POLK COUNTY'S UNSOLVED MURDERS, MISSING PERSONS AND UNIDENTIFIED BODIES

one hour payday

For years, the slaying left many unanswered questions for the family of Tommy Eugene Smith, of Bartow, who was found dead Oct. 11, 1996, at the edge of a citrus grove off Edison Road, off Old Berkley Road, near Auburndale.

On Wednesday, a witness contacted the Sheriff’s Office and voluntarily provided details about the homicide that only someone who had intimate knowledge of the crime would have known, the Sheriff’s Office said.

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The accused killer is Watson’s son, Christopher Shane Knight, now 39. Knight is also accused of killing Watson’s unborn son, who was to be named Skylar. Watson was seven months pregnant when she was fatally stabbed in her neck.

Knight, who goes by his middle name of Shane, was booked into the Polk County Jail late Thursday on second-degree murder and manslaughter charges.

Jahala Watson was well known and liked in Mulberry. She had closed down her Mulberry restaurant, Jahala’s, two months before her death in June 1993.

During a press conference Friday, Polk Sheriff Grady Judd said Knight was 19 when Watson died. He said mother and son lived together at 3755 Davis Road and fought constantly, usually about money or who was to drive her car.

Investigators say Watson was killed on June 20, 1993.

LAKELAND | Anthony Jackson dialed 911 Saturday night and asked an officer to meet him on a Tampa street corner.

He had to unburden his soul.

one hour payday

Darrell Conatser, grandson of victim William Clark Ford, left, and his wife Joy, center, and sister Sharon Scharber, right, during a press conference at Lakeland Police Department. || Photo by Ernst Peters, The Ledger

Tim Slaten holds the Crime Stoppers card that bears the face of his mother and the details of her slaying outside the apartment where she was killed in 1981 in Lakeland.

Jeff didn’t know what was happening, but Tim glanced into his mother’s bedroom, and what he saw nearly knocked him over. His mother, 31-year-old Linda Slaten, was dead, a metal coat hanger twisted around her neck.

“It was brutal,” Tim said.

Police say Slaten was raped and murdered while her two sons slept. To this day, her killer has not been caught.

In an effort to bring attention to the case, and in the hopes of getting someone with information about the crime to come forward, the two have added $8,000 to the $2,000 reward already being offered by Crime Stoppers for information leading to a conviction in the case.

It was an idea the two men came up with several months ago, as the anniversary of their mother’s murder approached.

Jeff, who was 15 when his mother died, worked overtime shifts at his job as a truck driver. Tim, who was 12 when his mother died, recently sold his house, and used some money from the sale toward the reward.

“Anything that will help, it’s worth a try,” Jeff Slaten said. Friday afternoon, he and his brother came to the apartment complex at 303 Brunell Parkway, where their mother was murdered, to talk about the case.

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William Donald Taylor, her boyfriend, told sheriff’s detectives that Smith and he were getting along just fine. But the last time he saw her she told him she was going to Daytona Beach, and she got into a car with a man he didn’t know and left.

Carrol Sparrow, left, sits at his dining room table with wife Elsie, center, and daughter Debra Lucas, and displays a 1980s photo of his three eldest children -- Cindy Lee Smith, left, Daryl Sparrow and Debra. The photo is the last taken of Cindy before she was last seen in April 1987.

Her family doesn’t believe it.

“She would not leave us like that,” her mother, Elsie Sparrow, said recently.

According to Elsie and Carrol Sparrow, Smith’s parents, Smith and her son. Shane (from Cindy’s ex-husband, Wayne Smith), were living with Taylor in Winter Haven at the time.

Smith told her parents that she was leaving Taylor. She asked them whether she and Shane could move in with them; they were supposed to meet her at the house she shared with Taylor that weekend to help her move her things.

On Friday, April 3, 1987, co-workers at Kmart on Havendale Boulevard saw Smith get into Taylor’s car, and the two drove away, according to Detective Ivan Navarro of the Polk County Sheriff’s Office.

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“We were so proud of Tommy,” Carrie Smith said. “We didn’t know then that we would never see him again.”

Tommy E. Smith

A couple walking beside an orange grove on Edison Road near Polk City found Smith’s body the next day, Oct. 11, 1996. Smith, 37, had been shot three times with a .22-caliber rifle. His 1984 Jeep Wagoneer was discovered about three miles away, parked along Berkley Road under the Interstate 4 overpass. The rifle used to kill him was nearby.

Detectives grappled with the case from the beginning, and it hasn’t proven any easier over time.

“He was the kind of guy who everybody liked,” said Polk Sheriff’s Detective Larry Roberts, who’s been working the case for about a year. “That’s been one of the problems with this case. We’ve talked to hundreds of people, but we can’t find anybody

who really disliked Tommy or had a real vendetta against him.”

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