The following 1998 article was recently posted in this Forum's Cold Case Section. It is about five children who were aparently abducted in Jacksonville, Florida in the summer of 1974, just under a year before the Lyon Sisters disappeared. One case involved two sisters who disappeared, and another describes victims who sound like they could resemble the Lyon girls.
I do not know if all or any of these crimes are connected, other than by location and time frame. And I do not know for certain if they are connected with the disappearance of the Lyon sisters. Certainly there are some similarities.
The article mentions a serial killer named Paul John Knowles. He could not be a suspect in the Lyon case because he was killed by Georgia State police in December 1974 while attempting to escape during his extraditon to Florida. I have some doubts as to whether or not he was actually involved in any of these cases. Certainly not all of them.
If someone else was responsible for even one of these Jacksonville cases, then maybe he came to Maryland in March 1975.
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Their families are still healing - In '74 Jacksonville searched for five missing children at once
Monday, November 23, 1998
By Sandy Strickland
Times-Union staff writer
Jean Marie Schoen was the first little girl to vanish that tragic summer of 1974.In all, there were five girls, ages 6 to 12, who disappeared within a three-month span in Jacksonville. Only two bodies were ever found.
The five abductions - coming so close and apparently unrelated - were unprecedented, said a veteran Jacksonville police officer.
Nine-year-old Jean Marie, known as Jeanie, disappeared July 21 after going to a store near her grandmother's house on West 19th Street in Springfield.
Lillian Annette Anderson, 11, and her sister, Mylette, 6, disappeared from their Oceanway home Aug. 1 while their mother was attending a sick relative.
Virginia Helm, 12, disappeared Sept. 27 while going to a convenience store a block from her home on Dean Road on the Southside. A month later, her body was found in a shallow grave south of Beach Boulevard. She had been shot through the head.
And Rebecca Ann Greene, 12, disappeared Oct. 12 after buying soft drinks at a store in her Fairfield neighborhood. Her skeleton was found three years later on Heckscher Drive.
Fast-forward to November 1998.
Eight year-old Maddie Clifton disappears. Her body is found a week later under the water bed of a 14-year-old neighbor.
Pam Schoen and ElizabethAnderson, the mothers of the girls never found, said they can relate to the grief felt by Maddie's family.''Anything that comes up about missing children brings it all back and throws me in a tizzy'' Anderson said.''My heart goes out to her,'' Schoen said. ''I also feel a great deal of compassion for the boy who did it. That's two families who've lost children.''
For Schoen, the worst part is not knowing her daughter's fate.''I don't have life or death,'' she said, her voice breaking and her brown eyes staring into space.Jeanie was an A student at Love Grove Elementary and an eager participant in her Brownie troop's activities, Schoen said.''
She was feisty and hyperactive like me,'' she said. ''She had to be forced. She wouldn't have gone with anyone willingly.''In the days after Jeanie's disappearance, Schoen and her family distributed 1,000 fliers of the smiling girl with the missing front tooth and had three phone lines installed so one would always be open. Schoen's former husband kept track from his home in Minnesota.Schoen said she kept her pain inside, causing her to hyperventilate.
''But I had counseling for three months, which saved my life.''Schoen thinks Jeanie was snatched by someone who wanted a child and clings to the hope she is still alive. Schoen's brother, Ken Maxim, even takes Jeanie's picture with him whenever he travels and displays it in his motel room.
Even today, Schoen breaks down when she sees a blond-haired girl at a mall. ''That's when I say to myself, 'Jeanie, I love you, but I can't talk or think about you right now.' ''
Still, Schoen, who has a 35-year-old son, said she has been able to lead a relatively normal life. She found solace in her jobs as a social worker and apartment complex manager. Ten years ago, she began having heart problems and is now on disability.
Schoen is convinced Jeanie would have been found if the technological advances of today and shows such as America's Most Wanted had been available 24 years ago.
For Anderson, the years immediately after the abduction were ''horrible.'' Anderson, who sees a counselor and psychiatrist, said only now is she getting the help she needs.
''I've had spells in which I go inside myself and don't come out,'' she said. Anderson also suffers from high blood pressure and arthritis and uses a cane.Anderson said she was able to survive only because of her faith in God and the support of her church, friends and family.
Her husband, Jack Anderson, was never able to accept the girls' disappearance, she said. The family never moved and kept the same phone number because ''Daddy thought the babies were coming home.''
In 1981, Jack Anderson had a heart attack followed by quintuple bypass surgery. In 1989, he suffered a massive stroke that left him bedridden. Anderson, a school bus driver for 18 years, gave up her job and cared for him until his death in 1994.
Only then could she find closure for herself. Anderson bought ''memorial'' headstones for the girls and placed them in the family cemetery off Cedar Point Road. On holidays, she decorates their headstones.
Staring at their last school pictures - they were students at Louis Sheffield Elementary - Anderson said she wonders what they would look like today.''My heart says they're in heaven. They're with Daddy now,'' she said. ''But I'd like to have bodies so I could really say goodbye.''
Anderson, who has a son and daughter in their 30s and is known as the ''neighborhood granny,'' said she doesn't know if the man assumed to be their killer is guilty or not.
Prosecutors concluded the girls were abducted by self-proclaimed mass murderer Paul John Knowles and closed the case. Knowles, a 28-year-old Jacksonville resident, was killed in December 1974 trying to escape from Georgia authorities.
In tape recordings found after his death, Knowles said he abducted two girls matching the description of the Anderson sisters and buried them in an isolated area at the western end of Commonwealth Avenue. Their bodies were never found despite a massive search.
Lester Parmenter, the former homicide detective who investigated the disappearances, said he and his partner, Sgt. Richard Pruett, never considered the Anderson case cleared. Even so, ''We felt strongly that he probably did it. We couldn't prove it because we didn't have the bodies,'' Parmenter said.
Parmenter remains haunted by one child whose body was found - Virginia Helm.
He and Pruett, who had daughters with long blond hair about her age, carefully dug her body out of its shallow grave with their bare hands to keep it from being distorted.''It's probably the single hardest thing I've had to do as a police officer,'' he said. ''I can see it like it was yesterday.''
LINK:
http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/112398/met_2a1disap.html