Old article about the Walton County search.Thursday, March 23, 2000
'Ghost chasers'
drawn to police dig site
(Photo: Mindell Thompson traveled from Opp, Ala., on Wednesday to see the possible site of the body of her missing friend. News Herald Photo: Dana Miserez.)
TONY SIMMONS
The News Herald
DeFUNIAK SPRINGS - A police dig in a wooded area off Coy Ellis Road brought out the curious and the desperate Wednesday.
The curious drove past the spot where police had excavated potential evidence in the Pamela June Ray investigation and craned their necks to see a mound of red clay and sand through the light brush.
The desperate drove 50 miles from Opp, Ala., to walk the search area and peer into a hole in the ground and speculate whether this investigation was connected, somehow, to the disappearance of 17-year-old Kemberly Ramer from her father's home in Opp in August 1997.
According to Opp police investigator Mark Keiser, the women who drove from Opp were "chasing ghosts." No connections exist, he said.
"It would have been great if (Florida police) had called and said, 'We have y'all's victim,'" Keiser said. "I hate it, but this investigation has nothing to do with Kem."
Investigators with the Panama City Beach Police Department and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement excavated parts of this 400-acre wooded property near the Sandy Creek area after a cadaver dog indicated human remains might be buried here.
The police had come here hoping to find the remains of Ray, an Atlanta woman who vanished from the grounds of a Panama City Beach motel in 1992. She left behind her car, purse, keys and sleeping children. Police found no signs of a struggle.
About 30 yards from the current search site lies the spot where police discovered the remains of Donna Callahan in 1996. Callahan, then 29 and pregnant, had disappeared from a convenience store where she worked near Gulf Breeze on Aug. 6, 1989.
Her remains were found seven years later, when a prison inmate finally disclosed where she had been buried. Mark Riebe and his half-brother, William Alex Wells, are now serving life sentences in the Santa Rosa County Correctional Institution for her murder.
Riebe has been interviewed several times by Panama City Beach police regarding the Ray case.
About a quarter of a mile from the hole in the ground off Coy Ellis Road is a house where Riebe's mother lives. "No Trespassing" signs bar the gate. No one stirs in the yards. No lights shine from inside the home.
One mile from the hole in the ground is a yellow caution sign with the words, "Children Playing," but there are no children around the nearby homes.
Dead-end lanes, sand roads and washed out tracks that amount to little more than wagon trails lead nowhere into the woods all around. Down one trail is a clearing guarded by an empty deer stand; down another muddy rut is a doublewide trailer with no one home.
Somewhere in those woods, at a location undisclosed by the police, investigators continued searching and sifting the earth. A dog trained to sniff for human remains showed interest in a few sites and police carefully dug into those areas.
FDLE spokeswoman Lisa Lagergren said police could not say exactly what the digs had uncovered. Any evidence taken from the area will require weeks or months of study before it is identified.
"There had been a rumor about a body, but there's no bodies," Lagergren said. "There's nothing that you could say is definitely something."
Police will continue searching other parts of the property during the next few days, Lagergren said.
lease:
