A passing motorist, thinking that the women might need help, pulled over and offered assistance. He noticed that the blonde was not only bleeding but also very drunk. When she asked him for a lift, he thought better of it and refused, whereupon Lee became angry and abusive. The man drove away, but he phoned the Orange Springs Fire Department and told them about the injured woman.
Two emergency vehicles were dispatched to the scene and, when they arrived, Lee denied that they had been in the car. ‘I don’t know anything about any accident,’ she snarled. ‘I want people to stop telling lies and leave us alone.’
At 9.44pm, Trooper Rickey responded to the emergency call and found the car. (It was not until almost two months later that homicide detectives learned exactly where the Sunbird had first crashed, or heard the account given by Rhonda and Jim Bailey.) Marion County’s Deputy Lawing was dispatched to investigate the abandoned, smashed-up vehicle. The vehicle identification number was checked, revealing that the missing Peter Siems was the owner. Bloody prints were found in the vehicle, and there were bloodstains on the fabric of the seats and on the door handles.
Items removed from the car by the police included Busch and Budweiser beer cans as well as Marlborough cigarettes and two beverage cosies. They were traceable to EMRO store number 8237, a Speedway truck stop and convenience store at SR 44 and I-75, close to the on-and-off ramps in Wildwood. The same EMRO store and truck stop would later feature in the murder of Charles Humphreys. Peter Siems and his wife were missionaries. They neither drank nor smoked, so the two beverage cosies did not belong to him. Underneath the front passenger seat lay a bottle of Windex window spray with an Eckerd drug store price label attached to it. This ticket was easily traceable to a store on Gordon Street in Atlanta, Georgia. Relatives also stated that the couple had never travelled to Atlanta but that Peter would probably pass close to the city en route to Arkansas.
Peter Siems had borrowed his son Stefan’s suitcase for his trip. Stefan Siems later recognised it among the loot found in Lee’s storage lock-up.
By now a police artist had drawn composites of the two women based on descriptions given by witnesses of the incident with the Sunbird. Armed with these sketches and the bottle of Windex, the investigators travelled to Atlanta to question the manager of the Eckerd drug store. Viewing the pictures, he recalled two women – identical to Lee and Tyria – entering his store on a Friday night. ‘We are in a bad part of town in a predominantly black area, and white people do not venture into this area after dark,’ he said. The police learned that the two women also purchased cosmetics and a black box of Trojan condoms – the same brand as those found near the body of David Spears and inside his car.
Fridays for June 1990 following Siems’s murder fell on the 8th, 15th, 22nd and 29th respectively. On which of those days were the two women together in Siems’s car when they purchased the Windex window spray, condoms and cosmetics in Atlanta? As Lee confirmed, she only drove to Atlanta once, and that was with Siems. She also confirmed that he was shot dead there. For her part, Tyria has denied ever travelling to Atlanta with Lee.
By the time 55-year-old Siems had reached the truck stop at Wildwood, he would have been tired and in need of a fuel top-up and refreshments. It is while here, I suggest, that he was approached by Lee and Tyria who had just purchased beer and the two cosies. From Wildwood, I suggest that the threesome – Siems, Lee and Tyria – headed north up I-75, crossed the state line into Georgia and continued on to Atlanta where they stopped at the Eckerd store. We know that the two women were at the Eckerd store on a Friday night because the manager identified them from composite drawings. Whether Siems was still alive at this point, or was murdered shortly afterwards, we may never know.
John Wisnieski of the Jupiter Police had been working on the case since Siems was reported missing. He sent out a nationwide Teletype containing descriptions of the two women, and he also sent a synopsis of the case, containing descriptions of the two females together with the sketches, to the Florida Criminal Activity Bulletin. Then he waited. He was not optimistic about finding Siems alive. The man’s body had not been found, his credit cards had not been used and money had not been withdrawn from his bank account.
But what of the bloody fingerprints found in the wrecked Sunbird? The police knew that the owner of the car had vanished without trace – he had been reported as missing some three weeks before the crash on 4 July. A missing-person report had been circulated and a copy held on the Florida Department of Law Enforcement computer. Now police had found the vehicle smashed up and two women had fled the scene in more-than-suspicious circumstances. But did the police run a fingerprint check through their own department at Orange Springs, or through the Florida Department of Law Enforcement? No, they did not.
CHAPTER EIGHT
EUGENE ‘TROY’ BURRESS
HE PHYSICALLY ATTACKED ME… AND HE WAS… HE LAUGHED. HE PULLED OUT A $10 BILL AND SAID, ‘THIS ALL YOU FUCKING DESERVE, YOU FUCKING WHORE’… LIKE THAT. AND I SAID, ‘WAIT,’ AND THEN HE JUST… HE THREW THE FUCKING MONEY DOWN AND I WAS STANDING IN FRONT OF THE TRUCK HERE, AND HE HAD THE DOOR OPEN HERE, AND HE JUST CAME… DIDN’T KNOW I HAD A GUN OR ANYTHING. HE CAME AT ME. WE WERE FIGHTING. AND, UH, WHEN I GOT AWAY FROM HIM, AND I RAN BACK TO THE TRUCK, AND I HAD MY GUN IN THE BACK, AND I RAN IN THE BACK REAL QUICK, AND HE… NOW, WE’RE STILL FIGHTING, AND SOMEHOW HE… I KICKED HIM OR SOMETHING. HE BACKED AWAY AND I PULLED MY GUN OUT AND I SAID, ‘YOU BASTARD,’ AND I THINK I SHOT HIM RIGHT IN THE STOMACH OR SOMETHING.
Ever-smiling Eugene ‘Troy’ Burress celebrated his fiftieth birthday in January 1990. A short, slightly built, blonde-haired man with a natural gift for the gab, he was employed as a part-time salesman for the Gilchrist Sausage Company in Ocala, a resort town in northern Florida where he lived with his wife Rose. Ocala is just 15 miles from Orange Springs, close to where the two women crashed Peter Siems’s car.
Troy had formerly owned a pool-cleaning company, Troy’s Pools, in Boca Raton on the south-east coast between West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale, but it went bust and the couple had moved to Ocala in 1989. Everyone liked Troy, who was now resigned to his new life. He had only one gripe: the lack of air-conditioning in his truck.
On Monday, 30 July 1990, Burress set out on Gilchrist company business. He would be travelling the Daytona route, which took him to several customers throughout central Florida. His last planned stop was to have been Salt Springs in Marion County, part of the extensive Indian reservation area and within a spit of Orange Springs where Lee and Tyria crashed Siems’s Pontiac Sunbird, and close to where Lee dumped David Spears’s truck.
When he failed to report at his office after work, Gilchrist manager Mrs Jonnie Mae Thompson was concerned. She started calling around the various customers and discovered that Burress had failed to show up for his last delivery. He had made the drop at Seville along SR 17; after that he vanished. Now Jonnie knew that something was very wrong. If he had broken down he would have phoned in, or used the American Automobile Association to help him out. He had done neither, so she immediately went out in search of him.