah, according to the book Unanswered Cries, Karen had been, like, kind of slowly moving her stuff to David's place for, like, the last several weeks. This was actually her last trip. So Karen grabbed her stuff, went back home to drop it off, and then she left to have dinner with another friend, N'vern. She got to N'vern's around 7.30 or 8. The two of them sat around eating and drinking wine and talking for several hours. And shortly after midnight, Karen said that she had to head home to shower and get some

sleep. And she left. So besides knowing that the murder happened not long after she got home that night, does any of this point them in any new directions in terms of suspects? Not really, no. Like so many other avenues detectives pursue, this one generates no new leads for them. And from the perspective of investigators, they feel like they were behind the eight ball from the moment they started working this case.

I mean, remember, over 30 hours had passed from the time Karen died to when her body was found. There was no warm trail to speak of. And here's like the wild part, the Gulfport police station is less than a mile from Karen and David's house. If someone, anyone had called 911 when they heard that scream that night, they may have been able to actually do something, even save her life or at least track her killer. Because this was a bloody crime scene and Karen's killer surely would have been covered

in blood. Yeah, I mean, there may have been a literal trail of blood to follow. Literally, depending on how quickly they got there, there could have been because it was actually raining on and off the night Karen was murdered. So if there had been any fresh blood, like in a trail or otherwise, it was long gone 30 hours later when police finally got there. You never mentioned anything missing from the house, so I assume police ruled out robbery as a motive.

Yet Karen's boyfriend David had checked pretty extensively and while he did say it's possible that maybe some of her things might be missing, like again, they just moved in together. He didn't have like a perfect accounting of what she owned. But as far as he could tell, there were only two things unaccounted for, a glass vase, which he said could easily have been broken or tossed out before and a white teddy that Karen had bought herself as a birthday gift just a couple of months before the murder. But even that he wasn't 100% convinced of, he'd only seen it one time two months prior and you know, it's possible she ended up taking it back or something happened to it

or whatever. Or it could have been taken by someone as a souvenir. That's a possibility to consider too. Even though all of their known suspects have been ruled out, they can't shake the feeling that the murderer is someone who knew Karen. I mean, first there's the front door. When Peter Cumble had been by the house on Wednesday, that front exterior door had been opened.

Remember, he had stepped past it and into the enclosed porch to knock on the interior door. Several of the neighbors noticed the door open that day too, but by Thursday, when police arrived at the scene, the door was closed, but no one reported closing it. The other thing that detectives keep going back to is the scene. The attack on Karen had been violent and frenzied and messy, and at one point she'd even come close to escaping. It was almost certainly dark too, since no one in their right mind would carry out such a vicious attack with lights blazing, not in a neighborhood where people live close

enough to see through the windows. But yet, nothing inside the house reflected a struggle. There was blood, yes, but nothing in the house was toppled over or pushed aside or out of place. It didn't look like how they expected it to look given that someone had been chased from one place to another with a knife. In Thomas French's book, detectives describe the scene as unbelievably tidy, exactly like that.

And that just doesn't seem like the kind of thing a random drifter would do, right? Return to the scene of a vicious attack and straighten up the chairs, it just doesn't make sense. Detectives keep pouring over the case file, looking at the crime scene photos again and again, even going back to the house, often going back to Karen's street to talk again to her neighbors. But it was like going in circles day after day. Then in late December, seven months after the murder, one of the detectives gets a call

from another officer saying that they found another potential witness, a woman who said that she too heard the scream. Okay, not to be a jerk about this, but she's one of how many now? Like there's a ton of these. There are, but this particular person lives several blocks from Karen and David's house, far enough away that it was outside their canvas area. And it almost didn't make sense, because it would be shocking if the sound carried that far.

So in late January, detectives decide to go chat with the only person who was actually outside when they heard the scream, the firefighter across the street. They want to see if he remembers anything about that night, something he didn't mention in the frenzy of the first statement on day one of the investigation. George tells investigators the same thing he said the last time, about how he was in the garage, he heard the scream, turned out the lights, shut off the radio, and then went out to listen. He said he checked along the street, saw nothing, and then he says he went into the house for

the night. Which is actually a little bit of a shift from what George said the first time, which was that he walked to the end of the driveway, looked up and down the street, and then went back to the garage to work. It's not a massive shift, like it could just be that after all these months things are fuzzy. But it's enough that they want to ask George to take a polygraph. And listen, it's important to note that George knows pretty much everyone who works at the

