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DNA partially solves 6-year-old mystery

A leg bone found in 2002 identifies a victim, but doesn't answer why he vanished in 2001.

By AARON SHAROCKMAN, Times Staff Writer
Published August 3, 2007

Police have reopened a puzzling six-year-old homicide where the only piece of evidence is a sawed-off femur bone. The bone, which was recently matched using DNA to a convicted murderer, washed up in an inlet near Boca Ciega Bay in 2002. The cops have no significant leads.
	[Special to the Times]

ADVERTISEMENT No one had seen or heard from Bryan E. Bailey since October 2001, when his Social Security checks started being returned unopened from a St. Petersburg address. [Special to the Times]

ST. PETERSBURG - Police have identified the victim in a puzzling 6-year-old homicide where the lone clue is a sawed-off thigh bone.

No one had seen or heard from Bryan E. Bailey since October 2001, when his Social Security checks started being returned unopened from a St. Petersburg address.

A fisherman unknowingly found Bailey's femur in foot-deep water a year later, behind an apartment complex bordering Boca Ciega Bay.

But it wasn't until last week that DNA evidence matched the bone to Bailey, a man who moved between Florida and his family's home in Missouri.

Investigators say the leg appears to have been sawed off at each end.

Police are considering it murder.

"We don't know what happened to him," said Brenda Stevenson, a civilian investigator with the St. Petersburg Police Department.

"We're trying to track down anyone who might have seen him in 2001."

Bailey, who would have been 40 when he died, returned to St. Petersburg in 2001 after recently being released from a Florida prison where he had been sentenced for a 1989 murder.

In that case, Bailey admitted holding down 18-year-old Richard L. David Jr. as another man stabbed David to death.

David was killed for threatening to report drug activity at a home he had shared with Bailey and two other people, police said.

They left David dead facedown at a local cemetery.

Bailey, who testified against two co-defendants, was released from prison in 2000 after serving one-third of a 30-year sentence. He first moved to his family's home outside St. Louis before returning to St. Petersburg.

He was last seen here in October 2001. Sometime between then and August of the next year he was killed, but no one ever reported him missing, police said.

Family members described Bailey as an easily influenced menial worker who was dyslexic and had trouble holding down jobs. He was a black sheep who somehow found his way to Florida, his brother Jeff Bailey said Thursday.

"It would go two, three, sometimes six months between times hearing from him," said Jeff Bailey, who still lives in the St. Louis area. "As time went on, we knew something was wrong. You just don't know for sure until you get news like this."

Bailey's family is planning a memorial in St. Louis on what would have been Bailey's 46th birthday.

Sgt. Mike Kovacsev, with the St. Petersburg homicide squad, said police do not know if Bailey's subsequent murder was a revenge killing. Kovacsev also said it's likely the bone was severed after Bailey died, though it's difficult to be sure.

Police have just begun their investigation, Kovacsev said.

"There was a purpose. This doesn't happen randomly," said Bailey's brother, Jeff. "To cut a person up - that's somebody paying somebody back for something."

[Last modified August 2, 2007, 23:27:21]