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Forty years later, a triple murder still haunts Tallahassee

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published November 12, 2006

TALLAHASSEE - For those who lived in Tallahassee then, 1966 is still remembered as the year that changed everything.

That was the year once-open doors were locked, the pastor of one of the city's largest churches became a murder suspect and an entire lake was drained for evidence. Halloween was nearly canceled.

Women filled water guns with ammonia to better fight off an attacker. Children were kept home at night. And police wandered the streets with German shepherds, looking for the killers who hog-tied and savagely murdered a family.

Forty years ago on Oct. 22, while many residents were watching Florida State University and Mississippi State play football, someone attacked Robert Sims, his wife, Helen, and their daughter in their modest brick house on a cul-de-sac.

All three were bound, their mouths stuffed with stockings. The two adults were blindfolded. Robert Sims, 42, a top official with the state Education Department, was shot in the head. Helen Sims, 34, was shot twice in the head and once in the leg. Joy, 12, was stabbed six times, then shot in the head. Her panties were found pulled down, and there was evidence that she was molested.

Their bodies were discovered by Joy's older sister, who with another sibling had been babysitting for families who went to the football game. Robert Sims and Joy Sims died at the scene. Helen Sims lay in a coma for nine days before dying.

"I've seen some terrible things in 45-plus years of law enforcement," said Leon County Sheriff Larry Campbell, who was a 24-year-old deputy on duty that night. "But I can see Joy's eyes as clear today as I sit here talking to you."

More than 40 years later, the savage murders of the Sims family remain officially unsolved despite a massive investigation that has been reopened several times over the years. Campbell has two prime suspects, including one person he says has a fondness for necrophilia. But he says there's not enough evidence for a conviction.

The impact of the crime in this town remains. While many people outside Tallahassee know about the brutal killings at an FSU sorority house by serial killer Ted Bundy in 1978, longtime residents point to the Sims murders as the moment when Tallahassee lost its innocence.

"We just woke up one morning in Tallahassee and we were part of an evil world," said Rocky Bevis, who was 16 at the time and was one of the first at the crime scene because his father ran a funeral home and ambulance service. "It's disturbing to go to sleep knowing someone is still out there."

The killings prompted a frenzy that seized the entire county - which had fewer than 100,000 residents at the time - and reverberated in the corridors of the Capitol, where Gov. Haydon Burns had state government kick in $5,000 in reward money for any evidence.

As word spread the Sunday following the killings, there was a run on hardware stores as Tallahassee residents bought guns, knives and locks, and women signed up for judo classes.

City officials set up a "prowler squad" of officers with dogs to patrol streets at night.

"I was so scared, I didn't let the kids out to play," said Kalliopi Joanos, now 71, who still lives in the house that backs up to the Sims' home.

Fueling the near hysteria was the admission by police that they had "no significant clues, no leads and no motives." There was no forced entry, no signs of robbery or even a struggle. While investigators poured over the crime scene and lifted nearly 1,000 fingerprints, there was nothing that led them to the killers. The murder weapons were never found.

"It would lead you to believe it was pretty well thought out," said Bevis, who helped his father cut the ropes that bound the victims. "It wasn't something spur of the moment where someone said 'Let's go kill three people.' "

Police combed through a thatch of woods behind the Sims house and eventually made the decision to drain a small lake that sat at the bottom of a hill a few hundred yards away. But a search of the muck bottom turned up nothing. A call to other law-enforcement agencies led one Kansas detective to tell Leon County authorities about the eerie similarities to the murder of the Clutter family - the topic of In Cold Blood, the Truman Capote book published a year earlier.

The lack of success fed wild rumors and cast a cloud of suspicion over one man: C.A. Roberts, pastor of the First Baptist Church, one of the city's oldest and most prestigious churches. Helen Sims had worked as a church secretary and her family was deeply involved with the church.

Investigators probed deeply into Roberts' comings and goings and into his interactions with parishioners.

Roberts, however, had an alibi: As team chaplain, he was at the FSU football game - a fact verified by investigators who scanned the game film.

Roberts was killed years later in a traffic accident. The probing into his life prompted him to step down as pastor within months of the murders.

Henry Cabbage, a local writer who is working on a book on the murders, obtained a video showing Campbell and another detective interrogating a woman in 1987. The woman, who now lives in Jacksonville, had a boyfriend who lived near the Sims family. A summary of the interviews says that she remembers going to the Sims' house that night but can't remember any details.

The woman's boyfriend, whom she later married and then divorced, told detectives in 1989 that he had nothing to do with the murders. The man, who now lives in St. Petersburg, theorized that "gangsters" killed the family.

Campbell concedes that barring a confession the murder will remain unsolved.

"I've done everything I think I can do," he said. "The big frustration is that I feel very confident that I know who did it."

[Last modified November 12, 2006, 00:32:47]