Читать книгу Jewels On Tiger Island - Catherine Pickren - Страница 9

Tiger Island, Florida

John called 911 on his cell phone and told the Nassau County Sheriff’s Office dispatcher what they had uncovered on Tiger Island. Sheriff Earl Benson and Sergeant Joe Haddock- both gray-haired, medium in height, and in their early fifties-, arrived first, about thirty minutes after their call, and introduced themselves. The two of them had been eating a late lunch at Bret’s Restaurant when they got the call. The sheriff said he always kept his skiff tied up at Charley Smith’s Seafood House on Front Street.

Other members of the Sheriff’s Office, Fernandina Beach City Police, the coroner, and homicide and crime scene detectives arrived sporadically on the island forty-five minutes to two hours later. They put the yellow crime scene tape around the site of the buried body and began the excavation process making sure they carefully preserved all DNA and ID evidence. From what they observed, the detectives said the body was female, age approximately 20-25. The body was about twenty percent decomposed, but it was still clothed.

John, Mary, Lucy, and Logan stood around and watched the excavation process and noticed that the perpetrator forgot to take off a gold Timex watch, a thin silver necklace with half of a heart-shape design engraved with a bird’s wing, as well as a silver toe ring on the right foot of the victim. There wasn’t any I.D., money, or credit cards on the victim, but from what they observed, investigators did not think robbery was the killer’s motive. Rape, however, was still in question. Even though the body was badly decomposed, the clothes- dirty and disheveled, but somewhat intact- were still on the body. Oddly, there didn’t appear to be any blood on the victim. Hopefully, the investigators would get lucky and be able to find out who did this to this young adult.

Since the coroner, who was affiliated with Oxley-Heard Funeral Home, pronounced the body “dead” at the scene, the body was carefully placed in a plastic body-bag and transported by the Fernandina Police boat to the docks in front of Bret’s Restaurant. From there, the body was transported to the basement morgue of the Nassau Baptist Hospital in Fernandina Beach, Florida. A pathologist on the staff at the Nassau Baptist Hospital would be conducting an autopsy of the corpse.