The Researcher

When a forestry student is brutally murdered while conducting research in a forest park at the University of Florida, law enforcement scrambles to find leads that prove fruitful. As the decades have passed, the mystery of who killed Julie Ann Cohen has endured much to investigators dismay.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hi, park enthusiasts. It's Delia. If you listen to Park Predators, you already know that sometimes the most beautiful places can hide the darkest secrets. But what happens when the danger isn't miles from civilization? It's in your community, and sometimes even in your own backyard. On Crime Junkie, hosts Ashley and Britt dive into real cases every week, from missing persons to unsolved murders, breaking down what we know, what we don't, and the details that still don't sit right. If you care about the stories behind the headlines and the victims at the center of them, you'll want to check out Crime Junkie. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra. And the case I'm going to tell you about today has remained unsolved for almost 50 years. By all accounts, it seems to be the definition of a cold case because there are still so many unanswered questions. But maybe, after this episode, that could change. It takes place in what's known commonly as the Austin Carey Memorial Forest, which is located on the campus of the University of Florida's School of Forest Resources and Conservation. This land has been used for teaching and researching by UF for more than 80 years. In 2011, the conference center was destroyed by a fire, but has since been rebuilt into a serene arrangement of cabin buildings which make up the new Austin Carey Learning

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  Center. The land is surrounded by trees, brush, and swamp. In my opinion, it might be the very makeup of the landscape itself, a dense combination of marsh and forest that gave cover to the predator or predators who stole the life of a young woman there in 1977. My hope with this episode is to spread information about this under-reported case so that maybe, just maybe, one day a perpetrator can be identified, and the victim's loved ones can finally have some closure. This is Park Predators.

• 2:39Speaker 00

  Around 9 o'clock at night on Monday, February 28, 1977, a young woman named Jane Shaw was in her off-campus apartment in Gainesville, Florida, when she noticed her roommate, 22-year-old Julie Anne Cohen, wasn't home. After a little bit of time passed, Julie's boyfriend, a guy named Eric Flag, called the apartment and said he was trying to get ahold of Julie. But Jane informed him that Julie wasn't home. She suggested that maybe Julie was just at the school library studying or outdoing research. At the time, Julie was a graduate student in the forestry graduate program at UF, and she often studied in the Austin Carey Memorial Forest on campus.

• 3:20Speaker 00

  So Jane's suggestions to Eric about where Julie might be were pretty in line with Julie's normal pattern of behavior. But by the next morning, Tuesday, March 1, Jane still hadn't seen or heard from her roommate. So she called one of Julie's friends named Mary McLeod, who was a lab technologist in the same program as Julie, to see if Julie had made it to the school's soil science lab that morning, or the previous evening. But what Mary had to say wasn't much comfort to Jane, because she explained that she hadn't seen Julie either. And right away, a sense of panic sort of set in for both women. Especially for Mary, because, you see, Julie had asked Mary to join her in the forest the previous afternoon, but Mary declined that invitation because she'd wanted to

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  attend a seminar. Meanwhile, around the same time Mary and Jane realized Julie was MIA, several students and teachers in Julie's program noticed something was up, because classes had started for the day and Julie was noticeably absent. Now, look, I know in college classes at major state universities, the rooms are often so big it's easy for a single student to miss class without being noticed. But in this case, it was different. Julie's professors and classmates knew that she was a really driven student. She worked hard in her studies, so her not coming to class was out of character. Depending on what source material you read, the sequence of events about what happened next in the story varies a little bit.

• 4:46Speaker 00

  But according to a detailed article I found by Kathleen Pellegrino for the Independent Florida Alligator, it was Mary and another one of Julie's friends named Jim Emmons, who decided to go out to Austin Carey Memorial Forest to look for her. The pair thought that Julie might have been involved in a minor accident or something, or had maybe gotten stranded in the woods. So when they arrived, they parked their car about 20 feet south of a road in the area known as Waldo Road, and Mary started searching in a spot just south of the roadway while Jim walked down the road itself. They didn't find any sign of Julie in those areas, though, so they decided to regroup and try looking for her on the north side of the road. And that's when they found something familiar.

