THE WALKER FAMILY MASSACRE
Don McLeod got up at 5:30am on December 20th, 1959 in Osprey, Florida and headed over to his friend Cliff Walker’s place so they could go out together to hunt wild hogs. The house was dark as McLeod approached, but as he got closer, he saw a light flickering through the window. Worrying that the family had succumbed to a gas leak, he broke in with his pocket knife. He caught a glimpse of Cliff’s wife Christine’s feet on the floor, toes pointed toward the ceiling. Near her lay the bodies of Cliff and their three-year-old son Jimmie. The floors were soaked with their blood. McLeod didn’t know it at the time, but one-year-old Debbie was also dead in the bathroom. This week on Out of the Past: The Walker Family Massacre.
The day before, the Walker family had driven into nearby Sarasota to run errands. They did some grocery shopping, then visited a couple of car lots to look for a new vehicle. After lunch, they went to the McLeods’. (The Walkers and McLeods were both employed by the wealthy Palmer family, on whose ranch land they both lived.) Cliff and Don went hunting, while Christine and Don’s wife Lucy stayed behind with the children. Christine asked Lucy if she could use their telephone. Lucy wasn’t one to eavesdrop, so all she remembered from hearing one side of her friend's conversation was that at one point they were talking about exchanging their current car.
Christine left a few minutes before 3:30, but Cliff had some chores to finish with Don. The children also stayed behind to watch. Considering how far away the Walkers lived, and the fact that Christine stopped to put air in the tires, it’s likely she would have arrived home around 4.
A while later, Cliff and the children were invited to stay at the McLeods’ for dinner, but he declined, wanting to get home to his wife. He took off with Jimmie and Debbie in a jeep that could be used by any of the Palmer Ranch hands. They also stopped to put air in the tires, and probably arrived home at about 4:30.
Christine’s car wasn’t parked in its usual spot, where it would have been most convenient to unload the groceries. Instead, it was parked a car’s width to one side, possibly indicating that another car was parked in her usual spot when she arrived.
Cliff didn’t take the time he would ordinarily take to unload the cattle feed he had bought in town before going inside. This could have been because he was curious or concerned about the other car, but he can’t have been too worried, as he left his loaded shotgun in the back of the jeep.
He was shot from a considerable distance as he entered his home. The bullet killed him instantly. It is strange to think about this being almost a blessing, but it did keep him from seeing what happened to his wife and children.
Three-year-old Jimmie entered the house at the same time as his father and was also shot. Blood evidence suggests that he wasn’t killed by the first bullet and that the assailant continued to shoot at him while he crawled over to be next to his father’s body.
The assailant covered little Debbie’s face with Jimmie’s hat and shot her in the head, failing to kill her. Out of bullets, he took her to the bathroom, where he had filled the tub. He drowned the toddler in this water.
Either before or after Cliff and the children arrived—it’s unclear which—the attacker forced Christine into Jimmie’s room, where she was raped and shot in the head. The bullet only brushed against the side of her skull; she died of a gunshot wound to the chest, though it is unknown if the shot came during the original struggle or some time afterward. At some point the assailant moved her body to the living room and made attempts to clean up the scene.
Many people assume that Christine was the main reason the killer was there in the first place. One assumption is that he was already waiting for her when she got there and that he was the one who was parked in her usual spot. Another is that it might have been someone she knew and voluntarily let in. She wasn’t accosted immediately as she entered her home. She had time to hang up her purse and start putting the groceries away. But evidence suggests that it wasn’t too long before the attack began. A bloodied high heel shoe was found at the scene, suggesting that Christine fought hard against her attacker, and possibly injured him.
When Don discovered the bodies of the Walker family, he was heartbroken and terrified. He ran from the house and jumped into the jeep, as his own truck had a trailer attached and he needed to get to a telephone as fast as possible. And he did move extraordinarily quickly. The police heard about what had happened by around 5:45 that morning. Sarasota Police sent out county deputies to investigate. Don met the deputies at a local grocery and led them to the horrifying scene. Deputies were already working hard in the Walker home when the sheriff arrived.
Unfortunately, the sheriff noticed when he walked in that several things had been done to contaminate the crime scene. Tire tracks from the mystery car were likely gone now that there was a police vehicle parked in its place. Some fingerprints and shoe prints were found on the property, but even more contamination was revealed when one of the boot prints was proven to have come from a county-issued sheriff’s deputy boot. The best piece of evidence they obtained was the semen sample left behind from Christine’s rape, though that kind of bodily fluid was of no use to police in 1959. Somehow, they still made the smart decision to store the sample, in hopes of greater technology coming along.
Shell casings were found at the site, but the murder weapon was never retrieved. Robbery was ruled out pretty quickly, though some things were taken from the house. They weren’t valuable items: Cliff’s pocket knife, his cigarettes, and most strangely, Christine’s beloved drum majorette uniform she was saving in a chest so her daughter Debbie could wear it one day.
The Walker family was laid to rest in Arcadia, Florida on December 22, 1959.
Now, this case remains officially unsolved and will likely stay that way forever. I’m going to go over a few of the main suspects, then tell you a little bit about my own personal theory. Keep in mind that over 500 suspects have been questioned since 1959.
The first person worth talking about is Don McLeod, the man who found the bodies. Some authorities were positive he was the perpetrator, and throughout the history of this case, he was a favorite suspect for many, although his window of time to commit the crime was small. Having McLeod take a few polygraphs was the extent of officials’ investigation of him in the fifties and sixties. These polygraph machines were outrageously unreliable and weren’t administered by experts, but DNA eliminated all suspicion when they tested the semen in 2005 and McLeod didn’t match.