Gulfport Police Department. Like, for example, the lead detective on this case, this guy Larry, had officiated George and Glenda's wedding, like that's how friendly we're talking. So you know, the story's changing, they're going to like try and rule this guy out. Come in, let's take a polygraph, let's just like make sure there's nothing like lingering here. So in early February, detectives bring George in to meet with a polygrapher, someone from a private company who, unlike the Gulfport cops, doesn't already know George and isn't

friends with him. But the detectives wait in a room nearby, and when the test is over, the polygrapher comes to get them, and he says they should come talk to George themselves, because George has something to say. When they go in the room, George is a wreck, and they have no idea what to think. Well it turns out, the test showed that George had been lying to police. But he insists he's not lying about what happened that night, but he admits that he hasn't been telling them everything.

Because he had actually seen something that night, actually he'd seen someone. George says he saw a man standing under a big oak tree in David and Karen's yard that night just after he heard the scream. The detective asks George if he saw the guy well enough to describe him, and he had. George says he's a white man, middle aged, tall, like 6'4", with a muscular build, red hair, and a red beard. He says he was wearing a green shirt and either gray or black dress pants. George says that he looked at the guy, and the guy looked straight back at him, which

scared him enough that he pretty much hightailed it back to the house. The problem with this is detectives don't think George's garage is close enough to Karen's that he could describe the person in that much detail, in the middle of the night on a rainy night at that. I was literally just going to say that. Yeah, but anything's possible, right, so they decide to actually check this out for themselves. They set up basically a recreation and have George stand at the end of his driveway, and

then they have a police officer. One who's not in uniform walked to the spot that George says he saw this guy. Once the officer is in place, the detective asks George, you know, go ahead, describe him. And the best he could say was that the man was wearing some kind of jacket? He couldn't say what color the jacket was, he couldn't even say what color this guy's hair was, none of those details. It was just too dark and he was too far away.

But here's the thing, what George didn't know is that the officer they had placed was actually someone George had known for years, someone he would have recognized if it was remotely possible. George tried to make excuses for why he had not been able to spot someone in detail now. He says, you know, there's something different about the light, maybe there was a full moon that night, or maybe the wet pavement was reflecting light, something that made it brighter on the night of the murder. But the investigators were sure that if anything, it was actually brighter now than it had been

the night of the murder, because after the murder, a lot of people on that street installed new outdoor lighting, George included, but they give him the benefit of the doubt. He works with them on a composite sketch and the detectives bring him a stack of photos of potential suspects for him to look at to see if he recognizes any of them from the lawn that night, but they don't track down a match. Now it's weird because each time they spoke to George, there were tiny changes in his story. Originally, he told them he had seen Karen on the day of the murder, but then he said

he had seen her in the kitchen window doing dishes, and he knew that she was doing dishes because he could see her arms moving, but then another time, he said that he knew she was doing dishes because he heard the plates rattling. So he heard plates rattling inside the house during the day when it's arguably probably louder and more busy on the street, but he didn't hear glass breaking outside the house in the dead of night. It isn't adding up, none of it is adding up. So they know that he's hiding something, something like murder, well, no, they actually

don't think that he's the killer and George is their friend. They know this guy. They trust this guy, but they definitely think that he knows more than he's letting on. So they bring him back down for questioning again in early March. And this time George changes his story again. He says he didn't just go to the end of his driveway and look around. He actually walked all the way up the street after he heard the scream looking in between parked cars, checking all around.

He did see a guy on the lawn, but not from his driveway. George says that he was next to Karen and David's house at the time. He says he asked the guy what was wrong and the guy told George to get out of there and don't tell anyone about this or he'd be back to kill him. And he's just remembering the story now, not during the, can you see this guy test? Okay. Yeah. This is now story number three, big picture wise.

So like cops are kind of like frustrated like you and literally at this point, they're like, geez, George. The next time you're going to tell us you were in the house. So they polygraph George again. And even now with this new story, again, he fails. Didn't his wife say he was in the garage when she woke up? I guess my question is what version of events is she backing up? Well, here's what's interesting.

Initially, Glenda told the police that when she heard the scream and got up, like George was gone for like 30 minutes and she did. She heard the scream. She went out to go find him. The lights were off in the garage. George was just totally MIA. Now she assumed that he was out trying to figure out what was going on because as Mr. Neighborhood Watch, like that wouldn't be weird.

