The Deck - Theresa Dusevitch (Queen of Diamonds, Florida)

Episode Date: January 7, 2026

Our card this week is Theresa Dusevitch, the Queen of Diamonds from Florida. For 50 years, Theresa Dusevitch’s case was intrinsically tied to Debra Espey’s murder. Both women were 19 years old when they were killed back in 1973, just eight months apart. There were other similarities, too: Both women were found nude from the waist down, their shirts pulled up, hands over their heads, with head wounds as their cause of death. The wooded area where each young woman was found was just three miles apart in and near a town, ironically enough, named Niceville, Florida. But at the end of  2025, Debra Epsey’s case was solved, and her killer turned out to be an acquaintance of hers, Dennis Murphy. In learning that Dennis killed Debra, law enforcement was able to conclude through DNA that he did not kill Theresa–meaning all the connections that seemed to be linked were just a coincidence. So now, detectives are looking at Theresa’s case with new eyes. And with the momentum of one 1973 cold case solved under their belt, they’re hoping you might help them get another.If you know anything about the murder of Theresa Dusevitch on November 23, 1973, please call the Emerald Coast Crime Stoppers at 850-836-TIPS (8477) or submit an anonymous tip at emeraldcoastcrimestoppers.com. View source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/theresa-dusevitchLet us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media.Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuckFacebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllcTo support Season of Justice and learn more, please visit seasonofjustice.org.The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers. Instagram: @ashleyflowersTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieTwitter: @Ash_FlowersFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AFText Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more!  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Our card this week is Teresa Ducevich, the Queen of Diamonds from Florida. For 50 years, Teresa Ducevich's case was intrinsically tied to another murder, that of Deborah Espy. Both women were 19 years old when they were killed eight months apart back in 1973. Both women were found nude from the waist down, their shirts pulled up, hands over their head, with head wounds. as their cause of death. Deborah's was blunt force trauma and Teresa's a gunshot wound. And the wooded areas where each young woman were found were just three miles apart, both near a town called, ironically enough, Niceville, Florida.

But just last year, in 2025, Deborah Espy's case was solved. We've covered it in a past episode. Now, her killer turned out to be an acquaintance of hers, who we originally identified by the pseudonym Dawn. But now we can reveal his real name, Dennis Murphy. He's the man who police had suspected from the beginning. But in learning that Dennis killed Deborah, they were able to conclude that he did not kill Teresa. And they did that through DNA testing that directly compared Dennis' DNA to a sample found on Teresa's clothing.

Meaning, all the connections that seemed so linked were just coincidence. So now, detectives are looking at Teresa's case with new eyes. And with the momentum of one 1973 cold case solved under their belt, they're hoping that you might help them get another. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. On the afternoon, on the afternoon of November 21st, 1973, deputies from the Okalusa County Sheriff's Office, arrived at a wooded area near the Rocky Bayou County Country Club. That's where they found the remains of Teresa Ducevich.

The young woman had been shot in the head and was on her back with her arms stretched above her. Teresa's remains were in what looked to be a shallow grave about 75 feet off the road. Her hip-hugger blue jeans were pulled down and her white-knit top was pulled around her neck. In addition to the clothes found on Teresa, there was a black coat and a pair of pink underwear found closer to the road. And right around her body was a Coke bottle. a pack of cigarettes, and a portable record player with the initials RA on it. That portable record player was always the standout because it never matched any initials for Teresa or people in her circle.

And it was the outlier when connecting the case to Deborah for all those years because even their main suspect there, Dennis, didn't have connections to an RA as far as they could tell. So maybe that was the first sign that this case wasn't connected to Debra. Dennis. Another was that Deborah and Teresa didn't run in the same circles or even go to the same places. While Deborah had a very structured routine, lived with her family, and went to a local college campus that she would later go missing from, Teresa was a bit more of a drifter. No one flagged her absence to police before she was found dead. And best they'd been able to tell, Teresa had last been seen at the Matador Club, where she often hung out. Or as Nicole, the Crime Stoppers

coordinator explains. It is a gentleman's club in the area in Valparaiso. Here's the thing about these cases that date back to the 70s. Nothing is ever the same. Family on drugstores become condos. Strip malls now stand where there was once a playground. You get the idea. But when our reporter went to find out anything she could about this case,

she found out that the Matador Club was still there. It was like a time warp to the 70s. There was a busted old limo in the back, a brick and stone facade, and, of course, no windows to speak of. I mean, you could practically smell the cigarette smoke and hear Leonard Skinner just looking at the place. And it may have been a relic to the disco era, but it allowed for us to put eyes on the exact location that Teresa was last seen in. Here is the lead investigator on Teresa's case, Kelly Henderson. Several witnesses that were patrons and or employees of the Matador said that they saw her on the night of the 20th. A lot of discrepancies between the times.