Emmett Monroe Spencer was a multi-murderer who was captured some time after the Walker massacre. Though he is thought to have committed several murders, he was only actually convicted of one. In He went on a killing spree in 1959, confessing after his capture. He confessed to everything, even crimes with which he was obviously uninvolved. He implicated an old girlfriend in his confessions, speaking specifically about her in his confession for the Walker murders. Spencer actually got a lot of things right in his confession, so at first listen, authorities thought it must be true. With a little investigation, however, it was determined that so much information had been leaked to the media that any civilian could have that kind of knowledge of the crime. This line of investigation stopped when police confirmed that he wasn’t even in Florida on the day of the Walker murders.
Some try to blame the attack on Christine. Many people at the time thought Christine dressed too provocatively, and because of that, was likely cheating on her husband. After the murder, rumors flew around that Christine was having an affair with Curtis McCall. The only information we have about Christine’s romantic life comes from tabloids, so we should obviously take this with a grain of salt. Not to mention this type of slut-shaming and victim-blaming has prevented real justice in our system for generations. Love triangles can certainly make people do crazy things, but killing small children? It doesn’t seem like that’s what happened to me. But I don’t know. Curtis had apparently been violent in the past. He claimed that he only saw Christine rarely and the last time he had seen her, she had been with her husband.
Cliff’s cousin Elbert Walker came into town for no reason the day after the murders. He stopped at a local gas station and inquired about the location of the Walker home, as if looking for Cliff. This was a very odd thing to do. Elbert knew where the house was. He used to live there. The folks at the gas station told him the Walkers were dead, and they took him to the house where he fell apart. Some believed it was an act. Some thought he was in love with Christine. It seemed to authorities for years that he would never be ruled out, but when technology changed, he was happy to provide a sample of DNA. It did not match the semen at the scene.
Christine had a lot of admirers. Wilbur Tooker, a neighbor of the Walkers, was thought to have an obsession with her. He kept making unwanted advances, and eventually Christine told her husband about her fear. Cliff wanted to teach him a lesson, but ended up only telling him to stay away. Wilbur’s alibi doesn’t start until after the murders. Tooker had apparently gone out to dinner, then went to perform in the violin section of the West Coast Symphony Orchestra. It sounds like his night could have been too busy to carry out the crimes. But depending on what time he went to dinner, it’s possible that he was unaccounted for during the time of the massacre. Tooker died in the mid-sixties, and I don’t believe they’ve tried to salvage DNA from his long-buried remains.
Ozie Youmans, who was married to Cliff’s sister, made unwanted advances toward Christine on multiple occasions. He had also been convicted of attempted rape. But the police stopped investigating him after he passed a polygraph. Junk science was enough to clear Youmans in the eyes of authorities.
Butch Dennison was also a popular suspect among armchair detectives. A woman came to police claiming that Butch had confessed to her about murdering the family, and also tried to hide bloody clothing in her presence. Police are said to have investigated Butch’s father, but never even spoke to Butch.
There are countless other rumors about other individuals or groups who could have committed these crimes. Some suspect Stanley Mauck, the man who read the meters for the Walker residence, as he was the same meter reader who serviced the home of another recently murdered family. Stanley was committed to an asylum soon after the murders. It is said that he complained to psychiatrists about homicidal tendencies.
Gossip created a lot of fruitless investigations. People gossiped about a fight Cliff had gotten into a few days before the murder. They wondered if this could be some sort of revenge killing. I don’t know if these were only rumors or how thoroughly they were investigated.
The list goes on. As late as the 1990s, police got a tip from a woman that an elderly gentleman she served at a bar had confessed to her about committing the murders. He cried as he told his story. The waitress reported all of this to the police, but didn’t provide a name for the man. Or herself.
The other two main suspects that people usually bring up are Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, who were hanged for the murder of the Clutter family—a crime that occured just weeks before the Walker massacre. The Clutter family, along with their assailants, have become infamous over the years. Truman Capote’s wildly popular book In Cold Blood was written about the crime, and is considered the first real true crime novel. The public looked at Smith and Hickock as serious suspects for the Walker case, and their whereabouts at the time suggest that their involvement isn’t impossible. Capote personally thought it was unlikely that the two were responsible for the Walker murders. He saw it as a blatant copycat killing. Smith and Hickock denied participation and claimed they were in Miami, four hours away. Eyewitnesses have placed men matching their description in Sarasota that day. It’s theorized that the outlaws were interested in dumping the car they were currently using, and when they learned the Walkers were in the market, proposed an exchange. Some think Christine called one of them on the phone from the McLeod residence—this could have been their way in. In February of 2018, DNA testing found that Smith did not provide the semen at the Walker crime scene. Dick Hickock’s body was too degraded to get a sample, which is unfortunate, because if they were the perpetrators, it is most likely that he would have been the rapist. Smith stopped Hickock from raping a young woman in the Clutter attack. So unfortunately, we can't really tell anything from these DNA results.
I’m not sure which theory I favor. If it weren’t for the DNA, I would certainly find Uncle Elbert the most suspicious—why would he have randomly arrived in town that very day? But science has ruled him out. The Wilbur Tooker theory also holds some merit, but there’s just no real evidence for it. So, with that being said, I lean toward Stanley Mauck, the meter-reader. It’s hard to ignore the fact that he was connected to another mass murder and confessed to having homicidal thoughts. I don’t know if anyone ever collected or tested his DNA. It’s frustrating to think that we’ll never know the answer.
This was such a young family. Cliff was 25. Christine was 24. They’d only been married for five years. Neither of their children ever got an opportunity to go to school or play on a sports team, or kiss a person they loved. They were robbed of all the things we bring children into this world to experience, and that’s devastating.
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