But her story on this changes too, though. It was 30 minutes at the start and then keeps getting like shorter and shorter until she says that he was only gone like 10 minutes. But the one thing I'll say is that throughout all of this, she's consistent with police that George never came home like covered in blood or wet from having rinsed off. And she knows that because she hugged him right away because how rattled she was by hearing the scream and then being alone in the house. So she's like, I would have noticed if something was on him or transferred to me.

So this time when they have George, they take a whole raft of samples from him. Fingerprints, handprints, footprints, hairs from his head and chest and pubic area. And they send them all to the lab for comparison against what was found at the house. Wait, they didn't do any of this before? No. So I guess they didn't feel like they had a reason until now, which I'm guessing is only based on the fact that he's like their buddy and a first responder himself, you know, captain again of the neighborhood watch.

Because in my mind, like they collected this other stuff from other people a while ago. Like it's weird that it's taken this long. With honestly kind of less reason. But to be honest, I'm not exactly sure what they're even comparing these samples to anyways. The best fingerprint they found at the scene was a bloody one on the window ledge actually matched already back to a first responder and the handprints on Karen's body and the footprints on the carpet around her couldn't be used to identify anyone either because of how long after the murder her body was discovered.

There is this one footprint, not even a whole print, but like a partial print on the bathroom floor that detectives keep coming back to you thinking that maybe that's got to be useful. A shoe print, you mean? No, it's actually a footprint, like from a bare foot. Oh. Yeah. So one of the detectives reached out to the crime lab again to ask them about the print,

like could the image be blown up to an actual size and used for comparison? They told him it was just like a smudge, basically another useless clue. But at this point, that smudge is pretty much all they've got. So they call up the FBI crime lab in DC and ask if maybe they have an experienced analyst who might be able to take a look and see if they can work with it. And they agree. By this time, it's February 1986, nearly two years since Karen has been murdered. Another month goes by and in March, the phone rings.

It's an analyst from the FBI crime lab in Washington calling to say that not only were they able to work with that partial print, they were able to compare it to the footprint sample that was sent with it. And they found a positive match to George Lewis, the neighbor. A few days later, detectives pay George a visit at the fire station in St. Petersburg. And they ask if he would mind coming down to the station one more time to answer some questions. And they don't just arrest him right there?

No, partially because they don't want to embarrass him in front of his colleagues. And I think the other part is they're still trying to give him a chance to explain himself? Like again, I have no other way of saying this, but this guy is clearly getting special treatment out the wazoo. So they bring him in, they sit him down and ask him again, walk us through what happened on the night of the murder. And again, he tells them he hears the scream, he walked down the street, saw the creepy dude and then went home.

And so they ask him, you didn't go into the house. He says no. And you're sure you did not go into the house 100%. And he says no. And then they're like, okay, well, then how is it that your footprint got inside the house? George is gobsmacked for a minute. He tells them there's got to be a mistake has to be a mistake. He didn't go into the house.

His footprint couldn't possibly be there. He wasn't even barefoot that night. It is not possible. So they show him the official letter from the FBI that says the print is a match. He keeps insisting that there must be something wrong with this. How could he even get inside the house and do all of that with his wife at home? It's just not possible. At that point, they tell him, this is the end of the line.

The only thing left to do is place him under arrest. But before they do, George sighs. And then he begins to tell them a whole new version of his ever changing story. Now George says that he heard the scream, went down to the street, saw the man under the oak tree, went home, but he didn't stay there. He says he waited for the guy to leave and then went back. He then climbed in through the back bedroom window. He says there were no lights on.

It was dark. Everything was silent. And he says once he got inside, he saw Karen lying there on the floor with her throat cut open. He was horrified and shocked and panicked. So he ran. But police are not buying it. Not this time, not from George.

He's a firefighter and EMT for God's sake, like a first responder. He is literally professionally trained to handle exactly that type of situation to help people and save their lives. Yeah. I mean, if that's what he stumbled across in his house, wouldn't you think he'd be the first one to call 911, the first one to start like applying like life saving attempts? Like, yeah, even if he's not applying life saving measures to your point, literally, he's the captain of the neighborhood watch.

He's called police countless times prior for less serious things, but like you don't report this. Like it's not making sense. So they placed George under arrest for the sexual assault and murder of Karen Gregory. George sits in a jail cell for months until December 31st of that year when his family and friends cobble together enough collateral to post his bond. Oh, wait. So he's charged with first doing murder and sexual assault and he gets out on bond?