You know, some say it was 8 p.m. Some say it was 10 p.m., but sometime between, I would say, 8 and 11, she was seen at the Matador Club on the night of the 20th. There was another warning sign to suggest Deborah and Teresa's cases weren't connected. though this one just adds a complicated layer. And that's because it factors in an entirely new person. Six months after Teresa's murder, on May 3rd, 1974, a 15-year-old girl accepted a ride from a stranger in the same area, about 12 miles from where Teresa was found.

She described the driver as a black man, 40 to 50 years old, driving a dark-colored, full-sized car. Now, she went on to say that the stranger solicited her for sex, and so she tried to get out of the car. She described jumping from the vehicle and being shot in the butt as the shooter fled. Now, the bullet exited through her thigh but ended up being located and analyzed

after the girl was able to get help and report her attack. She survived. And here's the wild part. The analysis of the bullet determined that it was fired from the same gun that killed Teresa Ducevich. They never found the actual weapon

or the shooter. Though there was a guy that they arrested and released. It was like this whole mix-up, and he really is not connected. But even with that misstep, the facts of the case remained. Those are a match for sure, and they were re-examined more recently, and are confirmed to be a match to have been fired from the same weapon. If you listened to our episode on Deborah Espy,

as recently as 2024, the question was still being raised as to whether all of these cases were connected. Deborah and Teresa, Teresa and this other young woman, but with one link broken, it's all being called into question now. Though this theory about how the 15-year-old might be connected or not has persisted for a long time. My gut is, it was a firearm that the male, it's one that he acquired after Teresa's, is my gut feeling. I don't believe that he's the one that committed the murder on Teresa,

but I do believe that we definitely need to further. investigate that in a reverse way to be able to track down who added fire to him. So starting over in Teresa Ducevich's case meant truly going back to the beginning because maybe the truth of what happened to her lies somewhere in the evidence and old reports and the names that still stand out in some of them. The case file is full of the usual suspects, people like Teresa's ex-boyfriend, Ernest Wayne Grover. The two of them were known to have a pretty diabolical relationship, and he admitted to seeing her the day before she went missing. But Investigator Henderson could see that they had ruled him out fairly quickly.

They did a consensual search of his residence where they took evidence. They did a consensual search of his vehicle where they took evidence. and then once a lot of that came back, he did take a polygraph, he did pass the polygraph. Henderson could also tell from old case files that police back in the first few days and weeks of the investigation ruled out another man, a neighbor named Richard McMahon. It seemed like they just briefly looked at him

because he had taken a walk with Teresa on the evening of the 20th, the day she was last seen. But it was before she was seen at the Matador Club, so there was nothing really interesting there. What was interesting was a report from a good friend of Teresa's who told police that on November 9th, this is about 12 days before Teresa was found, she had taken a drive with a guy named Harvey Dwayne Carnelly. She said that he told her he wanted to, quote, show her a pretty spot. So this Harvey guy drove her out toward the Rocky Bayou golf course and down a dirt road and parked.

Now, nothing wild happened. But when Teresa's friend later learned that this was in the exact same area where Teresa was found dead, that whole drive took on new meaning to her. Now, back in the 70s, police did talk to Harvey. According to reports, he stated that he last saw Teresa at none other than the Matador on November 18th, and that she had been with a young white guy that he didn't know who had long black hair and a black mustache. Now, even before Dennis Murphy had been ruled out, Investigator Henderson and Reader, one of her colleagues had actually interviewed Harvey in 2019 just to make sure they were checking

all their boxes. She said all those years later, he seemed pretty shifty, first stating that Teresa was a good friend, but then later saying that he only ever talked to her one time. He also said they went to school together and that he had no idea who would kill her. He had actually agreed to take a polygraph. However, he passed away like three days after the interview. you and before we could take the polygraph. Yeah.

He had medical issues, but by no means was he expected to pass away. So I wanted to research that a little bit more as well. You know, and law enforcement comes and talks to you about a 40-year-old case, and then three days later, you're dead. That's a little strange. Strange, yes, but a literal dead end. Not impossible to run down, but it was going to be hard. Plus, you know, Dennis.

