20 years have passed since Cindy Lee disappeared. In searching for an update, I ran across this article written when she had been missing for 18 years...
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Case of Missing Winter Haven Woman Remains Active
Wednesday, October 5, 2005
By Dana Willhoit
The Ledger
Dana Willhoit
Courts Reporter
In a photo:
Carrol Sparrow, left, sits at his dining room table with wife Elsie, center, and daughter Debra Lucas, and displays a 1980s photo of his three eldest children -- Cindy Lee Smith, left, Daryl Sparrow and Debra. The photo is the last taken of Cindy before she was last seen in April 1987.
William Donald Taylor, her boyfriend, told sheriff's detectives that Smith and he were getting along just fine. But the last time he saw her she told him she was going to Daytona Beach, and she got into a car with a man he didn't know and left.
Her family doesn't believe it.
"She would not leave us like that," her mother, Elsie Sparrow, said recently.
According to Elsie and Carrol Sparrow, Smith's parents, Smith and her son. Shane (from Cindy's ex-husband, Wayne Smith), were living with Taylor in Winter Haven at the time.
Smith told her parents that she was leaving Taylor. She asked them whether she and Shane could move in with them; they were supposed to meet her at the house she shared with Taylor that weekend to help her move her things.
On Friday, April 3, 1987, co-workers at Kmart on Havendale Boulevard saw Smith get into Taylor's car, and the two drove away, according to Detective Ivan Navarro of the Polk County Sheriff's Office.
Navarro is a member of the sheriff's cold case squad, and Smith's case is one that he's actively working.
Smith never called her parents that weekend.
"I figured she changed her mind," Elsie Sparrow said, sitting at her kitchen table and gently touching a framed picture of her daughter. In the picture Smith is smiling, frozen in time, her brown hair styled in a Farrah Fawcett flip.
But on Monday, April 6, Elsie got a telephone call that filled her with fear.
Smith's supervisor at Kmart called and asked why Smith hadn't shown up at work.
"When she was missing, I was afraid immediately that something had happened to her," Elsie said.
Elsie and Carrol felt that their daughter's case was ignored by the Sheriff's Office at the time. They called to report her missing as soon as Smith's supervisor called them, Carrol said, but no one from the Sheriff's Office came to speak to them for three weeks.
When the sheriff's deputies came, Elsie said, they acted as if they thought Smith just left on her own.
About a month after Smith disappeared, Carrol said, he heard that Taylor was selling Smith's things in the front yard of the home they shared.
He went over to her house with a male relative and they searched the house, Carrol said. They found Smith's mattress, bloodstained, inside the house.
They immediately called the Sheriff's Office, and the Sheriff's Office collected the mattress.
There were tests done on the mattress, but they were only to determine blood type, because forensic science wasn't as advanced in 1987, Navarro said. The mattress eventually was discarded in the 1990s, with no samples preserved, and the blood tests that were done at the time couldn't be used to determine identity, Navarro said.
Her family did everything they could think of to look for her, Elsie said. "We called all of her friends that I could think of. We put ads in the paper. We handed out flyers. We hired a private detective, but he never turned up anything."
Their frantic search failed to find any sign of Smith. Shane went to live with Smith's ex-husband Wayne. Smith seems to have vanished off the face of the Earth.
"At the time there was such a sense of urgency," her mother said. "We felt like if we didn't find her right away, something would happen to her. Now we know that something did happen."
After all this time, her family is sure she's dead. In fact, Detective Navarro recently took DNA samples from Elsie and Carrol Sparrow so he could compare it to a Florida database of Jane and John Does -- unidentified bodies that have been found over the years.
He plans to start questioning people close to the case as well. As for Cindy's ex-boyfriend William Taylor, Navarro will say only "He's a person of interest."
Telephone messages left for Taylor seeking comment for this article were not returned.
Over the years, the Sparrow family seems to have lived under a black cloud of tragedy. Smith's 15-year-old sister died in a traffic accident. And, in a bizarre and horrible coincidence, Smith is not the only missing person in the family. The 4-year-old son of Smith's sister, Debra, went missing in 1985, two years before Smith disappeared.
Debra was living in Winter Haven at the time and had just gone through a divorce. She let her ex-husband's sister, Delany Davison, care for her three children in Decatur, Ill., according to a Ledger article from October 1985.
Davison told police that she went into a supermarket one day and left 4-year-old T.J. Davison in the car for about half an hour, with the doors unlocked. When she came out, she told police, T.J. was gone.
He's never been found, and Decatur police still consider the case to be open.
Smith's family is still hoping that somehow, they'll get some answers to what happened to her. Perhaps whoever took Smith is feeling remorse after all this time, or perhaps the person talked about it with someone else.
Anyone with any information is asked to call Crimestoppers at 1-800-266-TIPS. Callers can remain anonymous and can receive cash rewards for tips that lead to an arrest.
Dana Willhoit can be reached at
dana.willhoit@theledger.com or 863-802-7550.
ABOUT THIS SERIES
"Not Forgotten: Polk's Unsolved Murders" is a periodic series focusing on unsolved homicide cases being examined by Polk County's Cold Case Assessment Team and the Polk County Sheriff's Office.
Anyone with any information regarding this or any other unsolved homicide should visit the team's Web site,
www.coldcaseteam.com, or call the Polk County Sheriff's Office Crimestoppers at 800-226-TIPS (8477).
Source:
TheLedger.com
LINK:
http://core.insightexpressai.com/ad...ID%3dN4359.mediaspan%26creativeID%3d23407169&
