The Deck - Debra Owens (7 of Diamonds, Florida)

Episode Date: May 22, 2024

Our card this week is Debra Owens, the 7 of Diamonds from Florida. Debra was a woman who deserved better than what she got in the last year of her life. Every day she woke up, she was a survivor of something or someone. Over 20 years after she was brutally murdered, no one has been held accountable.If you have any information about the murder of Debra Owens in 2002, please contact the Citrus County Sheriff’s Office major crimes unit at 352-249-2790, or you can anonymously report information at Crime Stoppers of Citrus County at 888-269-8477.If you or someone you know are a victim of domestic violence, know that help is available. You can contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233, or text “START” to 88788. View source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/debra-owens Let us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media.Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuckFacebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllcTo apply for a Cold Case Playing Card grant through Season of Justice, please visit www.seasonofjustice.org. The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers. Instagram: @ashleyflowersTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieTwitter: @Ash_FlowersFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AF Text Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more!

Our second card this week is Deborah Owens, the 7 of Diamonds from Florida. Deborah was a woman who deserved better than what she got in the last year of her life. Every day she woke up, she was a survivor of something or someone. Over 20 years after she was brutally murdered, no one has been held accountable, even though investigators have long felt they know who killed Debra. But proving it has remained elusive. And that's the thing about justice.

Sometimes, the harder you look, the more elusive it can feel. Until one day, it's standing right in front of you. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. On September 28, 2002, at around 6.30 p.m., there was a couple taking a casual stroll with their dog through a forested state park in West Central Florida. It was a nice day, nothing remarkable to speak of. That is until their dog got into something right off the path. Now Chuck's done this plenty of times on our walks.

Even though I keep him leashed on trails out of nowhere, he'll leap into the bushes just off to the side, and every once in a while, he'll come out with a small critter. But this story, this isn't Indiana. Where they're at in Florida, we're not talking little fuzzy rodents. You're more likely to find a snake out there. Citrus County here is fairly rural, especially in 2002, and they were walking their dog in the weather

with Coochie State Forest, which covers quite a bit as part of the county. That's Sergeant Chris Holloway of the Citrus County Sheriff's Office. He told us that the couple got closer to where their dog was sniffing, and it was no snake that their dog had found. They see what they thought was shoes,

and then they look further and, why not be in human remains? They knew a trooper lived nearby because they lived in that area, went to his residence, and he wound up calling the sheriff's office. And we responded at that point. The woman was fully clothed and wearing a lot of jewelry.

It must have been obvious to the couple that she'd been killed because they alerted authorities right away. Now, as far as what deputies saw when they got there, or what they collected once they roped off the scene, I can't tell you. The agency today is being super tight-lipped about what they found. Police didn't even wanna say whether or not the person found was clothed or not, but we know that she was because that information

is right there in the Citrus County cold case deck. Sergeant Holloway also didn't want to say if there were any signs of sexual assault. And we tried asking him whether he thought the crime was committed there, where the body was found, or if the body was placed there after the fact. But even that was a question he didn't want to answer. But we didn't want the lack of all of this information to stop us from covering this case. Sometimes that's just how it is. Sergeant Holloway treats information about this case as very precious, the same way they treated the crime

scene all those years ago. Typical for pretty much any agency, especially ours, we're really particular on our crime scene. So it had been taped off, being very careful what path they go in, because you don't want to go in the same path, to try to eliminate any kind of traffic in that area. So you don't want to transfer any evidence, bring any evidence in or take any evidence out inadvertently. So we're very careful that the crime scene is taped off.

Photographs are began at the time. inadvertently. So we're very careful that crime scenes taped off, photographs began at the time. It's just an unidentified body, you know, was male or female when they first arrived. It wasn't until the next day, which would have been the 29th, that it was determined the body was that of 41-year-old Deborah Owens, and her cause of death was multiple gunshot wounds. Deborah was somewhat familiar to police at the time already because of some prior arrests related to drug possession. But they were even more familiar with her husband,

64-year-old Gerald Owens, who by 2002 had been arrested 24 times, arrested for things like battery and possession of drugs. But arrests aside, he would have been one of the first people police looked into regardless. Well, you always check with people who were closest to her. So you start working your way backwards from there. You got her husband at the time. They were not on the best of terms as relationship-wise. Investigators discovered that on the morning of September 25th, just three days

before Debra was found murdered, she had gone to the Citrus County Courthouse to file a complaint against her husband. According to an article in the Tampa Bay Times by Carey Johnson, this is what she wrote in that complaint, Quote, I asked him for a divorce and he told me never he'd kill me first. And then he'd know where I was at, and no one else would be with me." Deborah was reportedly living at a domestic violence shelter when she was killed,

and she already had a protective order against Gerald from July after he physically assaulted her. The order required Gerald to stay away from both Deborah and her 14-year-old daughter, who some news articles claim was also Gerald's biological daughter, but this hasn't been confirmed by Sergeant Holloway. According to that same Tampa Bay Times article, before that, Debra had a restraining order against him stemming from an incident in April, where he punched her in the eye and, again, threatened her life. She eventually had the court drop that order when she tried to reconcile with him.

