Sifting for clues 2 years later

Answers evade police in the investigation of a missing Temple Terrace woman.

By REBECCA CATALANELLO, Times Staff Writer
Published December 30, 2007

Detective Michael Pridemore, center, examines a tube containing a soil sample at the W Vasconia Street site of the dig.
	[Melissa Lyttle | Times]

ADVERTISEMENT An excavation failed to yield Sandra Hamby Prince's body. [Handout] [Temple Terrace Police Department] Police released stills and video of a masked man who was seen using Sandra Prince's ATM card after she disappeared.

TAMPA - For five days in October, there was hope.

Police spent $21,000 digging beneath a South Tampa home, thinking her body might be buried there - Sandra Hamby Prince, who has been missing for nearly two years.

With the January anniversary of her violent disappearance near, the rumble of machinery behind 3908 W Vasconia St. raised the prospect of answers.

But no body turned up.

Flatbed trucks took the machines away, and the optimistic hubbub all but silenced, leaving Temple Terrace police and the University of South Florida archeology department with the task of sifting through 300 pounds of soil for clues.

So far, the only thing the pricey excavation has turned up is, in the words of a police spokesman, "just a lot of dirt."

That's whatPaul Sisco predicted. "They knew when they came out of there, she wasn't there," the attorney said recently.

He has motive to question.

Sisco represents the man Temple Terrace police have long held in their scope: Earl C. Pippin III, the contractor who built that Vasconia Street house, the man whose picture police say once graced Prince's bedside table.

The man they say dated her for five years, while he was married.

Prince was reported missing from her Moffat Place home in Temple Terrace on Jan. 3, 2006. Police found blood in her car trunk, on the garage floor and on the garage door. They believe someone cleaned the garage door and the floor in her bedroom.

Prince, co-founder of a Tampa area drug treatment center, was 59 when she vanished. Twice divorced and an only child, she had no children.

Extremely private, she shared with friends few details, if any, about her courtship with Pippin.

* * *

Pippin, 54, hasn't talked to police, let alone the news media, in more than a year. He has moved from his Tampa house, gotten divorced and spends most his time now in Sumter County.

But on Oct. 17, as crews began to digging at Vasconia Street, Sisco, a well-dressed, 40-year-old former state prosecutor, walked up to news cameras and set about defending his client against the suggestion of guilt that the search implied.

"He's the person who reported her missing," Sisco said. "He wants her found, and they have not a shred of evidence against him."

Sisco says the small Temple Terrace Police Department failed to secure the crime scene properly and has ignored evidence pointing to other suspects.

On Oct. 24, police filed with the court their reasons for thinking Prince's body lay beneath the concrete slab at the two-story rental house on Vasconia Street. They cited the following:

-Pippin, married for almost 20 years at the time, was the sole beneficiary of Prince's estate.

-Pippin was at Prince's house on Jan. 3, 2006, the morning her gardener and a neighbor reported her missing.

-He left before police arrived, and gave detectives and Prince's gardener conflicting accounts of why he had to leave.

-Cell phone records show he was not driving toward Prince's office that morning, as he told detectives in one interview. The records show he was headed toward South Tampa.

-When asked about that discrepancy, Pippin said was working two construction sites there, although records show those projects had been finished. And Pippin failed to mention the Vasconia Street site, where a concrete slab had just been poured.

-On Nov. 17, 2006, detectives found a Ti plant on the Vasconia Street property similar to those growingat Prince's home. The plant was in a vase decorated with yellow ribbon and had Pippin's fingerprint on it.

-When shown ATM surveillance videos of a masked man taking $800 from her accounts on Dec. 30 and Dec. 31, 2006, Pippin told detectives he thought the man looked like him.

-Just before she disappeared, Prince hung a $6,000 painting she'd commissioned in her living room showing her in her garden, with David Jarrett, her gardener. Police said interviews and an FBI analysis led them to believe Pippin may have killed Prince out of jealousy over her close relationship with Jarrett.

The gardener says they were justfriends, their bond fleshed out in journals that could not be found after Prince vanished.

At first the journal entries were a way to let Prince know the work he'd done while she was out. But they became an ongoing dialogue about everything from politics to God, Jarrett said.

Pippin's lawyer likens the search warrant, its findings and police hypothesis to the plot of a bad romance novel.