• 5:29Speaker 00

  There, laying on the ground in the dirt, were Julie's car keys and bag. Both appeared to have been abandoned. Jim picked up the items, and he and Mary walked yards apart into the pines. A few seconds later, though, Mary heard him yell back and tell her to stay where she was. According to the coverage, Jim had stumbled upon Julie's body. She was naked from the waist down, and it was clear she was dead. She had a piece of clothing wrapped around her neck, and it was not a sight that Jim wanted Mary to see. So right after making the horrible discovery, he backed away from Julie's body and rushed back to Mary, and then the two of them left to alert authorities.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  By 9:30 a.m., investigators with the Alachua County Sheriff's Department and the University of Florida Police Department had arrived on scene and begun investigating. They cordoned off the area as a crime scene, set up roadblocks on Waldo Road, and questioned hundreds of drivers in the area to figure out if anyone had seen or heard something unusual on Monday afternoon or evening. They also found Julie's green Ford Pinto parked about two miles north of the entrance to the forest. Looking over Julie's body, investigators saw that her killer or killers had used her own bra to strangle her. They also observed marks on her and the ground that indicated she'd been dragged about 12 to 15 feet through the woods.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  A few hundred feet away from her body, they discovered a single shoe print in an area next to a fence. They snapped some photos of the impression, but unfortunately, because the terrain was so thick with grass and weeds, it was impossible to find any other shoe prints. A captain for the Alachua County Sheriff's Department told the press that detectives were certain they were dealing with a homicide. Law enforcement asked the public for any information that could help them determine if certain vehicles or people had been in the general area late Monday afternoon. I think the consensus was that someone had to have seen something because Waldo Road was very well-traveled, and according to the source material I found, Julie's body was discovered about 75 yards off the roadway.

• 7:36Speaker 00

  And like I mentioned earlier, her car was some two miles north of the entrance to the forest. So these were not areas that were super tucked away or anything. According to an article by Andrea Murray, by the end of the day on Tuesday, Julie's body was removed from the forest and taken to Alachua General Hospital for an autopsy. Because she'd been found partially undressed, one could assume that a sexual assault had likely taken place, but until her autopsy was completed, that was only speculation. The next day, March 2nd, reporters had learned from officials that Julie had been strangled, and so they published that detail in their coverage. With that information now known to the world, investigators turned their attention to building

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  a timeline of Julie's last movements to figure out when she might have been killed. But establishing that timeline wasn't going to be easy because this was 1977 after all, and by all accounts, Julie had gone to the forest alone to conduct her research. CCTV footage wasn't widely available to show her movements around campus or her apartment in those critical hours. Plus, cell phones weren't readily available to the public, so tracking her movements was going to come down to finding people in her life who could tell authorities where she'd been and when. It seems from speaking with some of her friends and colleagues that Julie had an active day on Monday, the 28th. She'd left her off-campus apartment around 7:30 in the morning and spent several hours on campus attending classes and labs

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  before returning to her apartment sometime before 3:00 p.m. About a half hour later, around 3:30 p.m., she was believed to have arrived at Austin Carey Memorial Forest. She'd recently gotten over a bad case of the flu, and so people who knew her said she'd been determined to catch up on her schoolwork and research. She was studying forest soil fertilization and finishing up a project on that. So it would seem her trip to the forest on the 28th was a task that she needed to complete to stay on track with her school project. The fact that she'd been murdered in that specific forest shook up a lot of students and faculty members at UF. One of Julie's thesis advisors, a guy named William Pritchett, explained to the press that forestry students frequently use the Austin Carey Memorial Forest

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  to conduct research. And most everyone felt safe there, including Julie. Like the rest of the university campus, it was generally viewed as a safe and peaceful environment for students. Authorities also learned from speaking with folks in Julie's life that around 7:00 p.m. on the day of the crime, she'd planned to attend a forestry seminar, but had never made it. It's unclear from the source material if that was the same seminar Mary said she was going to or not, but either way, Julie being a no-show at the forestry event indicated to investigators that whatever happened to her had likely occurred sometime after she got to the forest at 3:30 p.m., but before she would have left to attend the forestry seminar. Investigators later told the press

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  that they suspected the specific window of time the murder happened was somewhere between 4:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m., maybe even 4:15 to 4:45 p.m., which to me, regardless of whether it was an hour or 30 minutes, still feels like a very small window of time. From other evidence authorities gathered at the scene, they were able to determine that Julie had climbed over a barbed-wire fence near where she'd parked her car, not far from where she'd been attacked. So with all that info in mind, the person investigators quickly turned their attention to for more insight into Julie's life and last-known movements was Eric, her current boyfriend. And what he told authorities piqued their interest.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  One day last year, detectives knocked on the door of a multimillion-dollar mansion in Los Angeles County. Inside, they found a strange scene. A dining area converted into classrooms with children and toddlers seated at rows of desks. The couple that lived there had 21 kids.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory, a baby factory.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Where had these children come from? Almost all of them were born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp.

