Post by Scumhunter on Jun 18, 2015 7:50:09 GMT -5
(Above photo credit: statesman.com)
Julie Wills, a 32 year-old aspiring actress was found stabbed to death in her home in Boca Raton, Florida at 9:30PM on Sunday, April 16, 1996. Below is a somewhat recent article on the case:
Since Nancy Crum was in her early 60s, she has traveled from Austin to Boca Raton, Fla., 16 times with her husband. She doesn’t go for pleasure, but instead meets with police and pleads with the public, holding on to hope that her daughter’s killer will be found.
Friday, the 17th time, was no different, except that her husband of 56 years, Art Jr., the man she leaned on while dealing with their daughter’s death, was not by her side. He died in November.
“We keep hoping, and … my husband is in heaven with Julie now, and he knows the truth, but we still want justice,” Crum, 79, said.
Julie Wills was 32 when she was found stabbed to death in her home in Boca Raton. The former beauty queen’s killer has never been found.
Nancy Crum refuses to call the case “cold” and says that after every trip to Florida, someone calls Boca Raton police with some type of information. She doesn’t want this time to be any different.
This year she made the journey with her oldest son, Art Crum III. He hadn’t been to Boca since the first trip the family made immediately after the slaying in 1996. “I came, No. 1, to support my mom in this emotional time and also to step into my dad’s role,” he said.
Nancy Crum said the police have already done all the DNA testing there is to do and that no new information was released Friday.
“It is the 17th year from the murder, so there’s really nothing more unless the public comes through,” she said. “The police seem to think that maybe something will jog this person’s conscience, and maybe this is the year.”
Wills, a graduate of Anderson High School and the University of Texas, where she studied biology, had already found some success on the big screen with small roles in the movies “Striptease” and “The Birdcage” when she came to Boca in 1994 with her then-boyfriend Steven Flacco. The two met in the Bahamas when she was competing in a beauty pageant.
They broke up by 1996 but remained friends and attended a friend’s birthday party together on Friday, April 12, 1996, the night she was last seen alive.
Flacco, a successful Boca Raton stockbroker, told police that he and Wills went to his house after the party but that she returned to her house alone.
Wills spoke into early Saturday morning with her then-current boyfriend, Paul Southern, who was in Hawaii at the time, after receiving a page from him. Wills told him that she almost slept at Flacco’s home that night but that the two got into a fight and she went home.
Nearly 48 hours later, Flacco told police he had found Wills stabbed to death on her kitchen floor.
Flacco told police he spent Saturday fishing and Sunday playing golf. After not being able to reach Wills, Flacco went to her home Sunday night. He called police after seeing Wills’ legs through the sliding glass door.
The attack started near the sliding glass door in the family room. She was stabbed four times and, after her attacker left, managed to make her way to the phone in her kitchen, trying to make a call. Her bloody handprints were left on the wall next to the phone, which was found dangling off the hook.
Police have not ruled out Flacco or a man named David Miller, who went to the same bars as Wills. They also have not ruled out a man who anonymously called a suburban Boca Raton woman after the slaying and told her things about the crime that only the killer would know. The woman’s husband worked with Flacco in the early 1980s.
Before meeting with police Friday morning, Crum and her son attended Mass at her daughter’s church, St. Joan of Arch Catholic Church, just as she has for almost two decades.
“I was dreading it this time because it is so sad and bittersweet, and as I say, the only consolation is that Art is with Julie now and hopefully at peace,” she said.
Nancy Crum said she will return every year until the case is solved. “Maybe somehow we’ll have reassurance that this will be solved,” she said.
Anyone with information is asked to call Crime Stoppers of Palm Beach County at 800-458-8477.
Thoughts? It should be noted there was also a person of interest who wrote letters to Wills' father in 2011 that many knew things only the killer would know. I don't see anything mentioned in more recent articles so I don't know if anything came out of that lead. I sound like a broken record but I think this would make a great case for Cold Justice. It seems there are many people that make good or decent persons of interests, but nothing directly tying them to Wills' murder.
web.archive.org/web/19991012070500/http://amw.com/
www.statesman.com/news/news/crime-law/17-years-after-slaying-former-austinites-mother-st/nXLkZ/
www.wptv.com/news/region-s-palm-beach-county/boca-raton/person-of-interest-in-julie-wills-murder
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