The Walker Family Murders on This Day in History

 

This day in history: On this day in 1959, Christine and Cliff Walker and their two children were murdered at their home in Osprey, Florida. The case is still unsolved.

Authorities believe that 24-year-old Christine Walker arrived at the family's farm home around 4 pm on Saturday, December 19, 1959, where she was raped, then murdered by gunshot. Her husband Cliff, 25, then arrived with their 3-year-old son Jimmie and 1-year-old daughter Debbie. Cliff was ambushed and killed by gunshot. Jimmie and Debbie were then murdered. Jimmie was shot, and Debbie was shot in addition to being drowned in the bathtub. The actual cause of death is unknown, and she could have been shot in the bathtub. News stories noted there were gifts around the Christmas tree.

Physical evidence left at the scene included a bloody cowboy boot, a cellophane strip from a Kool cigarette wrapper, and a fingerprint on the bathtub faucet handle.

A serial killer named Emmett Monroe Spencer confessed to the murders, but the confession was discredited by Sarasota County Sheriff Ross Boyer, who labeled Spencer a pathological liar. Spencer's confession was "determined to be cleverly constructed from real murders written up in newspapers and true-crime novels that he liked to read." In 1994, a bartender in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania contacted the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office, claiming that one of her customers had boasted of killing the Walker family; this tip was never verified.

Police never identified a motive, and 587 people were suspects at one time or another.

In 2012, the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office began investigating possible links between the Walker family murders and Perry Smith and Richard "Dick" Hickock, who had been convicted and executed for the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. The Clutter murders were the topic of Truman Capote's 1965 best-selling true crime book In Cold Blood. While that book devoted several pages to the Walker case, it dismissed a possible connection to Hickock and Smith, asserting that the two men had an alibi for that day. 

In August 2013, the Sarasota County Sheriff's office announced they were unable to find a match between the DNA of either Perry Smith or Richard Hickock with the samples in the Walker family murder.

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