Janet Staschak, lived in Clearwater, Florida when her life was stolen at age 25. Janet worked at Kash n’ Karry grocery store as a cake decorator. She failed to show up for work and colleagues called the manager of York Apartments where Janet lived alone. Police entered Janet’s apartment and discovered her deceased on a bed inside on November 3, 1986.

The medical examiner’s autopsy said, Janet was strangled and sexually assaulted, with her official cause of death being asphyxiation. Janet was naked, a window screen of her place had been slashed open, her purse was missing, and her vehicle was found abandoned in the parking garage of the Tampa International Airport.

The detectives were convinced that Janet was killed by someone she knew. They believed the suspect had staged the burglary in an attempt to throw them off. Detectives identified a man named Tom Sawyer, Janet’s then 33-year-old neighbor. Sawyer was interrogated for sixteen hours. Sawyer gave no alibi for where he was on the night of the murder.

Sawyer was arrested for the murder during the police’s initial investigation in 1986. He was deprived of food, sleep, and denied an attorney. He confessed after sixteen hours of interrogation. Sawyer made inconsistent statements in his confession. The trial court judge threw the confession out after six weeks of testimony, forty-seven witnesses and listening to sixteen hours of the recorded interrogation. Sawyer was released from the Pinellas County Jail after the confession was suppressed as it was the only evidence against him. Sawyer moved out of Florida and the case went cold.

The case sat on a shelf for 25 years until it was reassigned to Detective Chris Lyons in 2011. That was when things began to take shape in a way totally unexpected.