[2016] In Colder Blood by JT Hunter

Author:JT Hunter [Hunter, JT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B01LWX0XNL
Publisher: RJ Parker Publishing
Published: 2016-09-18T06:00:00+00:00

Sheriff Ross Boyer pointing to bloody boot imprint

Sheriff's deputies and detectives standing over Walkers' bodies

Trail of blood leading to Debbie Walker's body

Booking photo of Dick Hickock after his arrest

Booking photo of Perry Smith after his arrest

Chapter 6: New Blood, Renewed Direction

Sarasota County Sheriff Ross Boyer died in 1973. The twenty-year lawman who witnessed firsthand the brutal crime scene and bloodied bodies of Cliff and Christine and their two young children had handled many key aspects of the early investigation himself. Just prior to his death, Boyer told his wife that the one thing he wished he could have accomplished with his life was solving the Walker case.

*****

In 1981, someone else with a vested interest in identifying the killer took over the investigation. Fifty-year-old Ron Albritton, a distant cousin to Cliff Walker who joined the department a few years after Boyer’s death and worked his way up to detective, presided over periodic spurts of investigative activity in the frequently inactive cold case for the next two decades.

*****

On August 5, 1994, an anonymous caller left a voice message on the answering machine of a Sheriff’s Office detective. The caller advised that she wanted to provide information about a “possible murder that occurred in Osprey, Florida, many years ago,” but she was scared and too frightened to give her name or phone number. She explained that she worked as a bartender in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, and that during her work shift the previous night, one of her regular customers, a “white male in his 60s” inexplicably began to cry while talking to her. She asked him why he was crying, and he told her that when he was a young man he had killed “some people” in Osprey, Florida. He said that Osprey was near Tampa and he mentioned the name “Walker”.

The caller said that she thought the customer was a “gun buff” who did odd jobs around town. She said she would get the name and vehicle tag number of the customer’s car and then call back after 3:00 p.m. on August 9 with the information. However, she never contacted the Sheriff’s Office again, and subsequent attempts to track her down were unsuccessful. Even a series of stories about the anonymous call, requesting the public’s help in identifying the caller, which were printed in Pennsylvania newspapers at the urging of the Sarasota Sheriff’s Office, failed to generate any new information. The unnamed caller and her remorseful unknown customer faded back into anonymity.

Curtis McCall, Christine Walker’s high school boyfriend who failed a polygraph question asking if he withheld any information about the Walker murders, would have been 56 years old at the time of the anonymous tipster’s call.

*****

Detective Albritton’s tenure in charge of the Walker case file included an important period of activity when new DNA samples were provided to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for analysis. The process generated a DNA profile for Christine’s attacker in 2004, which eventually eliminated more than thirty top suspects, including Elbert Walker and Don McLeod, whose DNA did not match the suspect DNA profile attributed to Christine’s killer.

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