Not long after the end of the 1980s and the dawn of a new decade, an elderly woman looking forward to a sunny Florida retirement would instead turn up murdered in her own home.
Sixty-seven-year-old Eileen Jones had only moved to Gainesville, in north Florida, in 1989. She had always been something of a loner, and had never married; she lived with her two cats in a mobile home off Archer Road, and largely kept to herself, though she had several friends in the neighborhood.
On the morning of Saturday, January 13th, 1990, these friends noticed that the door to her trailer was standing wide open, and they thought they had better go investigate. Now that they thought about it, in fact, none of them had seen Eileen around for a couple of days.
As soon as the neighbors peered inside, they understood why: Eileen was lying face down on the floor of her bedroom, and she wasn’t moving.
When police arrived, they found that the victim had been strangled and possibly sexually assaulted. There were signs of a struggle in the home, and the sheets were missing from Eileen’s bed.
Authorities honed in on a person of interest rather quickly. This suspect has not been named, but he was known to have committed sexual battery on another older woman in Lantana, Florida, and shortly after moving to Gainesville, was arrested again for sexual battery, this time on an elderly woman who lived in the Wind Meadows mobile home park, the same park that Eileen lived in.
While investigators were certain that this was their man, they did not have the technology to prove it definitively in 1990, and the individual in question has since passed away, leaving the murder of Eileen Jones officially unresolved.
Crime Immemorial 