FOUNTAIN, Fla. — The body of a woman was found in a small grave in 1980, and deputies in Bay County say they now know who killed her.
The Bay County Sheriff’s Office says that three shooters found the body of a woman in a shallow grave in 1980, about half a mile west of Highway 231 and north of Fountain.
At first, police thought the body might have belonged to JoAnn Benner, who went missing in 1976. Her body had not been found, and it was thought that she had been killed.
The bodies were sent to the FSU Anthropology lab to be looked at.
Investigators said Benner couldn’t be the person who died because these bodies didn’t have the injuries she had.
People thought there had been foul play because the clothes that were found with the bones were damaged.
While thinking about the Benner case and reading about the strange skeletal remains, retired and current BCSO agents worked together with the Crime Scene Unit to find a way to identify the unknown woman that wasn’t available in 1980.
Investigators sent a tooth from the body to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) so that they could do a DNA test on it. The Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) was told about this information.
The police said they found two hits. They told them that two people in Texas had already given DNA because their sister had been reported missing.
BCSO said that once a match was found, the Centre for Human Identification did a kinship analysis to see if the remains were those of a family member of the two brothers and then made a final report. It said that the body was that of their sister Carol Sue Skidmore, who went missing in 1977.
ABC News says that in March 1977, Carol Skidmore, her husband James Ronald Skidmore, and her 5-year-old son Lynn Dale Mahaffy left their home in Sealy, Texas, to go see James’ parents in Rossville, Georgia. It was important to them to “put their marriage back together.”
Police said they left on March 29, 1977, and the last time anyone heard from them was on April 9, 1977, when Carol Skidmore called her parents to say she didn’t know when they would be back.
A child’s body was found in Tennessee’s Parksville Lake in May 1977. Investigators said that the boy had been killed. There was a lot of weight on the body, which made it look like it had been there for a few weeks.
The FBI said in June 1977 that the body was that of Lynn Dale Mahaffy, Carol Skidmore’s son.
James Skidmore, Carol Skidmore’s husband, was found dead in a hotel room in Harrison, Arkansas, on June 1, 1977. He had either overdosed on drugs or killed himself. A suicide note with the words “things weren’t working out for him” was found with his body, according to police.
The police looked for his wife Carol Skidmore but couldn’t find her. It was said that she was lost.
Investigators think that James Ronald Skidmore killed Carol Skidmore and buried her body in a small grave in Bay County. He then killed her son Lynn and left his body in a lake in Tennessee. Finally, he killed himself.
Investigators talked to Carol Skidmore’s family. They said that one of her siblings had died, but that her brother was glad to hear about his sister and finally know what happened to her.
“We will never stop seeking justice for victims of crime, no matter how much time may have passed,” he said. “I am so proud of our Cold Case and Crime Scene Units for their determination to find the truth and bring closure to this family.”
The BCSO’s Crime Scene Unit and Cold Case Unit are using family DNA to try to figure out who a number of sets of body parts found in Bay County belong to.