But that's a lot of ups and downs and down again for a marriage that was only a year old. That's why he was a prime suspect at the time. He's the husband. They're estranged, they're having their issues. He's obviously gonna be an obvious suspect. She's right in front of you. Well, figuratively speaking. They had to actually go track him down to ask him questions about his deceased wife, whom he hadn't so much as reported missing, by the way. When they found him, though,

he wasn't interested in helping them solve his wife's murder. I'll say it wasn't cooperative. They might not have been able to get a statement from Gerald, but between his connection to her and his violent history toward her, it seemed like there was enough probable cause to get a search warrant for his house, which happened on October 4th. I'd love to know if they found any guns or if Gerald was known to own or use firearms, but it doesn't appear that they found anything incriminating that could lead to an arrest for murder, because that didn't happen.

But he was sentenced for something else. Police arrested Gerald for violating the restraining order in place when he approached Deborah's daughter in a bowling alley. It's a little unclear when exactly he violated that order, but the violation charge was considered a misdemeanor, so Gerald ended up quickly being able to post bail and go home. Investigators were pretty sure that answers as to what happened to Deborah lay with Gerald. But that didn't mean they weren't open to exploring other possibilities when they were at a standstill with him. We always make sure we also get tunnel vision because even if she's going through something

family-wise, you don't want to focus on one person because you don't know what happened that night. They could have been just a random, she met some guy or met some woman and just randomly something nefarious happened, or it's been an ongoing issue and it's been building up. So you'll never want to focus just on one person. You always want to keep your eyes, I guess, wide open, especially if your evidence is not exactly pointing at one person. Anybody and everybody having to do with her, anybody in the area can be a suspect. It sounds like Debra grew up in Citrus County, so she knew a lot of people in the area, a lifetime of connections, and any of those people could be potential suspects in this case.

So investigators did their best to track down and speak with all of them. She knew a lot of people, so anybody that had contact with her is a suspect. Some of the evidence we had wasn't enough to get exactly just on one person. So that's some of our challenges. I'm sure somebody out there knows exactly what happened, but you also get a lot of third-party information that we hear that we have to chase down. So we're spending just as much time on that as we do as first person knowledge. And you had a lot of allegations that just weren't true as well. So you get tips to come in and said, she suppose he was hanging out with this guy or she was hanging out with this female and she was at the bar with this

person. And in most of that stuff, you spend a lot of time chasing it down. And chase it down. They did. Day by day, they're doing investigations, doing interviews, driving all over the place, going from one end of the county to the next county over to several other counties, meeting with specialists. Cell phones back then were just coming along where we could get data out of them. So they were working with specialists at that point trying to get more data out of it. Many kinds of cell phones, we still had landlines were very common back then. So we're checking landlines, the bars, they freak us out like that. So they worked very hard and

diligently the entire investigation until they had to make it a cold case. — Names of those spoken to, or who might have popped up as an alternate person of interest along the way, are part of all of the things that the department is not releasing. But everything indicates that when all was said and done, Gerald was the only one whose name made it onto the suspect list, but then never fell off. Months went by and though their suspicions grew, they never had enough to arrest Gerald.

But that didn't exactly mean that he was staying out of trouble. On December 10th of 2002, according to reporting by the Tampa Bay Times, Gerald Owens was arrested for driving under the influence, and he was accused by police of hitting three cars in a Walmart parking lot with his Lincoln. Because of that, Gerald stayed behind bars for 10 days before making bail. Now, I don't know if police took advantage of him being back in custody to question him

more about Debra's murder. Surprise, they won't say. But I know Deborah's mom, Sue Whitman, took advantage of it, and she went and confronted him. According to that same Tampa Bay Times article, Sue showed up at one of Gerald's court hearings with a collage of photos of Deborah with black eyes and bruises on her face. Sue told the judge, quote, she was used as a punching bag, end quote. Sue is a great reminder that you don't ever underestimate

a mother trying to get justice for her child. Sue told the Times back then that she had not heard any updates from police and that she was hoping that they would find a way to keep Gerald behind bars. But that didn't happen. He was released on December 20th and Sue was left preparing for the holidays with a broken heart. Not just for her daughter, but for her son as well.

Deborah's brother Scott died by suicide just six months before Deborah had been murdered. In that same Tampa Bay Times article from Christmas Day 2002, Sue said, quote, it's going to be just terrible. I'm afraid that no matter what I do, it's going to be miserable, end quote. That same story detailed how police were focused on Deborah's husband, Gerald, as their number one suspect, but it didn't provide any updates. And I guess that's because there weren't any.

