Unsolved case won’t fade away
It was a cool, sunny Friday afternoon in St. Joseph when 12-year-old Jennifer Odom got off her school bus.
By sundown, a distinct chill had spread across the remote East Pasco community.
Jennifer didn’t make it home.
Family, friends and neighbors were in a panic the night of Feb. 19, 1993.
Jennifer’s mother stayed home and waited by the window. Search parties numbering in the hundreds combed the woods in all directions.
Six days later came the devastating discovery. The girl’s body was found in neighboring Hernando County. Jennifer’s murder has gone unsolved for 19 years. It remains a source of frustration, futility and emotional pain.
Tips still get called in to law enforcement. Leads get checked. Every so often, evidence still gets sent to a lab. Technologies in forensic science keep improving. Hope doesn’t fade.
Detectives won’t call it a cold case. That implies it’s not being worked. Hundreds of eyes have glanced at thousands of reports.
Jennifer has never been forgotten.
“I don’t remember a time when the Odom case was shelved,” said Hernando County Sheriff’s Detective Jim Boylan, who started with the agency in 1991 and was an undercover vice deputy the year Jennifer was killed.
He handles the bulk of the agency’s unsolved cases.
Boylan sees Jennifer’s smile every day at work. He keeps two of her photographs tacked on a board above his desk. His predecessor, who retired in 2007, did the same.
Boylan regularly speaks to Jennifer’s mother and stepfather. He visits her gravesite, located four-fifths of a mile from where she was abducted.
The honor roll student and water-skiing enthusiast stepped off the bus after it stopped along Jim Denny Road in rural Pasco County. Her walk home was the length of about two football fields. Her friends from inside the bus watched her feet hit the dirt road.
Some of them noticed a white and blue pickup creep toward her.
The bus continued down the road and the students lost sight of Jennifer and the truck.
Jennifer’s body was found Feb. 25, 1993 near an orange grove along the south side of Powell Road in Spring Lake.
Authorities didn’t release a lot of details and they still haven’t. As long as the case remains open, they intend to keep most of the information to themselves.
“We can’t talk about that,” said Sheriff Al Nienhuis, who sat down with a reporter earlier this month and went over a list of more than 30 questions that were submitted in advance about the case.
“We’re not going to talk about that at all for obvious reasons,” he said when he got to the question about the girl’s cause of death.
Prior news reports revealed Jennifer died from a blow to the head.
The sheriff and his detectives were asked whether students on the school bus, passersby or other potential witnesses were shown photographs of potential suspects.
“We’re not going to talk about a lot of specifics there,” Nienhuis said.
Boylan said a composite sketch was never drawn. Those who saw the truck only noticed the driver was a male. They couldn’t provide further details.
One piece of information the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office released years ago was a detailed description of the pickup – the last image Jennifer’s classmates saw before her disappearance.
It was a 1970s or 1980s model pickup with light blue paint. It was faded, dirty and in shoddy condition. The license plate was damaged. The truck had two side-view mirrors, a trailer hitch and might have been missing a rear hubcap. It could have been a General Motors truck, but was almost certainly American made, according to news reports.
While Nienhuis wouldn’t confirm it, it was reported in the past that some trucks fitting the above description were searched, photographed and swabbed.
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Jennifer was abducted in Pasco and slain in Hernando County.
Manpower from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement was requested. The same went for the FBI.
In 1993, Hernando saw 13 murders, including five by the hands of serial killer Mike Kaprat. Detectives who worked the Kaprat case also investigated Jennifer’s death.
The calls made to the sheriff’s office and the statements recorded by investigators quickly reached the thousands. No other case fills more binders and occupies more bookcase space at the sheriff’s office. None comes close.
Nobody interviewed about the case made excuses about why it has gone unsolved for so long. Nobody feels the detectives who worked it back then, some of whom are still with the agency, were too overwhelmed, under qualified or distracted.
“There are always challenges,” said Boylan. “I looked at some of the ways we documented the leads and I was actually pretty impressed with some of the technologies we used then. There were a lot of them coming in, but they were all documented so (mistakes) would not happen.
“We have to deal with the cards that we’ve been dealt,” he said. “You can’t plan a murder investigation. You have to work with what you’re given and that makes any murder investigation a challenge.”
Jennifer’s body was found by a couple along a horse trail that looped south along Powell – less than a mile west of Cedar Lane. People regularly walked it. Sometimes people dumped trash there. Others wandered through the woods like scavengers, picking up scrap metal, cans or anything recyclable.
More than 1 inch of rain fell from the time Jennifer was abducted until her body was found. The wet conditions likely washed away most traces of evidence.
Investigators said she was killed close to where her body was found and within a day of when she was kidnapped.
“All leads have been taken to their logical conclusion,” Nienhuis said. “We don’t let any of them hang.”
Assistant State Attorney Ric Ridgway, who has prosecuted numerous child killers during his career, said certain cases never get cast aside. Oftentimes law enforcement places almost an extreme emphasis on crimes against children. It’s unfathomable for detectives to disconnect emotionally and move onto something else.
“It’s not unsolved for a lack of effort that’s for sure,” Ridgway said. “In this case, (the sheriff’s office) was not short-staffed. If they had been, they would’ve shortened something else and focused on this. This case would never have been put in the backseat. Whenever there is a kid killed or a cop killed, everything gets pulled out full bore.”
