The first desecration was discovered on July 12, 1957, by a groundskeeper at Roberts Cemetery on Creighton Road. A half-ton slab protecting the grave of a recently deceased woman had been moved to the side and the grave was opened. The woman's clothing was, according to reports, "disheveled."
Authorities converged on the scene and found that the body of the woman, a 22-year-old who died during a recent child birth, was soaked from the previous night's rain. Her right leg had been pulled up and was dangling over the edge of the coffin.
On July 15 at nearby Whitmire Cemetery, a man went to visit the grave of his recently deceased wife, clutching flowers for her grave. When he arrived at her burial site, he was horrified. Her grave's slab had also been removed. Her pajamas, the report said, had been pulled down.
The local sheriff called a press conference and ordered sex criminals rounded up and his deputies to "check all haunts or dives where odd ball character congregate." Patrols of the cemeteries commenced and things quieted down.
But on Feb. 23, 1958, a woman visiting the Whitmire Cemetery found the desecrated grave of a young girl who had been killed by an automobile on Nine Mile Road only a few months earlier. The slab, this time 1,200 pounds, had been moved, the lid of the casket smashed, and her clothes tampered with.
A reward for the ghoul's capture rose to $1,500, nearly $17,000 in today's money. But that was not the end.
On March 8, 1958, a woman visiting her husband's grave found a nearby gravesite had been disturbed and notified authorities. The body of an 11-year-old girl was missing, removed by the ghoul.
A team of deputies and other law officials began searching the cemetery and found nothing. A city patrolman arrived on his horse Trigger to search near the cemetery, which was surrounded by thickets of brush and bushes and swamp land to the northwest. About 250 yards away, in that swampy area, the body was found on the edge of the swamp. Her clothes were described, again, as "disheveled" but this time matches were found next to the girl's body.
Her body was taken to a mortuary for an examination. Doctors found that lipstick and rouge that had been applied to the girl before burial had been wiped away.
They also found that her body had been burned, and authorities speculated that's what the matches were used for.
No one was ever prosecuted. Jacki Wilson, a retired archivist for the University of West Florida Historic Trust, who has relatives buried at Whitmire Cemetery, "has heard whispers and theories too, though no suspect was every publicly named."
"There was some lore that it was a prominent person, though I never heard a name," she said. "It was all hushed and I have nothing to back that up, but it was just something that came down through the years. Either way, it was horrible if you have family members here."
A file obtained from the Sheriff's Office by a local newspaper showed that the Sheriff had, over the years, investigated several leads, including a similar incident from Feb. 18, 1965. In that case,
Dirt had been removed down to the casket boards and the casket of Maxine Cooper, a Black female around 47, opened. Investigator Otis Davis wrote the clothes had been disarranged, and her slip “had been pulled up exposing the pelvic area,” and the “area of clothing around the breasts apparent molested.” A shovel was found near the grave. Cooper had been buried four days earlier.
The Benboe Funeral Home told the investigator that the woman had been sick a long time and had died at home. No jewelry had been buried with the body. An additional examination found the body had no indications of being mutilated or disfigured. The file had no additional information on the crime.
No more reports of grave robberies were in the folder, but the documents did contain a sheet of paper with this note—“This case has not been cleared—it is filed with murder cases—do not destroy. Ghoul of Whitmire Cemetery.”
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