The case stalled and it didn't just stay cold for a year or two years. It stayed cold for 13 years. Until 2015, when, seemingly out of the was, we don't know. Again, Sergeant Holloway is not showing his cards. But the tips sparked their interest in the case again. So Sergeant Holloway, who was working in the Major Crimes Unit at the time, decided to start back at the beginning, to go back to where all this began and talk to the one person who could hold the key to this entire mystery and who was still suspect number one, Gerald Owens.

Now remember, the first time around, this guy was not interested in helping. But 13 years had gone by, and the dude was now in his late 70s. And Sergeant Holloway hoped that maybe a new face, not the same one who'd hounded him before, would make Gerald a little more at ease. So he went in with a softer approach. I was very open about it. I was like, I don't know anything about the case. I'm just getting into it. And I see you weren't interviewed that well or didn't have any kind of interview done.

So he was like, I had nothing to hide. I just did it back then. I was going through a lot with her and they were already just thinking it was me because of our relationship. So he says they were just putting it around me. I wasn't going to say anything because no matter what I said, it was going to be turned around to make it look like I did something he's alleging he didn't do. But he didn't just say, nope, not me and close the door in Sergeant Holloway's face. He really opened up.

He thought maybe there was a chance he could give some of the stuff he wanted to say before without them trying to turn it back on him. He knew the lifestyle he lived wasn't the best, wasn't upstanding citizen. He said he worked hard and they partied hard. That was pretty much what he said. He said they would work all day long out in the sun, they'd mow, they'd do fencing, they would do whatever kind of job they could get in that type of work. And he said from that night, they had their choice what they used for party favors. And so that's pretty much what they spent their money on. That was consistent with what we had back then. Of course, he denied doing anything wrong. But at the same time, he made some of the missions, other stuff he did from their past. and admissions, other stuff he did from their past." The other stuff Sergeant Holloway is referring to is the domestic abuse he inflicted on Deborah.

So after an hour, Sergeant Holloway left without a confession or anything incriminating, but feeling like Gerald had been pretty open and honest. Although he appeared to be a little vague on one critical detail. Where he was around the time Debra was murdered. Here's Sergeant Holloway explaining what Gerald told him. So, he gave an alibi, stays with a friend, he was doing yard work. Gerald had a landscaping business. It's unclear if he was implying that he was working the whole time or something else,

but there was a several day window after Debra filed that complaint at the courthouse that she was most likely murdered, so this guy couldn't have been doing yard work the entire time, day and night. But that's all Sergeant Holloway was able to get from him. And that just left the investigative team exactly where they were before, with nothing. Over the years, the team would send what evidence they had off for testing with the hope that the technology would continue to improve and give them a break in their case. We'd sent, I believe, some stuff off in 2017.

We reevaluated almost everything. After so many years, we're allowed to resend stuff off. That's the last time anything was tested, with nothing moving the needle, leaving this case cold to this very day. And while Sergeant Holloway hopes further testing and technological advances could still crack this case, he knows that there are people out there who might be the real key, and now might be the perfect time for them to come forward. Because Gerald Owens is no longer alive.

And while in some regards, having your number one suspect die might make solving this case more complicated, in other regards, it makes it easier. It would be nice if some of the people that may have known who the suspect is, whether it had been Gerald or another suspect, that it may have passed away. That if they knew for sure they did it, come forward. You're not changing anything. They passed away. You're not really writing them out anymore.

Deborah Owens still has a daughter out there who has no idea who murdered her mom. And the good news for her is that it doesn't sound like Sergeant Holloway has any plans to give up on this case or any others in his department that he might still be investigating. And he recognizes the importance of telling each of their stories to the world. We're always trying to work on a case. We want them solved. We don't want them unsolved.

We would like to get closure for the family. And that's our end goal, is to get closure and get a suspect in jail. And if the suspect passed away, at least get that part of the closure saying, we know who did it and we can close that case at that point as well. We don't get any kind of bonuses for closing case other than personal bonus. We get the enjoyment of saying, hey, we close this case.

And sometimes it just takes one little thing that we didn't have that we were missing the entire time, which something like these broadcasts do help with that. I mentioned earlier that at the time Deborah Owens was murdered, she was staying in a domestic violence shelter. And that should tell you everything you need to know. This woman had been through hell. Whether Gerald murdered her or not remains to be seen. He was never charged.

But the only way we'll ever know is if someone out there steps up and helps solve this case. The Citrus County Sheriff's Office is looking for anyone who met with Deborah Owens between September 25th and September 28th of 2002 in Citrus County, Florida. Or if you're anyone who knows anything about her murder, please contact the Citrus County Sheriff's Office Major Crimes Unit at 352-249-2790. Or you can anonymously report information through Crime Stoppers of Citrus County at 888-269-8477. And if you or someone you know is a victim of domestic violence, know that help is out there. You can contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233 or text START to 88788.

The Deck is an AudioChuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com. So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve? Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo