DNA Leads Detective to Suspect in 1971 Killing of 14 Year-Old

Some forty years after teenager Gina Justi was found dead in a Palm Harbor orange grove, Pinellas County Sheriff's Cold Case Detective Mike Bailey thinks he's finally cracked the case.

The suspect in Justi's killing is 69 year-old Jerry Fletcher, who is serving a life sentence more than a thousand miles away for the 1973 murder of a teenage girl in Illinois. 

14 year-old Gina Justi was last seen alive on August 6, 1971, when she left her home on Santa Monica Drive in Tampa to see a puppy about three miles away at a home on West Patterson Rd.

One day later, Justi's body was found in an orange grove called Severs Groves in Palm Harbor. Investigators say she had been strangled and raped.

The years passed, and as the case went cold, the orange groves were cleared to make way for a subdivision called Severs Landings, and Justi's mother died never knowing who was responsible for her daughter's death. 

Then, in 2010 detective Bailey picked up the case and worked it for a while. The investigation started to really pick up when the Pinellas County Forensic Lab told Bailey they had a full DNA profile of the suspect. That became the big break in the case.

The DNA profile was submitted to a national database and got an immediate hit. "It's massively rare, it's crazy to have the stars in alignment like that, as quickly as they were able to do that, it's very difficult," Bailey said, praising the Pinellas County Forensic Lab.

Bailey's investigation also found that back in the early 1970s, suspect Jerry Fletcher was a contract industrial painter who lived in Tampa about seven miles away from where Justi was supposed to see the puppy on August 6, 1971.

He also discovered that Fletcher lived in Tampa in 1972 and was accused of abducting a girl from a restaurant off Dale Mabry Highway and raping her. The case went to trial and a jury found Fletcher not guilty.

Bailey says in 1974 an Illinois jury convicted Fletcher of killing 13 year-old Shirley Mccune in 1973. Fletcher is serving a life sentence for this crime. Bailey says he is working with the State Attorney's Office to issue a warrant charging Fletcher with Justi's murder. Pinellas Sheriff's Cold Case Detectives interviewed Fletcher last week. He made no admissions to the crime.

There are also plans in the works to notify other police agencies around the country about the case. Bailey thinks that since Fletcher's job took him to different parts of the country he could be connected to other unsolved crimes.

"There is something wrong with your makeup that you do this,"  Bailey said, referring to Fletcher's 1974 murder conviction and the new accusations against him, "I have a feeling there's a lot more cases out there that he's probably responsible for, that's just speculation," he said.