So Investigator Henderson put Harvey's name on a short list of people to look further into should there be a change in direction in the case. But his name came below someone else's. A man who came up consistently throughout the police reports. Someone who will call Bobby. Bobby actually put himself on police's radar when he straight up approached a sergeant at the Val P shortly after Teresa was found. Police records note that he walked up cold and asked if police found who killed the ESP

girl. After they said no, Bobby stated, quote, I guess you know that I killed her, unquote. It was unclear in these reports if he was talking about Deborah or Teresa, but the report did say that Bobby was later interviewed at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, and admitted making statements about killing Teresa and Deborah. Bobby's statements continued to be all over the place. He admitted to seeing Teresa at 8 p.m. on the night she was murdered. And he said he picked her up while hitchhiking, but then later denied seeing her at all.

Now, back in 73, they searched his car and gave him a polygraph. Both came back looking sus. I mean, he failed the polygraph and police found blithe. blood in his car, but the blood ended up being from an animal when they tested it. So they circle back to him again in 2021. Bobby was still alive, but he wasn't admitting to anything anymore. And he also had a new story. Back in the day, he claimed that he was hanging out with his brother.

Now, he said that he was in the army at the time of Teresa's murder. Couldn't have done it. Except, that wasn't true. I mean, it was partly true. He was in the Army in 1973, but Bobby was actually on leave during the time of Sharisa's murder. When confronted with this, he said that he was out hunting with his brother at the time. Investigator Henderson says that they have not been able to corroborate this,

but she suspects that he wasn't actually hunting. So they continued to dig into him in 2021 by talking to Bobby's statement. stepson, who told investigators four key things. One, he told police that Bobby was violent. Two, Bobby had taught his family a nifty little trick. If you ever need to avoid detection of human blood, just put animal blood over it. Three, Bobby had an uncle who lived about 30 miles from where Teresa's body was found. And that uncle had the initials RA.

And four, he told Investigator Hendon, and her colleague that Bobby had a black friend from the military who could have been involved in the shooting of a 15-year-old girl that escaped. The stepson said that this guy's name was Crowley. Is that maybe a friend that Bobby could have offloaded a gun to? I mean, this would play right into Henderson's theory. But even after hearing this, in 2021, they still had those Dennis Murphy-did-it blinders on. So they didn't even try to track this Crowley fellow down.

And while police had interviewed that 15-year-old woman a few times right after she was shot, that was all. In fact, as far as Henderson knows, there has been no contact with that young woman by anyone in the department since May of 1974, which to me seems huge. Like she is still alive and could potentially provide the answers to so many questions. All of this is about to change. Blinders are off, and with Bobby looking like a promising suspect, this woman might be their key to solving Teresa's case. Henderson is in the process of reaching out to speak with her. But there is one more possible suspect that she's running down to,

someone who's always been treated as a witness, not a suspect, until now. This final lead has investigator Henderson going all the way back to the beginning of Teresa's case, back to the man who found her body and reported it to authorities. I'm going to call him Jay because he's a person of interest. It turns out there was a little bit more going on before he called law enforcement with the discovery of Teresa's remains. He had actually skipped out on work that day to play golf with a friend of his who was a judge and the judge's son.

He said that he found Teresa when he was on his way to the course, just driving by the nearby wooded area to get to the golf course. But get this, he didn't actually call police right away when he saw Teresa. Instead, he went to the golf club and corralled the two other men to come take a look at what he'd found. It wasn't until then that the police were radioed in. And really, there's nothing egregious about this. But what was odd was that in 1973, Jay said that he didn't know Teresa. Then, a year or two later, his story changed.

Investigator Henderson says that another reason she plans to speak with Jay is because he declined to take a polygraph on more than one occasion. And that, she said to our reporter Annie, Roderick Jones, struck her as odd. You know, if all you did was find the body, then why not do the polygraph and just rule yourself out? So I want to dig into that a little bit more, especially since he was so adamant that he didn't know her. And then, you know, a year or two later, he's inventing that, yeah, he knew her, that they would go out and do that. things as a group. He didn't ever claim that he had one-on-one relationship or one-on-one contact, but that he certainly knew who she was and had been around her in the past, which is just quite opposite of what he said when he first found her.

Yeah, that, that to me seems a little suspicious. Very suspicious, yeah. Okay, so that's someone else you want to look into. Absolutely. And there's one more thing that is suspicious about this guy. We know that Territus, Risa's cause of death was the gunshot wound. But there was also additional head trauma. And that detail mattered because of what Jay had been doing earlier that day. So there was blunt force trauma on the back of her head that appears to be from a round object

that was like a flat surface that didn't have any type of pattern on the wound to indicate, like, you know, like maybe the end of a golf club. Henderson believes that in order to solve this case, she can't have tunnel vision on one suspect, like what happened with Dennis Murphy. So she's striving to give equal attention to all leads, and she's prepared for any and all surprises, like the one that got thrown her way in 2022.