He does. Much to the delight of his defense attorneys. I could write a whole episode about the trial alone, which took forever to even happen because of all the defense appeals and the fact that this case bounced from judge to judge like six times before they ever got to opening arguments. And then once it finally did get underway a year later in another county, it was just objection after objection. Bench conference after bench conference, recess after recess.

I can't imagine how it must have felt for Karen's friends and family, even the judge who presided over the case called it a nightmare. Ultimately, the state's case is based on the footprint found in the bathroom and the many different statements George gave police over the course of the two year investigation. Now, the defense says that George's statements weren't conflicting, but rather progressive. He told the truth. He just told it in pieces, each story building on the one before and they go hard on police for what they call a bungled investigation.

There are two what I'd call surprise witnesses in this trial. The first is a woman named Tanya, who according to a piece by Bill Henry in the Tampa Tribune says that she was dating George in the summer of 1984 after Karen's murder. Wait, wasn't he about to get married or no, married, like the lead detective like officiated the wedding, right? Well, actually, George and Glenn is separated for a few months in the summer of 1984 like she had moved out and he saw their people. One of them who was this girl named Tanya, when I say girl, she was 16 at the time.

And how old was George? Well, I think he was 22. And I guess he thought that she was around the same age, but eventually he did for sure know that she was a teenager because as Tanya tells the jury, he gave her a gift for her 17th birthday. And that gift is really interesting. It was a white lace teddy, one that police took to David Mackie, who said that it was the same as the one that Karen had bought for herself that went missing from the house

after her murder. So are they able to prove that it's the same one? No. And they tried. George said that he couldn't remember where he bought it or even how he paid for it. And police weren't able to for sure connect it back to Karen. But David testifies that the teddy George gave to Tanya a few months after the murder had the same lace, the same buttons and was the same style as the one Karen owned.

And again, the same one that went missing from her house the night of the murder. Okay. So who was the second surprise witness? Well, that is none other than George Lewis himself, who takes the stand in his own defense and tells yet another new story. Oh my God. You see, according to Thomas French's 1988 series for the Tampa Bay Times, before the trial, no one had told George where that bloody footprint had been.

Only that there was a footprint that connected him to the scene. But that detail came out in court when the state presented it as evidence. So now George comes up with a story where he says he was actually barefoot that night. He'd been wearing work boots, but they were hurting his feet, so he took them off. Then he says he hears the scream, went to check things out, saw the man went home, went back to the house, climbed through the window, saw the body, saw the house covered in blood. And this now, again, progressive stories, he says that he was so overcome by the whole thing that he had to run into the bathroom to throw up.

He says he doesn't remember flushing the toilet, but he must have, since police didn't find any vomit at the scene. He just remembers climbing out the window and running home scared to death. Can you hear my eyes rolling from where you are guys? Is there any world in which any of that story could be true? Well not really. The footprint that police found in the bathroom was, I guess, just like just inside the door. So too far from the toilet to vomit unexpectedly and haven't land straight in the bowl without

getting a drop anywhere else, and too far to flush without serious acrobatics. Now during the trial, the defense tried to point the finger at Peter Cumble. Peter didn't look anything like the composite George had helped create that guy on the lawn though, like in fact the composite looks more like George himself than anyone else involved in this case, but they still suggested that Peter was maybe the killer inside the house and that his roommate, this guy named Kenneth, was the man on the lawn. I'm not sure Kenneth kind of bared a passing resemblance to this sketch, and he sometimes wore a beard, but that was pretty much it.

And he didn't even have a beard in May of 1984. And also I don't know why they're using this sketch like it's proven, it's from the guy who's on trial for murder. Yeah, I was gonna say like why are we even talking about this sketch of this, at least in my opinion, made up person? It's so weird. After 13 hours of deliberation over the course of two days, the jury finds George Lewis guilty of first degree murder and sexual assault.

The state was pursuing the death penalty, but the jury recommended life in prison to the judge. And I wish I could say that the judge, you know, sentenced him, you know, everyone went home, got on with their lives, but that's not what happened, or at least not right away. The defense filed a motion almost immediately saying George didn't get a fair trial because of all these various and sundry mistakes that the judge made. And as a result, they say that the verdict should be overturned. Like, listen, it's a total Hail Mary pass for sure, but it works.

