A year later, still no arrest

The DePalmas were brutally slain a year ago today, and deputies are still investigating. It's not a cold case yet.

By ERIN SULLIVAN, Times Staff Writer
Published October 29, 2007

Patrick and Evelyn DePalma lived for their house, always keeping it immaculate and having Sunday dinners with family. The property was recently sold, one year after the couple was brutally murdered.
	[David Degner | Times]

ADVERTISEMENT [Special to the Times] Evelyn, 79, and Patrick DePalma, 84, of Masaryktown were close to their grandkids. [Family photo] Evelyn DePalma sits with her grandchildren, left to right, Sonsee, Sarah and Kyle. This photo is from the 1980s. The grandchildren grew up living in a house on the same plot of land as the DePalmas. Their grandparents were the stability in their lives.

MASARYKTOWN - On this day one year ago, deputies knocked on the door of the DePalma house. A concerned friend had called the Sheriff's Office after not being able to reach the elderly couple, who were as dependable as people could hope to be.

Patrick DePalma was 84 and his wife, Evelyn, was 79. They had been married 62 years and lived by their routines - breakfast at 8, lunch at noon always a sandwich, dinner at 5 (always homemade, with a salad). Thursdays and Sundays were pasta nights, though Sundays usually were all-day eating affairs, the family over for Evelyn's red sauce that had bubbled since the morning, card table out, people playing spades, great-grandchildren crawling on the floor, which was freshly vacuumed.

Their home was their world, and Evelyn kept it immaculate. As children of the Depression, the DePalmas saved everything, even junk mail to use as notepads, and worked hard all their lives in New Jersey before retiring to Florida. Patrick was a mason, even though he lost his right eye in a childhood fire. Evelyn kept the house running.

Even in retirement they were both up, showered, neatly dressed and active throughout the day. What they owned was not fancy, Sears-brand clothes and the like, but they made it last for years. Patrick and Evelyn loved doing puzzles, but they refused to buy new ones, doing the same ones over and over.

It was not right for them to not answer the door or phone.

If the couple weren't at Mass, the grocery store or visiting family, they were home, on the isolated 10 acres they bought in Masaryktown in 1985, with dreams that their son and his children would live on the land with them. That was true for many years.

But these last ones, the couple roamed the property alone, in their structured, simple life. Their only child, Patrick Jr., had moved to North Carolina. Their grandchildren lived close by and visited often, but they were in their 20s, two married, one with children of her own. The last one to visit was Kyle DePalma, then 23, who drove earlier that week from St. Petersburg to see them.

When the deputies knocked, it was a Sunday, but no family dinner planned. It was a little after 2 p.m.

The beige stucco house was silent.

What deputies found inside was like something from a horror movie.

And it hasn't ended yet.

* * *

Murder, by definition, is a brutal act, the ending of a life that is not natural. But there are varying degrees of murder - a blow sent in rage, but not intended to kill; a poisoned drink of revenge; a desperate shot in the dark to keep a secret buried.

These are not condoned, but they are understandable. There are reasons. There are motives.

The DePalmas are dead, so there was a motive somewhere. But it seems that it could have been nothing more than the pleasure, or power, of killing defenseless, elderly people.

The crime scene is one of the oddest that detectives have witnessed. Nothing flows. Normally, detectives can go into a scene and visualize how things happened. A vase shattered here could indicate a body falling on it, verified by shards in the person's clothes, for example.

There was nothing like this in the DePalmas' case.

The couple were stabbed multiple times.

Detectives will not say if they had been bound or sexually assaulted. They will not say if the couple were tortured.

When asked last week, detectives just kept saying that the couple were "brutally murdered."

But the feeling the detectives gave was that the person who did this was sick - the type who would enjoy killing for the act alone. The case has some at the Sheriff's Office remembering Edwin "Mike" Kaprat, the Hernando County handyman turned serial killer, who raped and murdered elderly widows in the early 1990s. Kaprat terrorized the area until the Sheriff's Office caught him in 1993. He was murdered by another inmate on death row in 1995.

Those in the Sheriff's Office have waited with dread for the person who killed the DePalmas to resurface. But he - or she or they - has been silent for one year now.

And is still free.

* * *

Sheriff's investigators have been working every day to catch whoever did this.

"We are going to avenge the death of these two people," said Capt. Michael Maurer, commander of the criminal investigations division.

The DePalmas' home was closed for nearly two weeks, with experts gathering forensic evidence. There were five items stolen from their home: a Sanyo VCR, a Bissell vacuum, an RCA stereo, a wooden knife block with its knives (detectives do not know if one of the knives was the murder weapon) and a rifle - worth a combined few hundred dollars. Detectives were able to tell what was missing from the house because the DePalmas saved every box from items they bought and also filed their warranties and owner's manuals. For weeks, detectives canvassed yard sales in Hernando and Pasco counties looking for the items. They scoured pawnshops. They put an ad in the paper.

Nothing.

They interrogated family, friends and neighbors, sometimes multiple times. They could not find any enemies of the DePalmas.

