Elizabeth Swanson was thirty-eight years old and had a nine-year-old son with her husband Peter. The couple owned a coin laundry and dry-cleaning business called Palm Cleaners in Coquina Key, Florida.
On February 11th, 2000, Elizabeth was working at the establishment, filling in for an employee who had called in sick. At around four in the afternoon, someone entered the business and attacked Elizabeth in the back room, beating her savagely in the head before robbing the till and fleeing the scene.
A customer discovered the injured woman a short time later and called an ambulance. Elizabeth was transported to Bayfront Medical Center but died of her injuries only hours later.
A few months after the murder, police brought in her husband Peter for questioning, but he was eventually ruled out as a suspect. At around the same time, authorities also looked into the possibility that Elizabeth might have been killed by the then twenty-three-year-old Michael Tanzi, who was arrested in April 2000 in Key West and charged with strangling a woman in Miami. He also admitted to beating a Massachusetts woman to death while she was working at a laundry business. Investigators conceded that he was upfront about the two crimes he’d committed, but he denied killing Elizabeth Swanson, even though he was in the Tampa Bay area at the time of the slaying.
The case has since gone cold.
Crime Immemorial 