• 11:58Speaker 00

  That's the one time that we called the cops because she was screaming. And then he pulled out a gun.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into?

• 12:07Speaker 01

  I'm Ava Kaufman. The Journey is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. Find it now in the In the Dark feed, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 12:25Speaker 00

  Eric Flag told investigators that he was in Statesboro, Georgia, conducting soil sample research for his own graduate studies project on the afternoon Julie was murdered. He said he'd rush back to Gainesville by dinnertime because he and Julie had planned to attend the 7 o'clock forestry seminar together. Afterwards, he wanted to share a bottle of wine with her and talk about the future of their relationship. But when Julie never showed up to that event, he eventually decided to just head home and call her later. Like I explained earlier, though, her roommate Jane had answered when Eric called, and she told Eric that Julie wasn't there. So at that point, Eric said he called it a night, thinking his girlfriend had just gotten too busy to hang out.

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  But get this: around 6:45 PM on Monday, while I assume Eric was headed to the forestry seminar, he said he'd driven down Waldo Road right past where Julie's body lay undiscovered. But at the time, he reportedly had no idea she was there. Even more strange, Kathleen Pellegrino reported for the Independent Florida Alligator that an entire class of forestry students were allegedly working right across the road from where Julie was killed. And not one of those folks saw or heard anything. Yeah, wild, I know. But honestly, thinking about how dedicated the forestry program participants sounded from the available coverage, the students in Julie's program might have just been

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  hyper-focused while researching in the forest. So I think the implication there is that they were just too into what they were doing to really notice maybe a scream, or someone, or something suspicious. And that's assuming Julie even had the chance to scream for help. None of the source material discusses what specifically the forestry students communicated to authorities when they were spoken to. But Julie's friend Mary McLeod told the press that if she'd been working in the same spot Julie was, she thought she would have been able to hear someone walking up behind her. However, there was always the possibility that maybe traffic on Waldo Road was too loud and Julie never even got the opportunity to pick up on the fact that someone was close to her.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  There was also another scenario which theorized Julie might have seen her killer or killers before the attack, but had not known that they were intending to harm her. One investigator told the press that he suspected whoever had encountered the 22-year-old likely hadn't come off as threatening or dangerous, and Julie might have trusted them. Her boyfriend told the Independent Florida Alligator something similar. He said that Julie was a really trusting person who probably would have talked to a stranger if they'd come up to her while she was conducting her research. Not long after being taken to the morgue, Julie's autopsy concluded, and her cause of death was confirmed to be strangulation. But the medical examiner noted that there were no obvious signs of sexual assault.

• 15:16Speaker 00

  Despite that conclusion, though, one investigator told the press that he suspected evidence at that point suggested a sexual battery could have been a motive, but there wasn't sufficient evidence to support that. It was either that, or whoever had killed Julie had partially undressed her just to make authorities think that that was their motive. Eventually Julie's body was released to her loved ones and sent to a funeral home so they could begin making burial arrangements. The thought of someone wanting to harm her was unfathomable to people who knew her. She didn't have any known enemies and had only been at the University of Florida since the fall of 1976. Prior to that, she graduated from the University of Georgia with a bachelor's degree in agronomy,

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  and then moved to Florida to earn her master's degree in forest soil studies. She had big dreams of becoming a scientist, and some source material I found stated she was even the first American woman to be admitted into her graduate program at UF. None of the coverage went into specific detail as to how, but at some point in the investigation, authorities were able to eliminate Eric and several other people who were close with Julie as suspects. And in the weeks after the crime, officers with UF's police department and deputies with the sheriff's department interviewed more than 200 students, professors, staff, and other individuals. But leads were few and far between.

