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Uninvited guest, sans pants, surprises couple at home

The couple say a partly naked, mud-mired, intoxicated woman mistakes their home for hers.

By THOMAS LAKE
Published August 9, 2006

MOON LAKE - Cecil and Denise Allred's Sunday night began without incident. They ate dinner at KFC. They returned home to Randee Road. He stepped outside to feed chicken scraps to the cats.

Then he saw the body.

There in the mud a few feet from the house, someone lay in a fetal position. Pants and underwear were pulled down to the ankles. The county had seen six murders in the previous five weeks, and Cecil Allred feared the worst.

"Don't go out there," he told his wife. "Call the sheriff."

When Allred, a 51-year-old retired mason, went back outside for further investigation, the body tried to stand up.

Not dead, he concluded.

A live woman.

Partly undressed.

Fully intoxicated.

"I wasn't about to touch the lady," he would say later. "I guess she was going to the restroom, I don't know."

As best he can remember, their conversation went like this:

She: "I live here."

He: "No you don't. You need to get up and leave."

As they waited for the deputies, the Allreds stayed in the house. The woman eventually pulled her pants up and commenced to bang on the front door. By then they had locked it.

"We were just laughing, mostly," Cecil Allred said.

Sheriff's deputies arrived at 8:45 p.m. They identified the woman as Jacquilin Leeper, 52, who lives on Marigold Drive, less than a mile away.

According to his report, the deputy made several offers to drive Leeper home. She refused.

"She became belligerent and swung at me," Deputy Clifford Baltzer wrote.

So he drove her somewhere else: the Land O' Lakes jail. She was charged with disorderly intoxication in a public place. She went free Monday on $250 bail.

Leeper, who has several prior arrests involving drugs and alcohol, refused to tell a reporter how she arrived in the position where Allred found her.

"I'll talk to the judge," she said.

Denise Allred said that in more than 20 years on Randee Road, she has never seen anything so strange.

"The last thing you expect," she said, "is to go out your door, go to the side of your house and find a naked woman."

Thomas Lake can be reached at tlake@sptimes.com or 727 869-6245.

[Last modified August 9, 2006, 07:20:24]