4 Dark Histories of Tallahassee

By Trevor Durham on July 30, 2016

Bright Tallahassee is capital to the country’s most infamously screwy state. We hear the joke stories about drug users, political ramblings, and other hilarious anecdotes, but in this last year, the city’s darkest parts have been revealed. In the last six months, we’ve seen a resurgence in three of the most gruesome cases in the country, some of which lay unsolved. Below is a collection of the darkest parts of our Tallahassee capital’s legacy, dating back fifty years, and with the surrounding areas.

  1. The Unsolved Triple Homicide of the Sims (and possible cover-up) 

    -With the fifty year anniversary of Tallahassee’s biggest tragedy around the bend, and damning new evidence popping up this week, it may become time for you to research into a huge conspiracy surrounding the slaughter of a local family.

    The Sims house, in residential Tallahassee

    In October of 1966, Mr. and Mrs. Sims were found bound, gagged, and shot in their bedroom home along with their twelve year old daughter, also bound, gagged, shot, and stabbed twelve times, with her panties pulled down and signs of molestation. No money was stolen, and the crime remains unsolved.

    This marks what many call “the loss of Tallahassee’s innocence”- Halloween was all but cancelled, women began carrying ammonia filled water guns, and the first real show of inhuman violence the inner city had seen. “We woke up one morning and all of the sudden we were in an evil world.”

    The only prime suspects ever investigated seem to be a pastor, who had arguments with Mrs. Sims mere days before- his alibi is solid, with actual footage of him at the Florida State home football game at the time of the murder- and a young man who lived on the street behind the Sims.

    Here’s where the case takes an even grittier turn. The young man, whose name is on public record, was the son of a famed (and very beloved) FSU law professor. There are also rumors that he was set to be charged with the molestation of an underage girl- Joy Sims, the murdered 12 year old.

    A few decades passed, and the girlfriend of the young man (married, now divorced), came back to Tallahassee to speak with the leading officer of the Sims case. She told the officer that she had a ‘dream’ of the events in the Sims house, with statements as “I went in there and looked at that body,” “My God that kid with her clothes off lying on that floor…” and “How could he be interested in that ugly little girl?”

    The public was not informed that Joy Sims was found with her panties pulled down until 2006. The female suspect had divulged information unknown to the public.

    The late Tallahassee Sheriff Larry Campbell

    Where the theories delve into conspiracy is something Tallahassee has to stomach. The leading officer on the case, the late Larry Campbell, was a very new officer the night of the Sims murder. There is extensive evidence that his crime scene wasn’t well handled, and many feet went through that night. Yet only a couple years after, a short time for a major crime in a capital city, the Leon County Police told The Panama City New Herald that the case would remain unsolved barring a confession.

    Return to 1987’s near-confession. After all the statements, the female suspect asked Campbell what would happen if she confessed to being at the Sims house during the crime. Campbell told her that she would go to jail. She promptly halted her confession.

    It’s here that the case froze. Hard. No new evidence came up, but Campbell became Tallahassee’s sheriff and spoke on the crime many times.

    “I’ve done everything I think I can do; the big frustration is that I feel very confident that I know who did it,” he told the Tampa Bay Times in 2006. “I’m certain I have talked with the perpetrator many times, and it’s just a case of who gives in first,” he told the Tallahassee Democrat in 1999.

    The Sheriff passed away in 2014. Last week, Patricia Sunday said that she definitively knew the murderer. She claimed that when she was 19, a person confided in her the details of that night. When the person told her, she asked, “How could you possibly know this?”

    The informant began to back off and said, “I can’t talk about it… I must have dreamed it.”

    Where the case blurs once again is when Sunday says she believes Jeremy Mutz, an Assistant Leon County State Attorney, was fired as a result of his investigations into the Sims case. Mutz told WCTV that there is enough evidence in the file to name a suspect, and make an arrest. Sunday went on to say that she shared this information with the Sheriff 30 years prior, when Campbell was director of operations in the Sheriff’s office. She went “several times” and will not try again.

    What comes next for the Sims? This case may turn out to be protection of an FSU powerhead’s son and girlfriend, with ties inside of the cozy old-Tallahassee where it was born. It may be a murder with scarier times, even. Perhaps more evidence will surface in the coming weeks.

