Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said Thursday that executed Florida prisoner James Duckett was responsible for the 1987 abduction, rape and murder of 14-year-old Jeanifer Weldon, a cold case that had lingered for decades. The announcement came just two days after Duckett was executed at Florida State Prison for a separate 1987 rape and murder.
Weldon lived on North Socrum Loop Road in Lakeland and disappeared on Saturday, Sept. 19, 1987, after spending the day with Johnny Marsh, Angel Sullivan and Marsh’s mother. The group went to Tampa, where Weldon bought a stuffed kitten, before Marsh’s mother dropped Weldon and Sullivan off at Sullivan’s house on Highway 98 North. Weldon and Sullivan stayed there until 9 p.m., then Weldon started walking the two miles home and never arrived.
The case broke open after a frantic 13-day search ended on Oct. 2, 1987, when a phosphate mine worker driving down a dirt road in Fort Meade noticed shoes and smelled a decomposing body. Detectives found Weldon’s skeletonized body in a wooded area along with the T-shirt she wore the day she vanished. Authorities determined she died by strangulation and ruled the killing a homicide.
Judd said Duckett left for his phosphate mine job five hours early on the night Weldon disappeared, drove past where she was walking and arrived two hours late to work hot, sweaty, agitated and with dirty hands. He also said Duckett gave his wife a green bag at 9 a.m. the next morning that contained candy and a gray stuffed kitten. The wife threw the bag away after questioning why he had brought one toy for two children, and detectives later confirmed the store Weldon visited in Tampa used green bags and sold stuffed kittens. Duckett claimed the scratches on his back came from barbed wire.
The timing leaves one hard question, even in a case Polk County now says it has solved: what, exactly, was enough to close the circle after so many years? Judd said the evidence and circumstances tied Duckett to Weldon’s death, and he framed the killing as a stolen life that never reached adulthood, college, marriage or motherhood. That is the weight of a cold case finally named aloud, even after the man investigators believe did it had already been put to death for another murder.
For Weldon’s family and friends, the announcement turns a missing-girl mystery into a formal conclusion. It does not change the fact that Duckett was executed for the murder of Tereasa McAbee in Lake County before Polk County publicly linked him to Weldon, but it does mark the first public claim by authorities that the same man was responsible for both crimes. What remains unanswered is whether the evidentiary trail Judd described will ever be laid out in fuller detail, or whether this is the last word the case will ever need.
