By Michael Card
This story is part of a collaborative project between Project: Cold Case and a University of North Florida Journalism class.
Two Secret Service agents in black suits greeted Jessie Mckinnon at the door of her home outside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, after she returned from a routine day at work.
The two men had targeted a person they assumed to be her husband, Jason Pelishek, for hacking into a company’s online database, and said needed to talk with him immediately.
“Jason is my 14-year-old son, not my husband,” Mckinnon said to the agents. Read more
Case Spotlights
Jason Pelishek
/in Cold Case Spotlight, Florida /by Project Cold CaseBy Michael Card
This story is part of a collaborative project between Project: Cold Case and a University of North Florida Journalism class.
Two Secret Service agents in black suits greeted Jessie Mckinnon at the door of her home outside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, after she returned from a routine day at work.
The two men had targeted a person they assumed to be her husband, Jason Pelishek, for hacking into a company’s online database, and said needed to talk with him immediately.
“Jason is my 14-year-old son, not my husband,” Mckinnon said to the agents. Read more
Willie James Jackson
/in Cold Case Spotlight, Florida /by Project Cold CaseBy Steven Thompson
This story is part of a collaborative project between Project: Cold Case and a University of North Florida Journalism class.
It’s been nearly a decade since Willie James Jackson was murdered on the streets of the city in which he grew up.
Yet police are no closer to solving the crime than the night it happened.
The years of waiting for justice has taken a toll on Jackson’s family. Read more
Robert, Helen, Joy Sims
/in Cold Case Spotlight, Florida /by Project Cold CaseBy: Brianna Bartlett
This story is part of a collaborative project between Project: Cold Case and a University of North Florida Journalism class.
“Something terrible has happened, please come,” Norma Jeannette Sims pleaded with a Tallahassee funeral home ambulance service. She stood in her parents’ bedroom overlooking the bound bodies of her father lying on the bed while her mother and youngest sister lie on the beige carpet.
On that Saturday, Oct. 22, 1966, then seventeen-year-old Sims had been babysitting for a family that attended the Florida State football game. When the game ended and the family returned, she returned home with no one there to welcome her. Read more
Curtis Council
/in Cold Case Spotlight, Florida /by Project Cold CaseBy: Bailie Staton
In the early hours of Sept. 2, 1994, Curtis Ricardo Council, 20, would be taken away from his new family forever.
He had just arrived at his grandmother’s house from the Raines versus Ribault High School rivalry football game. Council and his friend Akbar Perkins, 20, received a page to Council’s beeper. After that alert, Council and Perkins left the home.
Backing out of the driveway, Council stopped and Perkins got out of the car to close the gate behind them. That was the last moment the friends had together. Read more
Kelli Chapple
/in Cold Case Spotlight, Florida /by Project Cold CaseBy Sara Crouch
The lessening of the constant pain never comes easily – if at all — for the families of the murdered.
But it’s even harder when there’s are few answer in a case that’s gone cold.
That’s the case with Bernard Chapple, the father of then-23-year-old Kelli Chapple.
“You know, they say you’ll get closure,” Chapple said. “You don’t ever get closure. You suffer every day. You just want to know the answers to what happened.” Read more
Joseph DiMare
/in Cold Case Spotlight, Florida /by Project Cold CaseBy James Donlon
It was 3 a.m. on a cold winter night in Bradenton. Richard DiMare and his two brothers were fast asleep at their father’s farm.
In the 1950s, winter farming meant lighting kerosene lamps and placing them between rows of tomato plants to ward off the frost. DiMare remembers his father waking them, then leading them out to the fields to ensure their crops didn’t freeze. Read more
Ali Gilmore
/in Cold Case Spotlight, Florida /by Project Cold CaseBy Alexia Carrasco
At 30-years-old, Tallahassee resident, Ali Gilmore, was finally able to check off her goals she worked so hard for. She landed a good job at the Florida Department of Health as an analyst, was pregnant with her first child, and had purchased her first home in a good community. All that was taken away when she seemed to vanish in thin air. Read more
Anna Marie Mullin
/in Cold Case Spotlight, Florida /by Project Cold CaseBy Chase Carle
Strawberry blonde hair, a beautiful smile and an infectiously friendly personality — those are just some of the ways friends and family describe Anna Marie Mullin.
Sure, she’d had a hard life – a childhood filled with trauma and an adulthood filled with alcohol — but her generosity was never questioned. Read more
Willie Coffee Sr.
/in Cold Case Spotlight, Florida /by Project Cold CaseBy Jennifer Graham
He didn’t deserve to die like that.
Willie Coffee Jr., also known as “Little Willie,” says his father was on the right track and trying to change his life. He was fighting the vicious cycle of addiction. Then someone came along and took Willie Coffee Sr.’s life. Read more
Michael Cohen
/in Cold Case Spotlight, Florida /by Project Cold CaseBy Matthew Farina
Michael Cohen Jr. loved his family.
His father, Michael Cohen Sr., remembers this vividly. At an Arlington Country Day School first-grade piano recital, the elder Cohen said his only son stood on stage and gave an unexpected introduction.
“Before sitting down to play his piece,” the retired U.S. Navy veteran recalls, “Michael turned to the crowd and said, ‘My name’s Michael Cohen Jr. and I’m the handsome son of Mr. and Mrs. Cohen.’” Read more