He cracked the front door, the thick screen obscuring his thin frame and age. But his voice crackled and his many years became obvious when he leaned forward to hear the question.
“What?” he asked.
Does he remember the murder?
His face changed, the question seemed to hurl him back to memories he has tried to forget.
Suddenly a woman in a housedress made her way to the door, her body slightly wobbling.
“What do they want?” she called out to him as if no one were on the other side of the screen.
The idea of dredging up the bloody murder that happened on the corner of Upton Street and 27th Avenue South 19 years ago was clearly uncomfortable, but the older man started to talk. He got out two syllables.
“We don’t know anything,” the woman said, cutting him off. “I didn’t live here and neither did he.”
The door closed.
The murder haunts this quiet Gulfport neighborhood.
Karen Gregory was killed in a small white house on the corner of Upton Street and 27th Avenue South. She was sexually battered and stabbed, and the intruder left very little evidence. One bloody footprint in the bathroom matched that of George Lewis, a catty-corner neighbor, a St. Petersburg firefighter and resident of Gulfport since his Little League days.
It took two years to get the conviction. Boxes of court documents and public records accumulated, several suspects were questioned. In 1987, Lewis was tried and found guilty of first-degree murder and sexual battery with a weapon.
The case was closed.
For many, it still lingers -- for neighbors who lost the sense of a tight-knit community, for firefighters who worked with Lewis until the day he was convicted, for the lawyer who has been working on the case for 19 years, and for Lewis who is serving a life sentence.
Nearly 20 years later Upton Street is still quiet. The two blocks are lined with one-story homes. A few brightly colored stucco houses stick out of the bunch. They are much newer and don’t have the white cast-iron rails, brick trim or screen doors to suggest the 50 years most of these places have existed. At night, the silence is broken only by dogs barking several blocks away and crickets chirping. The traffic is almost non-existent.
Vi Yakes, who lives on this street, is one of the few who have been there since 1984. Of the seven Upton Street residents who lived there for the past two decades, Yakes was the only one who spoke about the murder. One man was not home when reporters visited. The remaining five people refused to talk and closed their doors.
“I never really reached a conclusion,” Yakes said. “I didn’t think he could be that type of neighbor.” She said last year she questioned why she kept the old St. Petersburg Times articles about the murder.
On the night of the murder, several neighbors heard Gregory scream as her head was smashed through the jalousie window of her front porch, but no one called the police. Her body lay in a puddle of blood in the house for two days.
On Upton Street the memory casts a shadow 19 years long.
“I was a witness on that case,” said one woman as a look of horror fell over her face. “But I can’t talk about it, I’m sorry.”
She closed the door.
Attorney Bob Paver has defended George Lewis since the beginning of the trial. He believes Lewis is innocent and said he will continue defending him until Lewis is free. Paver has worked pro bono since he lost the first trial. He has appealed the case eight times, but each was denied. He has become so attached to this case that even after becoming general counsel at Jabil Circuits, an electronics company, he keeps Lewis’ files at his feet under his desk and works on the case weekly.
“I am here, he is not, that’s what is hard,” said Paver.
Lewis is serving a life sentence at the Tomoka Correctional Institution in Daytona Beach. Paver said Lewis spends much of his time reading to the blind, and designing fire trucks and crime scene vans, a longtime passion.
His petition for habeas corpus was denied by the federal court in Middle District of Florida, Tampa. In the next few months, the appeal will be heard in Atlanta at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Paver is hopeful but knows the process may take years.
“What is ironic is that I always felt like we were on the same side,” Paver said. “I always want the person involved to be held responsible. The difference is that they believe it was my client. I didn’t and still don’t.”
The books share the crammed shelves in the bookstore the same way the people of Gulfport are lumped into this little plot of land balanced on the tip of a peninsula. Both come in all colors and sizes, some young and some old -- each one telling a different story.
The one thing Jan Dutton, who owns Small Adventures Book Shop in Gulfport, can’t keep in stock is the one thing residents can’t forget. One of the most gruesome crimes the city has seen. Unanswered Cries, a book by Thomas French, a St. Petersburg Times reporter, chronicles the murder of Karen Gregory. It is the most popular book in the bookstore.
“They always sell,” Dutton says. “I thought that would end, but there are always new people coming and they always want to know. People still talk about it.”
This small bookshop in Gulfport has sold more than four times as many copies of Unanswered Cries as the nearest bookstore in St. Petersburg.
Dutton does not squeeze the book into an open slot of shifting novels and reading material. Unanswered Cries has its own place separate from the cramped bookshelves cluttering the tiny store. She keeps the book right behind the register -- accessible. It is always close.
The murder was bloody and left many questions. An intruder entered Karen Gregory’s house sometime late on May 23, 1984. She was sexually battered and stabbed several times in the throat. Lewis escaped through a window of her bedroom. And Gregory lay dead for two days before a neighbor found her. A weapon was never discovered, and all other evidence -- her clothing, a vaginal swab, the blood-stained hardwood floors -- produced no clues for investigators. The only thing they had was a footprint that matched Lewis’ and his inability to keep a consistent story.
Stephanie Bartolotta has called the house home for almost 10 years. Bartolotta keeps Unanswered Cries on her shelf above the fireplace. Before moving into the house, she didn’t know it was a crime scene from a decade earlier. No one told her about the murder until after she lived there.
Her new friend, Chris Ross, just moved catty-corner less than one year ago. She lives in the murderer’s house.
Ross said she had been meaning to go across the street to an elderly couple to collect the articles they have saved from the St. Petersburg Times. She loves history, and now that she knows she lives in the murderer’s house, she wants retrace the entire crime.
“You should talk to the older couple across the street,” said Ross as she pointed to a house just south of hers on the opposite side of the road.
The house across the street belongs to a thin man with a crackled voice and a woman in a housedress.
Did they remember the murder?
The door was already closed.