FL FL - Kenneth Pierce, 41, Pensacola, 3 Oct 2005

http://www.al.com/news/mobileregister/index.ssf?/base/news/1136974524135740.xml&coll=3

Excerpt:
It was the second set of decomposed remains that Baldwin investigators have found in wooded areas of the county in the past few months.

On Oct. 3, a body was found near the unincorporated Seminole community east of Robertsdale. That body was later identified as Kenneth Clay Pierce, 41, of Pensacola. That case is considered a homicide and is still under investigation by the Baldwin County Sheriff's Office and Florida authorities, according to reports.

From October 2005:

http://www.gadsdentimes.com/article/20051015/NEWS/510150312

Authorities have identified a body found stuffed in a storage box dumped in rural south Alabama as a 34-year-old Kentucky man who had worked removing hurricane debris in Pensacola, Fla.

The body of Kenneth Clay Pierce was found Oct. 3 by highway workers in woods south of U.S. 90 in Seminole.

Baldwin County Coroner Huey Mack Sr. said Pierce apparently died from a blow to the head. Investigators ruled the death a homicide.

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From October 2007:

http://blog.al.com/pr/2007/10/man_in_a_box.html

The body of 44-year-old Kenneth Clay Pierce was found in this toolbox near the Seminole community in October 2005. Two years later, authorities said their leads in the homicide investigation have dried up and the case has gone cold...

Authorities were never able to track down Pierce's relatives, authorities said, which is why he was buried in a pauper's grave...

Anthony Lowery, a former investigator for the Baldwin County District Attorney's Office... said investigators had more than one strong suspect in the slaying but could never collect enough evidence to prosecute the case... They finally located "some people he had been around near the time of death," Lowery said. But they couldn't pinpoint the day Pierce had been killed. "That's a problem: establishing timelines," Lowery said. "Timelines are good indicators of a suspect. The longer you get away from that period, the harder those things are to track down."

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COLD CASE: Man killed and stuffed in tool box

SEMINOLE, Ala. (WKRG) - Who would beat a man to death with a bat, stuff his body in a two-by-three-foot plastic box, and throw that trunk on the side of a highway? Twelve years after the crime, police still don’t know.

October 3, 2005, east of Seminole on Highway 90, a road crew putting up some signs finds a plastic box in some woods just off the road.

“We were curious what was in the trunk,” one of the workers said at the time. “At first we thought it was an animal but we looked and saw pants, a belt, shirt, and knew it probably was a human body.”

It was a horribly gruesome discovery and it didn’t give investigators much to work with. There was no physical evidence at the scene and only a badly decomposed body inside the box.

The medical examiner determined the victim had been beaten to death - likely with a baseball bat - and found a wallet in the decaying mass.

[...]

“They chased down every lead they could at the time and there just wasn't anything there to prove that he did this,” Reid said.

So, 12 and a half years later the case remains unsolved.

“It certainly shocks the conscience a little bit to think there are people out there who was beat someone to death, put them in a box, and literally thrown them out on the side of the road,” said Reid. “And that’s why I say it is important that we make an arrest in this case, because what kind of person is that?”

With no family claiming his body, Pierce was buried in Foley.

Six years later, the Sheriff’s Office was contacted by a woman in Kentucky who said she was a distant cousin of Pierce and had stumbled upon the story on the internet.

http://www.wkrg.com/news/baldwin-county/cold-case-man-killed-and-stuffed-in-tool-box/1146977305

Photos of Kenneth Clay Pierce - Find A Grave...