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  Then, about a month later, in early April, they caught a significant break. According to more reporting by Kathleen Pellegrino, by April 7th, more than a month after the murder, authorities released that they were looking for a man who'd been seen driving a medium-sized, dark-colored motorcycle in the general vicinity of the crime scene when Julie was killed. That guy was described as a white man with medium-length dark hair and was said to be dressed in casual clothing. The witness who saw the man stated he'd walked across Waldo Road toward a green Pinto, which, reading between the lines, law enforcement suspected was probably Julie's car since she drove a green Ford Pinto.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  And if you've ever seen a picture of a Pinto, it's a subcompact car and fairly distinct looking. In addition to Motorcycle Guy, another person authorities wanted to speak with was the driver of a medium-sized blue sedan, or possibly a station wagon. That individual was also described as a white man with collar-length hair and was seen wearing an Army fatigue jacket. He and his vehicle were spotted about five miles south of Waldo Road. Some witnesses even claimed they'd seen him climb a fence at some point. Now, this guy and the other one were spotted separately sometime between 3:45 PM and 4:30 PM on the afternoon of the crime. Authorities wanted them to come forward because they suspected, whoever they were, they likely

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  had heard or seen something related to the crime, if not possibly been involved themselves. But I couldn't find any available source material that discussed whether these men were ever identified or interviewed. Within a few months of Julie's murder and the info about these two mysterious men circulating far and wide with seemingly no fruitful results, it appeared investigators had exhausted all leads. And by February 1978, that reality hadn't changed much. Which was worrisome, because there was genuine concern amongst some members of law enforcement that if Julie's killer or killers weren't caught, they might strike again. And when you back out and take a 30,000-foot view of other young co-ed killings that

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  occurred in Florida in the 1970s, authorities concerned that they could be dealing with a repeat offender wasn't unfounded.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  One day last year, detectives knocked on the door of a multimillion-dollar mansion in Los Angeles County. Inside, they found a strange scene. A dining area converted into classrooms, with children and toddlers seated at rows of desks.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  The couple that lived there had 21 kids.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory, a baby factory.

• 19:32Speaker 00

  Where had these children come from? Almost all of them were born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived.

• 19:40Speaker 03

  Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp.

• 19:43Speaker 05

  That's the one time that we called the cops because she was screaming. And then he pulled out a gun.

• 19:48Speaker 04

  I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into?

• 19:53Speaker 00

  I'm Ava Kaufman. "The Journey" is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. Find it now in the In the Dark feed, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 20:10Speaker 00

  According to news coverage on this case, in the months after the crime, investigators working Julie's homicide consulted with law enforcement agencies around the country that had similar cases to hers. Because during the 1970s, the state of Florida seemed to be a hotbed for serial killers who were specifically targeting young women. Now, it's important, before I go into this part of the episode, to state that as far as all the info I was able to find, which was very slim because of the age of this case, it doesn't appear any of the investigating agencies involved in Julie's murder ever definitively tied her death to a known serial killer. But after I did some digging, I came across one person who was linked to a handful of young women's murders

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  in Florida during the mid-1970s that I hope authorities at least took a second look at. And if they haven't, probably should. This individual's name was Gerald Eugene Stano. And according to Paul Tash's reporting for The Tampa Bay Times, which was formerly known as the St. Petersburg Times, Gerald killed several women in Florida cities between 1973 and 1980. He also had victims in other states, but for a good majority of that seven-year stretch, he was regularly preying on women in the Sunshine State. Paul Tash explained in his article that Gerald eventually confessed to killing 25 women and girls.

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  But he was suspected of having even more victims than that. His crimes included a variety of violent acts, and his victim pool varied in age, race, and walks of life. Some of his victims were girls as young as 12 years old, while others were grown women. Some were dancers while others were athletes, recent graduates, or travelers. There were a handful of cases where he strangled his victims and disposed of their bodies in state-owned lands in Florida, AKA forests or densely wooded areas. And if that wasn't eerily similar enough to Julie's case, Gerald was connected to already killing two girls in Gainesville. Another loose parallel I found was that he seemed to be the type of killer

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  who would strike in the spur of the moment. Sometimes he would lure younger victims and get them to willingly get into his car, but in at least a few instances, he would just strike impulsively. Basically, it seems like that whenever he saw a young woman who looked vulnerable, he would just attack. For example, one of his known victims, a woman named Ramona Neal, who was eventually found dead in a state park swamp, had been visiting Daytona Beach, Florida with her boyfriend, but after the couple had a disagreement, she'd walked off and was never seen alive again. Another woman Gerald murdered, named Nancy Hurd, was hitchhiking to a bar to meet a friend when she was later discovered strangled and hidden near a state park.

