Early on Nov. 5, 1979, a Florida sheriff’s deputy radioed dispatch to report that he had found the body of a convenience store clerk who had just been fatally shot — once in the back and once in the head. About $7 was missing from the register.
Decades passed and no one was ever arrested in the murder of the clerk, Adele Marie Easterly, 25.
But some investigators always suspected that the deputy, John J. Greer, might have been involved because he was odd, even “creepy,” said Detective Mike Gandy of the cold-case unit at the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office.
Their suspicions were finally confirmed, Detective Gandy said, when investigators confronted Mr. Greer in April 2023 as he lay in a bed in an extended-care facility in Kingsport, Tenn.
Unable to feed himself and barely able to speak, Mr. Greer managed to tell investigators that he had shot Ms. Easterly at the Farm Store in Punta Gorda, Fla., more than 40 years earlier, Detective Gandy said.
Detectives did not arrest Mr. Greer, believing his failing health would have made his extradition to Florida difficult and that the case would have been a coin toss at trial, with no physical evidence and only one witness with hearsay linking Mr. Greer to the murder, Detective Gandy said. Mr. Greer died nearly a year later, on March 2, 2024, at age 76.
The investigation into Ms. Easterly’s murder has now been closed, the Sheriff’s Office said in a statement on Tuesday that disclosed Mr. Greer’s confession in 2023. Detective Gandy said information about the confession had not been made public earlier because the office was contacting other law enforcement agencies in the South to see if Mr. Greer might be connected to other crimes and because investigators were busy with other homicides.
The outcome has left Ms. Easterly’s family torn.
Jessica Kilbourn, a niece of Ms. Easterly’s who was 5 when her aunt was killed, said she was grateful for the work of the cold-case detectives, but believed that “the ball was dropped” after her aunt was killed because the Sheriff’s Office knew that Mr. Greer was “a shady kind of character.”
“We have a name — it will never be closure,” Ms. Kilbourn said in an interview on Friday. “It’s not because I don’t have my aunt here. My dad doesn’t have his only sibling. My grandparents never lived long enough to even see this moment.”
Detective Gandy said it was frustrating that Mr. Greer had never been brought to justice.
“It’s very disappointing that we didn’t get to arrest him and have him stand trial, but it’s also good to be able to close the case and give the family some answers,” he said. “I’m sorry we couldn’t have done more.”
Mr. Greer’s statement about shooting Ms. Easterly wasn’t his only confession in the extended-care facility, Detective Gandy said.
Mr. Greer said he had also shot his wife, Jackie Greer, at their home in Port Charlotte, Fla., on Aug. 27, 1979 — a little more than two months before Ms. Easterly was killed, Detective Gandy said.
Mr. Greer had told responding deputies at the time that he had been sleeping when he heard a “pop” and found his wife’s body in the closet. Her death was ruled a suicide.
Detective Gandy said that investigators had also spoken in 2019 to a woman who said that Mr. Greer had sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager working as a dispatcher at the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office in 1979.
After she came forward, detectives tried to develop probable cause to arrest Mr. Greer, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
“Once the detectives obtained as much evidence and information as possible, an interview with Greer was attempted,” the office said in a statement. “The detectives were aware of Greer’s location, and he was monitored as much as possible over the years.”
But they did not interview him until they learned that he had moved into an extended-care facility. When they spoke to him in April 2023, “he was bedridden and could only give short answers to questions,” the office said.
The Sheriff’s Office said it still wanted to know if there were additional victims of Mr. Greer’s. He resigned from the office in October 1980 and then worked in several other police and sheriff’s departments, usually near the west coast of Florida. He was also a pilot and held a variety of pilot and aircraft-related positions in and around Kingsport, Tenn., according to the Sheriff’s Office.
In 1986, a friend of Ms. Easterly’s provided critical information to investigators, telling them that Ms. Easterly had been dating a Charlotte County deputy who would visit her at the Farm Store on the night shift and would bring his gun to “protect” her.
The friend believed that Ms. Easterly was trying to break up with the deputy and that she was “definitely afraid of him,” Detective Gandy said. Detectives later learned that Mr. Greer carried a double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun in his patrol car and that Ms. Easterly had been shot with a 12-gauge shotgun.
The friend, relating what she had heard from Ms. Easterly, also said in 1986 that the deputy had told his wife that he wanted a divorce. According to the friend’s account, the deputy’s wife then took his service revolver and tried to shoot herself. The deputy then told Ms. Easterly, according to the friend, that he had fought his wife for the gun, causing it to go off and kill her.
Detective Gandy said investigators are still not sure if Ms. Greer was shot during a struggle over a gun or if Mr. Greer intentionally shot her.
The woman who reported that Mr. Greer had sexually assaulted her when she was a teenage dispatcher said that Mr. Greer had also threatened to kill her, Detective Gandy said.
During one assault, she said, Mr. Greer warned her not to resist, telling her to “ask” dead women like “Adele Easterly what happens when they say no to me,” according to the Sheriff’s Office.
The former dispatcher told investigators that she had also been working on the night Ms. Easterly was killed.
She said she had seen Mr. Greer return to the office with what appeared to be a long gun in his hand, and that he looked disheveled, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
She also noticed that one of his gloves was off and that he had something in his bare hand that could be blood, the office said. Mr. Greer motioned for her to go back inside and he later returned, looking freshly showered, the office said.
Detective Gandy said that investigators had spoken to other teenagers who worked at the Sheriff’s Office in the late 1970s, some of whom reported unwanted advances by Mr. Greer.
Sheriff Bill Prummell said in a statement that Mr. Greer did not represent “the overwhelmingly great men and women who have worked for this agency over our century-plus of existence.”
“I am angry at the scar he has left on our reputation,” Sheriff Prummell said, “but I am even more upset about the people he hurt through his vile actions.”
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