True Crime Report: Who's Keeping a 50-year Secret?

On October 31, 1969 police in St. Petersburg, Florida received a call about suspicious activity behind the Oyster Bar restaurant. Two men in a pick-up truck had driven up, unloaded a trunk, and left.

Police came to investigate, likely thinking this was nothing more than a Halloween prank or someone unloading junk they didn’t want. But upon opening the trunk they discovered they had a murder investigation on their hands.

A woman was found in the trunk, strangled to death and wrapped in plastic. She had no identification on her, and was listed as a “Jane Doe.” She had likely been dead for 2-3 days.

Detectives, including 34-year-old Paul Drolet, were assigned to the case. Now, this was 1969. Computer databases did not exist. Heck, computers themselves didn’t exist for this purpose. There were no surveillance cameras. There was no such thing as DNA testing. No, this would require old fashioned investigating.

The case was reported in the local news, and police received 50 calls from people who thought they might know the woman’s identity. All those leads were followed up on, and all were dead ends. 

They did have one hope, and that was that her fingerprints would identify her. Even in 1969, if you were arrested for a crime you were fingerprinted and those fingerprints were kept on file. They sent her fingerprints to the FBI in hopeful anticipation, but this too was a dead end.

Continuing to investigate, detectives checked missing persons reports in the area, but nothing matched. They also checked missing persons reports in the region. This was done by calling or mailing letters to various other agencies checking for open missing persons cases. Can you imagine the effort involved back then? Today a detective can, in minutes, check the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) database of all missing persons in the U.S. wtih one click.

The case of the “Trunk Lady,” as she became known, went cold. How sad that somewhere someone was surely missing her and here she was, buried as an unidentified Jane Doe.

But the St. Petersburg Police Department did not forget about her. In 2010 her body was exhumed in the hope that advances in DNA technology would yield her identity. Unfortunately, her DNA was too degraded after all those years to be able to be tested. Yet another dead end.

Finally, in 2022, a detective revisiting the case discovered a hair sample from the original autopsy in her case file. Perhaps it was the same lock of hair that Paul Drolet provided to a psychic in 1971 in a far flung, unsuccessful attempt to identify the Trunk Lady.

Whatever it was, it was available to be tested with current DNA technology, and finally, 53 years after her death, she was positively identified. Paul Drolet, now 87, attended the news conference announcing her identification. What that must have been like for him, after all these years.

Sylvia June Atherton was a 41-year-old wife and mother of five who had relocated to St. Petersburg from Tucson, AZ with her husband and three of her children in 1965.

Detectives located one of Sylvia’s children, Syllen Gates, who was 5 at the time of her mother’s move to Florida. Remaining in AZ with her father, she had never known what happened to her mother, where she was, or why she had not been in contact. Over time, Syllen assumed her mother was deceased, but she spent most of her life wondering about her mother.

While Sylvia’s now been identified, many questions remain about this case. Who were the two men who abandoned the trunk? Why did her husband not report her missing? Didn’t anyone in her life in Florida miss her or wonder what had happened to her? Was she working or known in her neighborhood, and one day she just vanished?

It’s likely her murder will never be solved. The most obvious suspect is of course her husband. He may have had nothing to do with her death – maybe she had left him and ran into trouble elsewhere – but police always start by looking at the spouse. Unfortunately he died in 1999, and took anything he might have known about her murder with him. 

Maybe her murderer, whoever it is, confessed somewhere along the way. People have a hard time keeping secrets. Perhaps someone is still alive who was told what happened. And even if one of the two men who abandoned the trunk was her husband, who was the other man? Maybe he is still alive and wants to finally stop keeping a 50-year secret. DNA did it’s job here and identified Sylvia. Hopefully that brings police one step closer to solving the case of the “Trunk Lady.”

Photo: St. Petersburg Police Department