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What happened to Tracy McClelland?

In her 20s, a popular college student, studying to be a teacher. In her 30s, a body in a shallow grave. In the time between ...

By BEN MONTGOMERY
Published April 1, 2007

Tracy was a good mother when she was sober. Here she is on vacation in North Carolina with her three kids and niece Destiny, clockwise from right: Sara McClelland, now 12, Sergio Gonzalez, now 6, Destiny Wilson, also 6, and Emmalee McClelland, now 8.
	[Family photo (2005)]

ADVERTISEMENT [Times photo: Skip O'Rourke] A worker in the neighborhood found Tracy McClelland's body in a shallow grave in the Six Mile Creek section of Tampa. It took a call from her mother to help police identify the remains.

TAMPA - The buzzards picked at the pile for weeks, but nobody thought much of it.

A few of the boys at the Sweeping Company of Florida figured maybe someone had gutted a pig and dumped the carcass by the fence. Stranger things have happened in Six Mile Creek, a rough stretch east of downtown Tampa.

By March 6, Billy Clapp couldn't stand it. He climbed on a Bobcat and scooped at the dirt.

The soil shifted. Something emerged. Clapp jumped down.

The body's condition allowed police but a vague description: white female in her 20s or 30s, 5 feet 4, with brown hair and breast implants. Perhaps she was a prostitute or crack addict.

Ten miles east in Dover, inside a big house set between orange groves and strawberry fields, Janice Garvin worried.

Where was Tracy? Why hadn't she called?

Her daughter had so much potential. Tracy McClelland was beautiful and smart, born to a family with roots in Tampa and Ybor City. Tracy went to private school and took college credits in high school and wore such nice clothes she was named "Best Dressed" her senior year. She dated the son of a powerful Tampa family. She was a semester away from graduating from college when her life changed.

Janice Garvin's telephone rang. Tracy's father was calling.

A worried father

The woman wore a blue skirt from American Eagle Outfitters. She had nice teeth and polished toenails.

As police tried to learn her identity, Janice Garvin spoke to Tracy's father, James. He hadn't heard from Tracy.

He talked to her at Christmas, when they took a walk on his farm. She looked good at 36. She was sober and making plans to move into a building on his land.

"She said, 'Daddy, I don't want to go down that road anymore,' " he recalled. "I said, 'Well, I want you to promise me you won't.' And she said, 'I promise you, Daddy, but it's hard. You can't imagine how hard it is.' "

He told her he would call every day. He did until February, when he couldn't reach her.

Janice Garvin called police.

A detective came to the house in Dover and asked questions about Tracy.

What was she like? Who were her friends? Enemies?

What would have led such a pretty girl into that part of town?

A brother's suicide

Tracy was the second of the three kids. Her brother, Larry, was six years older but the two were always together.

Her mother was an accountant for Hillsborough County and her father worked for the school district. They provided the kids a good life.

Tracy was always popular. She liked to shop at University Mall and go to the beach with friends.

"She always attracted the best-looking boys," her mother said.

She was smart, too. She went to the University of South Florida to become a teacher.

On Aug. 28, 1996, her brother, Larry, called from Charter Hospital, a mental health facility. He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia years before. The two remained close.

No one heard their conversation, but Larry asked Tracy to come get him, according to their sister, Lisa Whidden.

Later that day, Larry was found hanging in his room.

"It changed our family," Whidden said. "It changed her."

The suicide plunged Tracy, raising her first child, into depression. On birthdays and holidays, she moped and cried. She dropped out of college.

"She was the last person to talk to him before he died," Whidden said. "She always felt like she could have done more."

Tracy was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed Prozac and Zoloft and other medications. She was soon abusing prescription drugs.

"This has been a nightmare for me ever since," she wrote in a letter in 2000.

Her family noticed.

"I would come over and her home wouldn't be the same," Whidden said. "People I didn't know were coming by at all hours. She went from all bills being paid to struggling. We knew something was going on."

But they didn't know what.

Troubles mount

She began to leave, sometimes for weeks. In July 1997, the woman who had never been in trouble was arrested for attempted robbery, records show. In November 1998, a camera caught her stuffing clothes in a bag at Wal-Mart. Two months later, she was busted stealing Tommy Hilfiger clothes from Burdine's at WestShore Plaza, documents show. Four months later, she tested positive for morphine, cocaine and other drugs.

With each arrest, Tracy's family wondered what went wrong.

"I wouldn't know what rock cocaine looked like if I saw it," said Janice Garvin. "That's never crossed my mind. We're working-class people."