  2. Tallahassee’s Brush with Bundy-Ted Bundy, one of America’s most famous serial killers, spent his most violent night on Florida State University’s campus, and was caught right outside Tallahassee.Over a decade after the Sims massacre, Ted Bundy was well into his career as an evil murderer. In 1978, he arrived. Staying near FSU’s campus, he claimed to be on a job hunt while avoiding police, but quickly began shoplifting and purse snatching. A week after, in the early hours of January 15th, he broke into the back of Chi Omega sorority house. He beat Margaret Bowman with a piece of firewood, garroted her with a nylon stocking, then went to torture Lisa Levy with beating, strangulation, tearing off her skin, biting her, and sexually assaulting her with items in her room. He next went to Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler, breaking their jaws, cutting them and breaking bones.

    A picture inside the Chi Omega house.

    His entire attack took less than fifteen minutes, Tallahassee officers determined, before he had snuck back out, with more than thirty witnesses in the house. But he wasn’t done.

    He ran eight blocks to break into the basement apartment of Cheryl Thomas, dislocating her shoulder and fracturing her skull. She survived, but was deaf and her equilibrium was so damaged, her career as a dancer was ended.

    Bundy at trial.

    While he went on to terrorize further in Lake City, that night in Tallahassee is something even a horror movie couldn’t recreate. Pure horror of the human sort, violence and gore unimaginable. Bowman and Levy died before reaching the hospital. Chandler and Kleiner, blood pouring out of them, survived that night. Bundy, perhaps one of the cruelest men to ever live, was allowed to function as his own attorney. He called the girls from Leon County jail to depose them. They had to sit in a small cell with him, their nightmare embodied, as he grilled them to relive his attacks.

    An old image from the Bundy trial.

    Bundy was sentenced to death. Tallahassee, as the rest of the country, hopes he rots.

  3. Dozier School for Boys

    Graves outside of the School.

    -Florida’s Dozier School for Boys is located around an hour from Tallahassee, but still functions as a capital horror tale. The survivors, called “White House Boys”, came forward to tell their stories over the last decade and eventually got the institution closed. What happened there?

    Stories range. The state-run institution, a reformatory for young boys, had a small building they called ‘the White House’. It is here where they administered punishments. Jerry Cooper told NPR, “These were not spankings. These were beatings, brutal beatings.”

    NPR reported that 81 boys are known to have died here, but some estimate this number is egregiously low. Where the boys are buried? Unknown.

    A 2013 excavation for bodies.

    Many boys were sent to Dozier for random causes, charged with crimes when they were simply without family or run-aways. It was a death sentence.

    Although Dozier opened up west of Tallahassee over a century ago, the school has always been known for its horrid treatment of the boys. They would whip boys with leather straps, sometimes with metal attachments. Cooper reported that punishments were at random, that his first time in the White House he was given one hundred and thirty five lashes at 2 am.

    An interior shot of the White House.

    What sort of story is common-sort? Reports of children being put in machine dryers, being mauled, hogtying them over their cots for hours? A thirteen year old boy was sent to the school in 1938, dying only thirty eight days after his arrival. Leg-irons were a favorite of the staff members, as were bound-isolation. One inmate told of the existence of a ‘rape room’ for the boys, and that some of the White House victims were as young as nine.

    The school is now closed. This case, while over, does not have a happy ending. Too many of the boys are left without graves, unknown to their parents.

  4. All the Ones We Won’t Speak Of-Face the facts here. Tallahassee may have stories of massive injustice and horror, but the worst part of a city like this is the slow-encroachment of murder and deceit.

    Tallahassee at night

    Ted Bundy destroyed the Chi Omega house that night, but six monthes earlier, a Chi Omega girl had been raped, severely beaten, and left for dead in a field. That wasn’t a serial killer.

    We have a horrid case of brushing the actions of Florida State students under the radar to keep the institutes name clean. I spoke with a Tallahassee officer once who told me the story of a drunk student who had jumped a median at 3 am (on Tallahassee’s bustling Tennessee St.) and hit a pole, lightly. They came to him, cleaned him up, and sent him home. “What good would writing him up do for his life?”

    While The Hunting Grounds grossly misrepresented facts, they bring up a good case for the local handling of rape allegations towards football players.

    The late Dan Markel.

    Shall we even bring up the on-going Merkel case, wherein a hired assassin killed an FSU professor? From Tallahassee to Miami, that case gets crazier each day.

Tallahassee is a dark city, with a darker history than we embrace. So long as we sweep horror under the rug, it will continue to surprise us. If we start to deal with them, perhaps we can make change for the future of this grand city.

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