Key West Horror Story No 20

 This is a True Story

 

Have you ever had someone in your house accused of beheading another person? I did. In Key West.

I remember the day very I met him very well. Soon after we moved here in December 1993 my partner and I began to clean up the former Eaton Lodge Guest House which had been foreclosed upon, boarded up, and the gardens left unattended for two years. We got things under control and opened on Valentine's Day weekend in 1994. Our 13 room guest house was sold out within days and remained sold out until the first of May. Soon after we moved in neighbors stopped by to introduce themselves and to welcome us to Key West including a very handsome young man named Jerry Hamlin. He told us he was the manager of the Blue Parrot Guesthouse and offered us any help he could give. 

After we got the guest house running smoothly I joined Club Body Tech in the Duval Square complex. It was a great little gym. I saw Jerry Hamlin there from time to time. He always said hello. Always had a smile on his face. He was taller and younger than me. And very handsome! Big boy! Totally straight looking but gay.

A few years later I was at the gym and got caught totally off guard when someone told me Jerry had been arrested for the grisly murder of another gay man in Key West. They lived in the same apartment complex but not together. They apparently got together one night. Something happened. According a report in the Sun Sentinel in December 1999 "Jerry Lynn Hamlin, 32, allegedly confessed after his arrest Friday in St. Petersburg to killing Jesse Ronald Childs, 29. Childs' head was found Saturday wrapped in a sheet in a Key West park. His sexually mutilated body was found by workers last Monday in Homestead canal." As I recall both the head and the body were found he day after the murder in different locations. I was shaken to my core when I heard the story.

A woman lawyer I used to work with went tt law school with Ted Bundy.  She said she never sensed anything negative about him. The thing about people is you don't know what you don't know.