They paid for a therapist and rehabilitation programs. Her father begged a judge to send her to a drug program. They learned the first names of probation officers and called when Tracy violated. They took care of her two children.

"I think a person who gets into that is a person who can't handle failure and negativity," Garvin said. "This was her way out. This was how she dealt with negative things."

When she was sober, Tracy was a good mother who felt guilty about being a burden. She went to First Baptist Church of Dover on Sundays and Narcotics Anonymous on weeknights.

But her addiction always drew her away.

In April 2001, Tracy was gone when her parole officer visited. She turned up with bruises on her arms and told her parole officer that she "used anything that she could get her hands on," records show.

She was sentenced that year to six months in prison. Lisa remembers exchanging kisses through the glass.

Sometimes as they were driving, Tracy would point to Hillsborough and Nebraska avenues and tell her sister she knew those streets. Lisa wondered about the unfamiliar world.

"It's a dark life that I can't even imagine," she said.

On New Year's Eve 2002, Tampa police found Tracy under a tarp behind a shed on E Hillsborough Avenue. She was with a man named Ronnie Wright. She told the cops she was his wife.

Police found two glass pipes and crack cocaine.

Destroyed by drugs

As police learned more about her past, two images of Tracy became clear.

"She had two lives," Tampa police Maj. George McNamara said. "When she wasn't on drugs, she was a sweet, loving person who was dedicated to her family. ... But cocaine took over her life and destroyed her."

Six Mile Creek is an area of scrap yards, tractor trailers, bail bondsmen and low rent.

"They take the prostitutes down here," said Robert Schlosser, who lives in a trailer along Delano Road, pointing to a patch of woods at the end of his street. "By the time the cops get here, they're gone."

When Tracy McClelland wasn't living in Dover, she came to a squat set of apartments at 3619 Orient Road. She moved in with Sergio Gonzalez, who has served time for crimes that include cocaine possession and aggravated assault. They had a child in 2000 - Tracy's third.

Tracy liked to sit on the patio and drink Starbucks coffee. She waved to people heading to the Caves Inn Tavern.

'A horrible need'

When detectives tracked Tracy there, they questioned Gonzalez, 43, and others who live in the apartment a mile from where she was found. They needed to find the last person who saw Tracy alive.

Tracy's life here was stable, said his mother, Rosalin Gonzalez, who also lives in the apartments. She said Sergio fell in love with Tracy about seven years ago.

"There was never no problems with them," she said.

Sergio Gonzalez, who didn't respond to several interview requests, argued with Tracy only when she tried to leave, his mother said.

"She'd tell me, 'I don't want to leave. I want to be here, but I have a horrible need that I can't fight,' " she said. "And then, a little while later, she'd be gone. ... I don't think she could deal with the guilt."

The last time Rosalin saw Tracy was just before Valentine's Day. Tracy had bought her children gifts from Limited Too. She said she was going to put clothes in the washer out back.

She never returned.

At the Sweeping Company, police dusted the trucks for fingerprints and the employees of the company that cleans parking lots and streets grew suspicious of each other.

"We were like, 'Who's the one?' " said Bill Clapp, who found the body.

Detectives showed pictures to the 20 or so workers and told them everyone was a suspect.

Some had records. Many had secrets.

"Everyone there has something in their past," former employee Nicholas Mitchell said.

Detectives questioned his brother, Richard Mitchell, 24, who quit the company a week before the body was found. He lives on Orient Road, less than a mile from the Sweeping Company and a block from where Tracy lived.

"I'll tell you what I told them," said Richard Mitchell, who has a clean record. "I've got nothing to hide."

Three detectives are still casting a broad net and tips come in, McNamara said, but the work is challenging in part because the body was there so long.

"We're still drilling down," he said. "This was a beautiful, beautiful girl and the question is: How did she end up in this type of situation?"

Hoping for answers

Janice Garvin told Tracy's children about their mother.

"I have to talk to you and it's not good," she recalled saying.

"I don't want to hear it," said Sara, 12.

They're coping, Janice said. But the family wants to know who killed Tracy, even if it means finding answers a world away.

"There's someone out there who knows who did it," James McClelland said. "When you're in that atmosphere, you're in that climate, there are people who say things.

"Someone knows."

Researcher Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report. Ben Montgomery can be reached at bmontgomery@sptimes.com or 813 661-2443.

To help

- A trust for Tracy McClelland's children has been established at Sun Trust Bank. If you wish to donate, reference the Tracy Jan McClelland Children's Benefit Trust.

- Anyone with information is asked to call Tampa police detectives at (813) 276-3529.

[Last modified March 31, 2007, 20:53:44]