Lawyer insists police confess

There's no proof, he says, tying his client to a missing woman.

By REBECCA CATALANELLO, Times Staff Writer
Published November 29, 2007

TAMPA - A Tampa attorney says it's time police fess up about their search for missing Temple Terrace woman Sandra Prince.

It has been six weeks since Temple Terrace police started a five-day dig beneath a South Tampa home hoping to find evidence leading them to Prince.

Prince, 59 at the time she vanished, was reported missing Jan. 3, 2006. Police say evidence shows she disappeared under violent circumstances.

Paul Sisco, an attorney for the man Temple Terrace police have named a "person of interest" in Prince's disappearance, demanded in a letter Wednesday that the agency reveal its findings from the search.

Investigators sent off almost 300 pounds of dirt samples from 3908 W Vasconia St. for archeological researchers at the University of South Florida to study.

Earl C. Pippin III, Sisco's client, built the house. Records show a concrete slab was poured there about the time Prince vanished.

Police said Pippin dated Prince for five years while he was married and is listed as the sole beneficiary in her will.

"As you now well know," Sisco wrote to lead Detective Michael Pridemore on Wednesday, "not only was the dig not 'inconclusive,' it was conclusively without merit. The soil analysis revealed not a shred of evidence related to the presence or deterioration of human remains or other evidence in any way related to this woman's case."

Temple Terrace spokesman Michael Dunn said he doesn't know where Sisco is getting his information. "I would call this letter preposterous," Dunn said.

The agency hasn't received lab results from the dig, he said. And whether police will release the results, Dunn said, depends on whether they think it will harm the investigation.

Sisco said he is simply responding to the time frame police gave when they concluded the Vasconia Street dig. "They said it would be four to five weeks," he said. "It's been six."

Pippin has not spoken with police in over a year. But Sisco wrote that police interviewed Pippin four separate times and stopped only "when you wrongly accused him of foul play in this matter."

[Last modified November 29, 2007, 02:38:29]