ST. LUCIE COUNTY, Fla. — For nearly four decades, a Treasure Coast family has wondered who killed their loved ones. Then recently, a potential answer surfaced. However, justice was denied to the family due in part to the degradation of evidence.
“I really wish it would have come out different,” Charlene Trager said.
Trager thumbed through weathered newspaper clippings from a terrible time in 1985. She was 13.
“Still hard to think about that moment,” she said. “It was a very raw moment.”
She was told her uncle, Michael Pritchett, had been shot and killed along with his fiancée, Teresa Whitmire.
“He was the only male on the planet I felt safe around,” Trager said.
Their bodies were found in a home between Port St. Lucie and Fort Pierce. The trail for the couple’s killer went cold over the years.
However, in 2020, St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office Detective Paul Taylor brought out the case file to give it a fresh set of eyes.
“Once I started going through that case,” he said. “I started finding a lot of information about a possible suspect.”
Taylor found that some anonymous tips had come in a few years after the crime, with information that had never been made public.
“This guy slipped through the cracks in the ‘80s?" WPTV's Jon Shainman said.
"He absolutely did,” Taylor said.
Taylor, who along with retired State Attorney Bruce Colton, have closed seven cold-cases, and hoped to do the same with this one.
“Whenever I go through these cases, I treat them as if they happened yesterday,” he said. “I disregard anything other detectives came up with suspects, because I don’t want to get tunnel vision with somebody they thought was the suspect.”
Taylor said only 7% of law enforcement agencies have cold case departments full time. Only 2% of cold cases are eventually solved.
Taylor’s work led him to a trailer home in Hall County Georgia, where he came face to face with the man he believes committed the murders over a $90 drug debt.
“He had never been interviewed, which I thought was just strange,” he said. “I’ve been in law enforcement a long time and you hear ‘their face turned white.’ This is the first time I really saw it.”
The suspect denied he knew the murdered couple.
Taylor took what he had gathered to both local and state prosecutors, but could not get an arrest warrant due in part to the degradation of evidence.
“The State Attorney’s Office said this guy did it but there’s not enough there,” he said. “All of these witnesses that came forward, they’re all dead.”
Learning the suspect was in poor health is of small comfort to Trager.
“Our whole family feels he shouldn’t get a pass just because he’s sick. He had 38 years of Christmas, birthdays that Mike and Teresa didn’t get,” she said. “It was almost like it opened an old wound by telling us you have somebody but you’re not going to prosecute him.”
While the case is officially closed. It is not closed in Taylor’s mind.
“We pushed and pushed, we pushed as far as it could go,” he said.
And for now, it goes no farther--an unsatisfying conclusion.
“That’s almost worse than not knowing who he was,” Trager said.