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  By the time he admitted to some of his murders in 1981, Gerald was 30 years old, which means he would have been about 25 years old when Julie was killed in 1977. He also matched the broad description of the unknown men who'd been seen around Waldo Road when Julie was murdered. He was a white male with dark hair, which I know isn't super specific, but it's certainly interesting. The real kicker for me, though, was that Gerald was familiar with Gainesville specifically. According to a map included in Paul Tash's reporting, Gerald disposed of two of his victims there. In 1973, a girl named Anne Arsino was traveling around the country and met her friend,

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  Janine Ligadino, in Gainesville. The two got picked up by Gerald while hitchhiking in the city, and they were later found stabbed to death and dumped in a lumberyard in that area. And remember earlier when I told you that Waldo Road was a mainstream road in Gainesville in the 70s? Well, I think a very solid argument could be made that Gerald could have driven on that roadway when he was known to be in Gainesville. Is it possible he was on that road on February 28, 1977, and spotted Julie or her car? Yeah, it is possible. But unfortunately, we'll never be able to know for sure because Gerald was executed in March of 1998 and is no longer around to answer any questions.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  I couldn't find any source material about whether authorities investigating Julie's murder ever interviewed him in relation to her case, but I think it's worth authorities possibly considering him as a potential person of interest, simply because of the similarities between his documented crimes and Julie's murder. Whether or not that's something the sheriff's office or UF's police department are willing to do or have already done is unknown. I reached out to both agencies for this episode, and a public information officer with the sheriff's office told me they must defer to whatever course of action the campus police department wants to take because technically Julie's case still remains in UFPD's jurisdiction. A spokesman for the campus police department confirmed that the case is still with them,

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  and he put me in touch with a detective who has assigned the case today, but that investigator responded that because Julie's case is still an open act of investigation, they aren't able to discuss it. In the aftermath of Julie's murder, her loved ones laid her to rest at Westover Memorial Park in her hometown of Augusta, Georgia. Her boyfriend Eric told the press that to honor her, he planned to finish the soil fertilization project she'd been working on. According to the coverage, UF's forestry department implemented a new policy after the crime, which stated female employees were no longer allowed to work in the forest alone anymore. Which I think just goes to show you how much of an impact Julie's case had on the campus community.

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  Just like so many other young people in 1977 who called UF home, she was an ambitious, smart student, but her future was ripped away from her far too soon. I think her last known movements and all the things she was doing in the hours leading up to her death show that she was beyond dedicated to her studies and determined to complete her dream of becoming a scientist. From what I’ve read about her, she loved nature, both as a researcher and a recreationalist. She rode horses and was into photography and was described as adventurous and committed to everything she did. Her sister Terri told Atlanta Constitution reporter Frank Wells that Julie was kind of like the glue that held their family together.

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  At one point prior to moving to Florida, she’d expressed interest in joining the Peace Corps and planting trees overseas, but had opted to forego that endeavor until she got her graduate degree. In that same article, Julie’s rabbi and friends who witnessed her dedication to activities at their temple described her as “the type of person who was simply full of goodness.” Something I read while researching this episode that I found profoundly touching was an anonymous memorial message some people who weren’t named submitted about Julie to the Independent Florida Alligator several days after her murder. The message stated, quote, “We would like the following message printed in your letters column to let us express our sorrow at the death of Julie Cohen, who was our friend.

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  Please withhold our names. We only hope by printing this letter that others will appreciate their living friends more. No longer will our friend Julie visit us. The echo of her smile hangs heavy and empty in our house. We grieve her loss, yet rue ourselves, for now Julie will never know our feelings for her. We wish we had told her before she left.” End quote. Based on those words, it’s clear to me that Julie made the people around her feel like they mattered. She left a lasting impression on others in just the short 22 years she was alive. It’s time for the mystery about who took her life to end.

• 28:09Speaker 00

  If you know anything about the unsolved murder of Julie Ann Cohen, please contact the University of Florida Police Department at 352-392-1111, or use their silent witness portal, which can be accessed on the department’s website. I’ve also listed a link directly to that in the show notes and on the blog post for this episode.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  Park Predators is an AudioChuck production. You can view a list of all the source material for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com. And you can also follow Park Predators on Instagram, @parkpredators. I think Chuck would approve.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  In the dark, even the most familiar trail can feel like it leads somewhere else. Every rustle becomes a warning, every shadow, a doorway. In Full Body Chills, those doorways open into worlds pulled straight from your nightmares. This spooky season classic returns with chilling new tales, immersive sound, and no promise that you'll find your way back. So step off the familiar path if you dare. Listen to new episodes of Full Body Chills every week, wherever you get your podcasts.