"Painting?" Sisco said incredulously. "I refuse to give any credence to the theory. ... The reality is, there never was probable cause at all to search that house."

Sisco says the police havefocused unfairly on Pippin, ignoring evidence pointing to others. Andthey deliberately crafted the search warrant for the Vasconia house in a way thatwould lead thejudge to suspect Pippin was the masked man at the ATM.

He also doubts the police assertion that Pippin told detectives that he thought the man at the ATM video looked like him.

"It was the only meat on that warrant," he said of what detectives wrote about the ATM. "And it was completely fabricated."

Sisco says the department deliberately excluded information from a witness who came forward after the disappearance with a description of the masked man at the ATM.

What's more, Sisco said the department has not employed some rudimentary methods of analysis to the video that would give them more detailed information about the suspect.

The witness described a man in his 30s or 40s, white, 5 feet 11 to 6 feet, about 215 to 245 pounds with brown hair, police said.

A composite picture showed a man with curly hair. But the police spokeswoman at the time made a point of saying that the hairstyle could be off.

Friends say Pippin, now 54, isn't that big. He has tightly clipped light hair, Sisco said.

Lead Detective Michael Pridemore has long said he puts little stock in the witness's description.

Police spokesman Michael Dunn said it had been dark when the man used the ATM, and a lot of time passed before he came forward. The composite sketch and description were made public on March 31, 2006 - almost two months after the ATM video was released.

Besides, Dunn said, the information from that witness wasn't used in the search warrantbecause it wasn't relevant.

"They were looking for evidence there might be a body under the house," he said. "Just because you know what someone does or doesn't look like doesn't prove there would be something under the house."

As to Sisco's charge that police have missed details about the suspect by failing to use "rudimentary" tools in analyzing the video: "We don't know what those tools are that he's talking about," Dunn said. "If he would like to come in and tell us, we'd be glad to look into it."

* * *

Pippin stopped talking to police after four interviews. Sisco said, a "flee or fight" instinct kicked in.

Pippin had been cooperating, he said, offering to let them search anywhere they wanted, "and they didn't."

Sumter County deputies did search a property Prince owned at Lake Panasoffkee, where Pippin frequently helped her buy land. They found nothing.

Twenty-nine truckloads of dirt had been brought there in late December 2006. An invoice from the hauling company is dated Dec. 28, a court file shows.

Pippin has declined to take a police polygraph exam. But Sisco said his client did pass an independent test administered by a trained FBI examiner.

Sisco also said the police failed to properly secure Prince's home as a crime scene by taking witnesses' keys - a charge the department disputes.

"Keys were taken into evidence, the house was sealed, the crime scene was taped up and an officer was parked outside the residence 24-7 for a couple weeks," Dunn said.

The department eventually returned the house into the care of Prince's family. Jarrett, the gardener, resumed caring for the property at the request of Prince's 90-year-old mother.

After police finished working the house as a crime scene, Jarrett said, Prince's cousin in Virginia asked him and his wife to clean it in preparation for Prince's mother's arrival from North Carolina. The couple spent hours scrubbing away the fingerprint dust, he said.

Sisco questions the wisdom of police allowing Jarrett to clean.

"The government can't hold onto somebody's property," Dunn countered. "Once the situation is cleared, they the family can go ahead and clean it up and do whatever they want with it."

But Sisco said he doesn't accept any of the department's explanations or evidence.

"I can tell you this," Sisco said, "he's never going to talk to them."

* * *

Angie Turner, owner of Ahjaleah's Boutique, a Carrollwood shop Prince frequented, said her memory flashes to Prince at this time of year more than any other. Turner was one of the few people Prince confided in about her relationship with Pippin.

Turner keeps the bottle of lavender oil Prince gave her to help make bruises vanish, and checks with the police occasionally.

"We still think about her," she said. "We still talk about her."

Like most, Turner hopes there will be something in that dirt, some answers. Two months without word leaves her unsettled.

Rebecca Catalanello can be reached at rcatalanello@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3383.

There is an $80,000 reward for information leading to Prince's whereabouts. Anyone with information about Prince is asked to call Detective Michael Pridemore at (813) 989-7110.

[Last modified December 30, 2007, 00:01:06]