It is among Florida’s oldest unsolved crimes on record, notorious for its brutality, as well as for a pool of suspects that numbered over 600. High among them: The killers made infamous in Truman Capote’s true crime classic “In Cold Blood.”
Myers, 71, had pleaded for answers most of his life, sometimes dropping into the sheriff’s office when the phone fell quiet. But the Walker murders had consumed detectives, then spit them out, for half a century.
Myers wondered how much longer he would be able to make the three-hour drive to Sarasota. Sixteen stents kept his heart pumping, another five expanded veins in his legs. He’d been able to make this trip only because his wife of 51 years, whom he cared for at home in Lake Placid, was in rehab after a fall.
Cliff, who earned $55 a week managing a herd of deep red cows, wanted to trade in his wife’s 1952 Plymouth. The Walkers dwelled amongst country folk, whose women were sorted by their morals and men by their prowess roping cattle or catching hogs. Behind many closed doors, kerosene lamps and frying pans flew. Christine had grown up in one of those households.
McLeod also fell under suspicion. But he told police he had seen the Walkers’ neighbor, Wilbur Tooker, at their house at least two dozen times. Tooker, a 65-year-old retired railroad telegrapher, had made advances on Christine, which she rebuffed. Perry Smith, 31, and Richard Hickock, 28, met as petty thieves serving time at the Kansas State Penitentiary.
Kansas authorities, hearing of the Walker murders, suggested Sarasota’s sheriff take a look. Both families lived in rural communities. All had been shot in the head. No child had been spared. Hickock had once said his philosophy was to “leave no witnesses.” A day after they were sentenced to death, Hickock and Smith answered questions about the Florida murders while strapped to a mid-century lie detector test. Kansas authorities told Boyer they passed.
In a recent interview, retired Sarasota Lt. Dario Valente recalled speaking with one of Boyer’s chief investigators, who told him that while one of the Kansas killers denied the Walker murders, another confessed. Finding out who had murdered Christine had consumed his family for decades, and now, with many of them dead or far-flung, it had fallen on him to keep up the pressure. So, again, he dialed the detective he trusted most.
As she organized boxes of witness statements, ballistics reports and crime scene photographs into an 8,000-page digital record, more clues — and gaps — emerged. She read a report that the pair sold two dolls to a minister in Louisiana for $1.50 in gas money after they had left Florida. Could those dolls have been for Debbie? No one had documented the wrapping paper, and the minister was long dead.
The year before, she had convinced a judge in Kansas to exhume the remains of Hickock and Smith to see if their DNA matched an unknown profile in Christine’s underwear. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation lab had pulled partial DNA from the men’s femurs and teeth. The mix-ups made McGath wonder about the evidence already tested. She sifted through thousands of pages, looking for the original DNA test of Christine’s underwear that had detected a male suspect — a result detectives had leaned on for years. That’s when she noticed that the supposed suspect’s DNA was remarkably similar to Christine’s own incomplete DNA sequence, gathered from her dress.They likely had been comparing their suspects all these years to Christine herself.
The agency issued a press release, noting Hickock and Smith were the most likely suspects. “However,” the release said, “DNA testing seems unlikely to provide conclusive evidence one way or the other.” She had never been able to fully put the case aside. Recently, she’d told Myers she’d found a picture of Hickock with two small marks on his chin. Could they be from Christine’s heel?
In 2019, Clark was able to test the stain again. It generated pieces of two people’s DNA, one male and one female. But the results were too tangled to isolate any individuals. Now Myers related to McGath what he’d heard from Clark: Though not a conclusive match, Tooker could not be discounted. But national clearance rates have sunk. In 1965, according to FBI statistics, agencies closed 90% of the year’s homicides. By 2020, the rate was 54% — meaning more cases grow cold. Experts blame the drop largely on slimmed-down police budgets and hundreds of unsolved serial killer cases.
“And that doesn’t work,” said Ryan Backmann, who started Project: Cold Case in Jacksonville in 2015 to document unsolved cases and support other families after his father’s murder went unsolved. “You get an arrest occasionally. But you need dedicated detectives primarily working on cold cases, and across the country in law enforcement, we’re not seeing that.”
But Myers observed that letting the case languish, passing it from one detective to another and failing to exhume Christine 15 years ago to obtain her DNA, as he and his sister had asked, had cost the agency more money and delayed the results.In mid-September, Myers clenched his jaw as he lifted his wife with a gait belt, transferring her from wheelchair to recliner at their modest home. She settled in and smiled.
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