One of the first things Investigator Henderson did back in 2021 was retest a piece of promising old evidence, fingernail scrapings that had been taken during Teresa's autopsy. And they actually got a profile back that was good enough for CODIS. And by January 31st of 2022, they got a hit. Individual got in trouble and his DNA got put into CODIS. And then the female DNA that was under Teresa's fingernails came back as a relative to that. male, last name to Dunbar.

So we had a list of 17 females possible to be linked to that DNA. So me and then agencies, according to where they were living at the time, would go make contact with those females. This was the first that Henderson heard of the Dunbar's surname. And she made contact with all 17 of the women. And as far as she can tell, they don't connect to anyone she's looking at. Our reporter Annie asked investigator Henderson how she made sense of that evidence. So could this tell you, like, one, do you start looking for females or two, do you think like she got in an argument?

Like, what does this tell you? She was hot-headed, a little scrappy. So my initial guess is that she was probably involved in some type of altercation with another female. I'm not going to completely rule out that a female is not responsible, but it's not, to me, it's more likely. that a male is responsible for the actual murder of her, especially back then. You just didn't see it as much back then with females. So you have to look and take into consideration that it could be very well to be a female suspect and don't rule that out.

But my guess and my hopes is to find the female who maybe had an altercation with her a day or two prior. Yeah. And were there any female people of interest in this ever? No. I mean, they talk to them, you know, if they last saw or like the waitress at the Matador. But once they provide that information, then it appears that they just get moving on to other nails. Henderson is in the process of reaching out to Bobby again, along with that uncle whose initials are RA. She's also trying to make contact with Jay, who's been interviewed three times, but here's the kicker.

The last time was in March of 1974. Jay and Bobby are still alive. And while she already has a DNA sample from Bobby, and so far there are no links to Teresa on some of the items tested, she still needs to get a sample from Jay. So that's what's next. That and retesting more evidence in Teresa's case, stuff that got a look back in 2007 but hasn't gotten any more testing since. In 2007, it was re-examined and there is DNA, but we haven't been able to. positively identify that DNA. However, it has not been re-examined again. So I do believe that technology now we can re-examine it and possibly get a much better conclusion, and possibly link to somebody.

Her request to retest the portable record player, the coat, underwear, cigarettes, coke bottle, and fingernail scrapings are awaiting approval from the state lab now. When cases from 1973 land on my desk. I know there's going to be a challenge. A lot of people folded into this story are no longer with us. And sometimes people like Teresa, someone who wasn't anchored to a daily routine that would trigger fast alarms when she left home get lost in paperwork. But none of that makes her case less solvable or less urgent. An investigator Kelly Henderson knows that. It doesn't matter that this case is over 50 years old. Henderson is chasing down leads as if it happened yesterday. She's updating old police reports, creating timelines, and sending off samples for

DNA testing, just like she did for Deborah's case, which 52 years later she was able to close the books on. So if there's something that we learned from Deborah's case, it's that your tips matter. Here's our reporter Annie speaking with Nicole, the crime stoppers coordinator. Have you received tips from the deck episodes? We have. I believe we've done four or five cases with the deck, and we've gotten numerous tips following the release of each of those episodes, and some were very valuable to us. Listening to these episodes not only helps bring in tips, but Investigator Henderson says that it pushes them to devote more effort to old cases.

I'm curious, because I know oftentimes these cases that we cover are so old, and I know you have, like, you have a lot of cold cases, and you also have, like, regular cases. cases but I'm curious like does this ever like us reaching out to you does it ever kind of like not force you but it's like you know which one do you pick out of the pile right like if you don't have family calling you does it like kind of force you to like pick these things out and tear them apart again it puts the spark back in you know what I mean like the let's let's see what we could what movement we can make on this and and get justice you know for the victim and a little bit of closure for the living family. But yeah, it certainly lights that fire again.

And when it comes to Teresa's case, Nicole says this. So anyone who may have any information about Teresa Ducevich's murder can contact Emerald Coast Crime Stoppers. You'll be a 100% anonymous. We give you three simple and secure ways to do so. You can contact us at 863 tips 24 hours a day. Of course, you can go to our website, Emerald Coastcrimesopers.com and submit a web tip or the most popular way everybody is submitting tips nowadays and that is the P3Tips mobile application which you can find in your app

store. All three are 100% anonymous and you may even get a cash reward. The Deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. And to learn more about the deck in our advocacy work visit the Deckpodcast.com. I think Chuck would approve.