What? The judge does it, yes. But the prosecution appeals that decision. And the higher court says that the only mistake the judge made in the trial of George Lewis was that final one when he overturned the verdict. So George gets life in prison with no chance of parole. There were, of course, many appeals over the years, as recently as 2008, when Thomas French from the Tampa Bay Times reported that the Florida Innocence Project had taken on

the case and wanted to do DNA testing to exonerate George. DNA testing, like, from the semen found during the autopsy? So this is something I kind of spiraled on. The media coverage from 2008 just talks about DNA evidence, like, really broadly. It doesn't say what it is. And none of the source material I used for this episode talks about anything else. So to me, it's got to be the semen. Like, we know she was sexually assaulted.

We know they found that. We've never heard anything about, like, other people's blood. I mean, there were defensive wounds so there could be, like, skin samples under her nails possibly. Yeah. Well, whatever this DNA was, it had been tested before but was inconclusive. In the episode of American Justice I mentioned, they noted that the detective was told that there wasn't much of it to work with anyway, whatever it was.

So do we know for sure that the semen was from a sexual assault? I mean, could it have been from a consensual encounter? Well, George's lawyers argued that very thing, that just the presence of semen did not prove a sexual assault occurred. And, you know, to be fair and in defense of their argument, the semen is the only evidence of a sexual assault as far as I know. At least the only one that comes up in, like, the source material. They don't talk about bruising or lacerations or anything like that.

It doesn't mean there was no other evidence of it. I just don't have, like, the original autopsy report or anything. But even during the trial, nothing else came up to prove a sexual assault. It's just this semen. And again, if we're saying there's only a little bit of it, it, like, kind of makes you ask questions. And it's something that the jury considered, actually, during deliberations, like, was there enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that George Lewis sexually assaulted

Karen Gregory? And they determined there was. But of course, technology changes. And in particular, DNA testing advanced by leaps and bounds between the late 80s and, like, the first decade of the 2000s. So another round of testing happens. And in June 2009, the results come back. And it's not exactly one of those big movie moments like we got our guy.

But basically, all it says is George could not be excluded as a suspect based on that testing. So if he couldn't be excluded, then he couldn't be exonerated either. Okay, but what I can't get out of my mind is the Innocence Project doesn't just take on any old case. Like they clearly felt there was a good chance that George had been wrongfully convicted or they wouldn't have touched it in the first place. I couldn't stop thinking about this, too, because I agree.

Like for the Innocence Project to take it on, they don't just take cases willy nilly. Like you have to like really prove your case to them. And they have to feel like there's something there, but like I could only find two mentions of this case and the Innocence Project together. There's one media story before the DNA was sent off for testing and one when the results come back. But the first of those stories, the one published in the Tampa Bay Times before the results were written, notes that the executive director of the Innocence Project of Florida visited

George in prison and quote, was struck by a sense that this was no murderer, which is kind of a reoccurring theme in this case. Yeah. But you know what? Like I couldn't stop thinking about, especially after I learned about the Innocence Project. What's that? It was Tim Hennis. I don't know if you remember, we covered that case like a long ways back.

It was the Eastburn family episode. Oh yeah. And yet Tim was like this upstanding family man, military man who was convicted of triple homicide right around the same time in 1986 and no one could buy it. Kind of like in this case, like one thing you'll hear over and over for George Lewis is like, he didn't have a history of this. He didn't have even a reason to like want Karen dead. Like there was no real connection, but it was the same thing for Tim.

People couldn't wrap their heads around it. And his case was taken up on appeal and he ended up being acquitted. And then like 10 years later, they were able to test the DNA evidence and it was him after all. So again, I feel like there's so many things to compare. I don't know if this is, you know, two of the same where it's like two guys who had no real significant connection, who didn't seem like the types, but did this one off horrible thing.

Or if I'm just like making connections where there are none. Anyway, in June 2010, the Florida Parole Board ruled that George could be eligible for parole after all, but not until 2051. At which point he'd be like 89 years old, but George actually died in prison in 2015. And by then he'd spent almost 30 years behind bars. Despite the mountain of evidence that proved otherwise, he always maintained his innocence to the very end. George's ex-wife Glenda and their two daughters did too, along with many other family members,

friends, and many people who worked with him. To them, George was a quiet, caring man, a family man, a guy who looked out for his neighbors, a man whose entire career was about saving lives. No one who knew him could make sense of it, and a good many still can't. But the family and friends of Karen Gregory, the people who knew and loved her and knew all too well the horrors suffered on that night in May, they saw George for what he was, a wolf in sheep's clothing, a monster in plain sight. Next week with a brand new episode.

So, what do you think Chuck, do you approve?