Ray Williamson is a retired U.S. Army military police officer and private investigator. He has been a volunteer with the sheriff’s office’s major case unit for about 18 months. Of the 680 hours he has volunteered, roughly 500 have been devoted to The Odom case.
“You really want to see these get solved,” Williamson said.
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Jennifer’s family confirmed her identity after then-Pasco Sheriff Lee Cannon showed them photographs of the girl’s jewelry. She was wearing two rings and a gold necklace with two charms.
Cannon, who had been sheriff for only a few weeks, said the sights, sounds and reactions from Feb. 25, 1993 were singed into his memory.
“It was very somber,” he said. “I was just trying to wrap my mind around what was going on. It was extremely, extremely, extremely difficult. There’s no other way to describe it.”
Media from across Tampa converged on Powell Road. The stress was palpable, especially among deputies.
Former Hernando County Commissioner Tony Mosca said he frequently thinks about that day. He drove to the scene after hearing from a friend a body had been found. Mosca, along with hundreds of others, waited for several hours before Cannon and Hernando County Sheriff Thomas Mylander confirmed what everyone had suspected. The body was Jennifer’s.
Mosca told reporters at the time he was amazed at how secretive deputies were with each other that afternoon. Speculation was disallowed. Everyone was sullen and serious. The more they held back, the more the media grew agitated.
Mosca had never witnessed anything like it before or since. Once the identity of the body was confirmed, information slowly began to trickle.
“They asked me if I wanted to go to the scene,” Mosca said. “I declined.”
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Many of Jennifer’s belongings had remained missing. Detectives were hoping they would turn up somehow, either in the killer’s possession or somewhere close to the scene of the crime.
A couple on the prowl for scrap metal in a rural area northeast of Weeki Wachee came upon Jennifer’s missing clarinet case and book bag.
The media frenzy began again.
The distance between where Jennifer was killed and where her clarinet was found was about 18 miles. It was about 30 miles from Jennifer’s old bus stop. Detectives surmised the culprit had inherent knowledge of the region’s rural landscape.
A fingerprint was found inside the book bag. It didn’t match Jennifer or her family. So far, it hasn’t matched anyone.
A DNA sample from the clarinet case was sent to an FBI lab as recently as 2009, according to the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office.
Nienhuis and Boylan conveyed optimism about the investigation. There is the advancement in DNA technology to consider. It’s also possible someone might finally confess or somebody else might hear or see something suspicious – even after all this time, he said.
“I don’t think you ever reach a dead-end,” Nienhuis said. “There is always something you can do.”
Ridgway’s office prosecuted a case 20 years ago in Marion County involving two men who had killed a couple inside an antiques store.
Somebody walked into an FBI office in Las Vegas and told agents his girlfriend’s husband had old statues with dried blood on them. The investigation was turned on its head and eventually two men were arrested and convicted of double murder and sentenced to life in prison.
“It can be something like that or it can be a DNA event that breaks a case,” Ridgway said. “You just don’t know.”
Ridgway was part of the prosecutorial team that presented evidence to a Hernando grand jury in 1998. It centered on the Odom case. The defendant was not indicted.
Ridgway said jurors made the right choice. His witness’ story kept changing.
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Jennifer’s mother and stepfather, Clark and Renee Converse, have agreed in the past to be interviewed for news stories. Renee Converse most recently was interviewed by a Tampa news station last year.
A Hernando Today reporter left three messages with the couple. All of them went unreturned. The same reporter tried contacting Jennifer’s best friend, Michelle Sample. She, too, declined to answer.
Those close to the case said the couple’s willingness to be interviewed gets chipped away with every story that gets printed or aired. Their hopes are lifted leading up to it, but after some days and weeks go by without a resolution, they feel emotionally deflated.
Boylan said the family has fears about the psychological toll the case could have on them if and when it is solved. First comes an arrest and then comes the media attention. A year or two goes by with more court hearings and then comes the trial, which would be accompanied by more media attention.
“If the case gets solved, it kind of starts all over again for Jennifer’s family,” said Boylan. “It’s bittersweet. It would be very hard for them. You can tell … Part of them wants it solved and the other part is not looking forward to going through that.”
Emotions ran high 19 years ago. Grief counselors were assigned to schools throughout Pasco and Hernando counties after the news broke about Jennifer’s death.
Some of her classmates at Weightman Middle School were immediately enrolled in after-school day care. Their parents wouldn’t let them ride buses any longer.
Theories have swirled about who the killer might be. Some have guessed he was known by the family. Others think he scoped the bus stop in the days and weeks prior to the murder.
Some have suggested there are two killers. Boylan hasn’t ruled that out, but said murderers who work solo have better odds of eluding arrest. They can control what they say, but not what accomplices say. When people talk, they usually get caught.
Tips don’t always get sent directly to Hernando. The investigation started in Pasco. Both sheriff’s office websites have Jennifer listed on the “unsolved” cases list.
That word was purposely chosen over “cold.” The case has never gone cold, detectives said.
“The whole experience was so difficult,” said Cannon, who lost his re-election bid in 2000. “Everybody in the world seemed to be involved in that case. They did everything they possibly could do. We just couldn’t get anything to gel, but that doesn’t mean it’s over.”
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