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Florida Nurse’s Brutal Murder Solved After 37 Years — Thanks To Suspect’s Family Scandal
DNA has proven who killed 29-year-old Teresa Scalf in her home in 1986.
Authorities in Florida have announced they have finally solved the cold case murder of a nurse back in 1986 after locating a suspect through DNA.
Teresa Lee Scalf, 29, was a registered ICU nurse who worked at what is now Lakeland Regional Health Medical Center. She had studied her way up from a role in phlebotomy and as a respiratory technician before qualifying to work in trauma, something she saw as a way of providing comfort to those in need.
However, on October 27th 1986, Teresa failed to show up at her job and her colleagues knew something was wrong. When she still hadn’t appeared by later that evening, her mother Betty went to her Lakeland apartment and jimmied open the door to a terrible scene.
According to the Polks County Sheriff’s Office, Teresa’s throat had been brutally slit as the young woman tried desperately to defend herself.
Sheriff Grady Judd said: “He cut her head almost off. It was violent, and it was horrible.”
Detective Matt Newbold added that there had been no sign of forced entry at the front of the apartment, something Betty Scalf attributed to the suspect probably entering the property through a sliding glass door and lying in wait for Teresa to finish her shift.
A murder investigation was launched and detectives managed to locate a sample of blood other than Teresa’s, but it wasn’t a match to anything on file and there was no DNA back then with which to create a suspect profile.
To make matters worse, there had been heavy rain that day and any trace evidence that might have been left outside the apartment was washed away. There wasn’t even any scent to help search dogs find a trail of the killer as they left the scene of the crime.
Slowly but surely, Teresa’s case went cold. Although there was another attempt to crack it in the 2000s when DNA technology began to evolve, the sample again proved not to be a match to anything in nationwide databases. The young woman’s killer continued to fly quietly under the radar.
