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Months after Claudia Eanes was shot, detectives are casting a wider net in search of suspects, a motive, or at least some clues.
By LEANORA MINAI
© St. Petersburg Times, published July 22, 2001
ST. PETERSBURG -- The bullet sailed across Central Avenue from a northeast direction.
It struck Claudia Eanes in the back of the head as she locked the tanning salon at 9:30 p.m. March 14.
Two of her children and a co-worker were there, but they only saw her body fall to the pavement.
Four months later, the killing remains a mystery, one of five unsolved murders in the city this year. There have been 11 homicides.
"I don't have a motive yet, and I don't have a suspect," said St. Petersburg homicide Detective Cindy Leedy. "I can't say we're close to an arrest or anything because we're not."
Leedy has not ruled out the possibility that the killer mistook Eanes, 35, for someone else.
After the shooting, there were rumors that the men in Eanes' life had something to do with her death. But police now say they have eliminated Eanes' estranged husband, ex-husband and former boyfriend as suspects.
Friends have wondered whether the owner of Tanny Fanny, Suzann Rogers, was the target, because Eanes resembled her.
"Once you eliminate people who are friends and family, you have to start branching out," Leedy said.
Weird things were happening at the salon. A month before Eanes was killed, Rogers and her boyfriend told police that someone threatened them. Rogers also was in a dispute with a salon tenant in small claims court. But detectives do not believe the court matter had anything to do with the killing.
"There was a theory going around that it could have been mistaken identity, but it's hard to picture a mistake made when a woman's with her two children," said Charles Fitts, Eanes' father.
Fitts adopted Eanes in Oklahoma when she was 18 months old. One morning, on his way home from church, he stopped to see a friend, a buddy from Vietnam.
"Claudia was in a little playpen," said Fitts, now a Bradenton resident. "You could tell by looking at her she was pretty well abused. She had on dirty diapers."
Fitts decided right then and there to take care of her. He left with Eanes that day.
"She was my child from the minute I looked in that playpen," said Fitts, 61.
When she was 15, Eanes moved to Gulfport with her family. She attended Boca Ciega High School but dropped out in 11th grade. She wasn't interested in school, said her stepmother, Dolores Fitts.
She wanted to care for her younger stepbrother, Larry, who was developmentally disabled. Eanes helped him write his name and brush his teeth.
Her first marriage was to Kenny Perry, who lives in Palmetto. Mrs. Fitts remembers the wedding day as if it were yesterday.
"The look on her face when she married Kenny was unreal," she said. "It was like scratching off a Lotto ticket and finding out you just won $1-million."
She and Perry had two sons, Joel, 12, and Craig, 14. Eanes and Perry divorced, and she later had a daughter, Danielle, now 5. Her boys now live with their father and Eanes' daughter lives with Eanes' sister.
In 1996, she married a friend of Perry's, Eric Eanes. They lived in Gulfport until last year, when she moved to Kentucky to live with another man for several months. She came back to St. Petersburg and was living at Sunshine City Mobile Home Park when she was killed.
The day before the shooting, Eanes called her stepmother in Bradenton and chatted for 21/2 hours.
Eanes talked about leaving the tanning salon she managed and starting a new job at a Pinellas beach motel. That way, she could work days, instead of closing the salon at 9 p.m., and she could cook dinner for her children.
"I ain't ever been through nothing like this before," said Mrs. Fitts, 47. "You know, you never think your kids are going to go before you."
Eanes usually brought her kids with her to Tanny-Fanny, where she had worked for 10 months. On March 14, she closed the salon at 9 p.m.
At 9:30 p.m., she was walking out with two of her three children, Danielle and Joel. A co-worker with them heard a "pop' and turned around. She saw Eanes falling to the ground at the door, keys still in her hand.
At first, they thought Eanes tripped and hit her head, but after paramedics arrived, they discovered she had been shot. One bullet was lodged in her head; another pierced the glass door, setting off the burglar alarm.
Where was the shooter? In bushes or behind the concrete wall across the street? Could the killer be some demented stranger, acting on an impulse?
"We can't eliminate that," said Sgt. Mike Puetz.
What makes the murder tougher than others to solve is the lack of a motive and no eyewitnesses.
Leedy, the homicide detective, said she does not believe Eanes' estranged husband, ex-husband or boyfriend had a role in the murder. She said they either took a polygraph test or could prove, through receipts or videotape, that they were elsewhere when Eanes was shot.
"She was on friendly terms with everyone I talked to," Leedy said.
She was separated from Eric Eanes, 41.
"I was out that night, and I was lucky I was buying a new car from a church, a pastor," said Eric Eanes, a mechanic. "And he was able to verify my story."
He ended up taking a second polygraph test at the police station because the first test was inconclusive.
"They did it a week after everything happened, and my blood pressure was too high," Eric Eanes said.
Although police have eliminated several people as suspects in the crime, they are considering all possibilities.
A month before the shooting, Rogers, the salon owner, and her boyfriend, gas station owner Jim Ahern, called police to report that someone threatened them. The police report does not offer many details. The first call involved someone in a blue Ford Explorer; the other involved an argument with a man over wall renovations at the salon.
Rogers does not believe the shooting was meant for her.
"Let's put it this way," said Rogers, 44. "No one has called me and said, "It should have been you.' I've gotten no letters, no phone calls."
Leedy is checking other incidents that required police attention in the neighborhood. She is asking anyone who was in the area of Central Avenue and 64th Street on March 14 to call her at (727) 893-7613.
"You can't let murderers go free," Leedy said. "People need to start standing up and doing the right thing."
For 44 days, Eanes clung to life at Bayfront Medical Center. She never regained consciousness. On April 27 -- four days after her 35th birthday -- her family decided to remove her from life support.
"She never took a breath. Never had a movement," said Fitts, her father. "She just faded off to sleep."