Crime Immemorial

In early February of 1990, in central Florida, a young woman was likely abducted from the store where she was working. The victim’s remains were never found, and it is uncertain whether the disappearance is related to several other convenience store clerk murders occurring throughout central Florida at the time.

Twenty-six-year-old Deborah Poe had just moved to the Orlando area from her native Virginia less than a year before, and shared an apartment with a friend by the name of Lori Tillman. During the day, Deborah worked as a retail sales associate for the Orlando Sentinel, and by night she worked the graveyard shift at the Circle K store at Hall Road and Aloma Avenue. Her family had tried to discourage her from keeping such late hours at the convenience store, citing the dangers she could face and the little time she had for sleep, but Deborah was working hard to save money; she was planning on buying a house in nearby Volusia County, and she wanted some seed money set aside to get her catering business off the ground.

On the evening of February 3rd, 1990, Deborah arrived at the store for her usual shift at a little before eleven p.m. Her boyfriend, Scott Iaggi, also worked at the Circle K; his shift ended as Deborah’s began. He had also warned Deborah about working alone at the store, particularly because of the regular creeps and weirdos that would often harass her; for a time, in fact, he had actually worked the same shift as she did, to keep an eye on her. Eventually she told him that she didn’t need his protection, however, and he switched to an earlier shift. He was still in the habit of dropping by every few hours to check on her, though.

Shortly after Deborah started work, another friend of hers dropped by to chat about some house plans. And two hours later, Scott drove by the store and saw Deborah inside, standing behind the counter. Another friend passed the Circle K at about three a.m., and also saw Deborah working as usual.

But a brief time after this sighting, something mysterious and tragic must have occurred. According to a woman who entered the store between three-fifteen and three-thirty a.m. to buy some cigarettes, there wasn’t a young woman working behind the counter at the time she came in. Instead, there was a tall, thin young man with dark hair, dark eyes, and a black Megadeth t-shirt standing behind the counter. The woman asked him for cigarettes, and the young man rang up her purchase, although the witness later told police that the man had seemed uncertain about the location of the cigarettes she wanted. He didn’t seem to have any problems using the cash register, however, so the woman simply assumed that he was a new clerk, and didn’t think much more about it.

At four in the morning, yet another customer walked into the store, and found no one at all, either working or shopping. The cash register was locked and untouched, a Circle K employee smock was neatly folded behind the counter, and a bottle of chocolate milk and a partially drunk cup of coffee was still sitting on top of a small pile of house plans. But Deborah Poe, as well as the enigmatic “Megadeth Man,” had completely vanished.

When authorities arrived, they found that Deborah’s new red Toyota was still parked out back, and contained Deborah’s purse, keys, and paycheck in the back seat. Tracking dogs were brought to the site to try to determine where Deborah might have gone, and the dogs indicated that she had probably either walked willingly or been taken through a gap in the wooden fence behind the store that led to the parking lot of an adjacent apartment complex then called The Shoals. After that, though, the dogs lost the trail, suggesting that Deborah had perhaps been herded into a vehicle and driven away.

The mystifying disappearance was never solved, and the identity of the young man reportedly working the counter in Deborah’s absence was never established. Some reports at the time claimed that there had also been a black van in the parking lot with a Megadeth mural painted on the side, but this has never been substantiated, and seems somewhat unlikely, as such a vehicle would have made it much easier for law enforcement to locate the phantom clerk.

Though police were seeking the man as a suspect in the initial stages of the investigation, they later stated that they believed the man might have only been a witness, and not the actual kidnapper. They further implied that he may have been a boyfriend of another Circle K employee who had perhaps filled in on his girlfriend’s shift from time to time and thus would have known his way around a convenience store cash register.

In August of 1990, a set of skeletal remains was discovered only two miles from the store from which Deborah disappeared, but it was later found that the body was not hers.

In spring of 2002, authorities announced that they had a suspect in the case, and undertook a massive search of a plot of ground behind the Chapel Hill Baptist Church, only about three-and-a-half miles from the Circle K. Despite their efforts, however, Deborah’s remains eluded them once again, and she has still not been found.

Interestingly, detectives noted at the time that their suspect lived near the church whose grounds they had searched. One individual who lived across the street from the church at the time was Deborah’s boyfriend, Scott Iaggi, though as of this writing, he has never been charged, and it is not known whether he was involved with her disappearance.

It should be noted as well that there was a string of fairly similar workplace abductions taking place in the area at around the same time as Deborah Poe’s disappearance. For example, on August 6th of 1989, a twenty-nine-year-old pregnant convenience store clerk named Donna Callahan was abducted from her store in Gulf Breeze, though in her case, the perpetrators were eventually captured: William Alex Wells and his half-brother, suspected serial killer Mark Riebe, were arrested years after the crime and led police to Donna’s remains. Both men received life sentences.

And on the night of September 18th, 1989, thirty-six-year-old clerk Darlene Messer was kidnapped from the Suwannee Swifty convenience store in Lake City amid signs of a struggle and evidence of a robbery. Two days later, her body was discovered face down in the water beneath Swift Creek Bridge. She had been bludgeoned to death, though notably, one newspaper reported the cause of death as a single gunshot to the back of the head.

And only a day after Darlene was taken, another woman fell victim to the same type of crime. Fifty-year-old Eileen Mangold was the manager of a gas station in Riverview, Florida who was abducted during a robbery on the evening of September 19th. Her body was found only hours later; she had been raped and bludgeoned to death. A man named Franklin Alfred Smith was arrested and tried for the murder in 1999; he was a career criminal who lived near the store from which Eileen was abducted, and his fingerprints were discovered on Eileen’s car. Smith was ultimately acquitted of the murder, but investigators still consider him the prime suspect.

Whether some or all of these murders and disappearances were linked remains a mystery.