Detectives retraced the couple's movements: Mass on Saturday, then a stop at the grocery store and then home. They were murdered sometime between Saturday evening and when their bodies were found Sunday afternoon.

Investigators got videotapes for weeks leading up to the murders from places the DePalmas went - the grocery store, the gas station - looking to see if anyone might have been following the couple.

Nothing.

Investigators have DNA evidence from the house, though they will not say what it is - if it's spit from a cigarette, semen, hair or something else. They have plugged this into every database known to them and the FBI.

Nothing.

They have shoved the case at national experts, who might shed some light on the killer's profile.

Nothing.

They plugged their information in to an FBI system that connects odd crimes, possibly committed by a serial killer.

So far, there has not been a match.

Though frustrated, those working on solving the murders are not shoving it to the cold case files. Sheriff Richard Nugent, who held a public meeting in Masaryktown days after the killings to calm residents' worries and stamp out misinformation, asks Capt. Maurer for updates on the case at least once a week. Maurer said he talks to his staff about it daily. There are plans for billboards to be put up around the area, asking for information.

They have a personal mission to catch whoever did this, Maurer said. The DePalmas represent everyone's grandparents - or the grandparents they wish they had. Stable. Loving. Giving.

"There was no reason for them to die," Maurer said.

* * *

The DePalmas' eldest granddaughter, Sonsee Sanders, 27, still talks about them in the present tense. She lives in Brooksville with her husband, Jason. Her brother, Kyle, now 24, moved in with them a few weeks after their grandparents' murder. He didn't want to stay alone in his St. Petersburg apartment.

Their other sibling, Sarah Barnier, 26, lives a few miles away with her husband, Steve, and their three children.

They are all very close. During their childhood, they lived in a house on their grandparents' land. They saw them every day. The DePalmas were the ones who picked the kids up from school when they were sick. They fed them and loved them and taught them how to save money, how to sew, how to cook. At the grandparents' home, they had their birthday parties, with cakes baked from scratch. This is where the girls' future husbands panicked in Grandpa'ssteely gaze - and stuffed themselves sick with Grandma's cooking.

The grandchildren's parents divorced and their mom remarried. But the kids still visited the DePalmas often. Their mom divorced and remarried again. Their dad, who has a record of drug arrests, moved out of state. They would not discuss him, and he could not be contacted.

With all of this turbulence, the DePalmas were the stability in the grandchildren's lives. They had acres to run and old, gnarled oak trees to climb. There was a playground set near the house and a picnic table their grandpa built. The children had their best sleep at that house, tucked in tight with fresh sheets.

They found out about the murders late that Sunday night. They gathered at Sarah's house and didn't leave for more than a week. They couldn't get inside the DePalmas' house before the funeral, because it was still a crime scene, so the grandchildren went to Sears and picked out the clothes the DePalmas were buried in. The grandchildren organized the Mass at the DePalmas' church, the flowers, the photos, and got plots for them at the Florida National Cemetery near Bushnell, since their grandpa was an Army veteran.

They hired an attorney to find out if the DePalmas had a will, which it doesn't seem they did. The property, owned by their father, has just been sold. Sonsee and Kyle have been in the house a few times this year to clear things out. Sarah can't. And Sonsee and Kyle don't want her to. Why traumatize her, too?

The house was turned upside down, either by the killer or by investigators or both. The freshly painted white walls and the furniture and window ledges are smudged with black fingerprint dust. The dirt driveways are thick and overgrown. What is left in the house is piled on the floor or where the DePalmas left it, such as a small blue prayer book on a dresser by a window. Their puzzles are stacked in a box on the back porch. The playground swing set is rusted, and two swings have fallen off. The picnic table is rotting.

"You don't want to see it," Sonsee said to Sarah, as they gathered at Sarah's house Thursday night. This is the first time they've spoken to the news media about their grandparents.

They have not really allowed themselves to stop and grieve. They are working. They meet most Sundays and play cards. Sonsee makes her grandma's red sauce, in the same pot she did for all those years.

They said they believe the Sheriff's Office will catch the killer. They have kept in contact, and the grandchildren feel the detectives truly care about the case and that they are working hard.

They just want whoever did this to be caught.

Days after the murders, Sarah and Sonsee installed security systems in their homes. Sonsee, an elementary school teacher, doesn't sleep well. Sarah has a recurring dream that they are all at their grandparents' house - cooking, laughing, hugging, though the grandparents appear ghostlike. She asks them:

"Who did this to you?"

"Who did this to you?"

But they won't answer.

News researcher Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report. Erin Sullivan can be reached at esullivan@sptimes.com or (813) 909-4609.

Depalma case

Help solve the crime

Detectives ask that anyone with any information call the Hernando County Sheriff's Office at (352) 754-6830. To remain anonymous, call Crime Stoppers at (352) 797-TIPS (8477). Or you can e-mail your tip to www.hernandosheriff.org/tips. There is a reward for information leading to an arrest.

[Last modified October 28, 2007, 19:30:52]