It is a fascinating, true-life cold case story. The dust had long settled on the murder of a 17-year-old who vanished one humid summer night in Florida in 1979. Her skeletal remains, shuffled between labs and storage, sat unidentified and unburied for 45 years until a chain of coincidences occurred that would finally bring her home.
The remarkable story begins two years ago at Millennium Cremation Service in Vero Beach, Florida, when funeral director Rachel Delashmutt got a call about the skeletal remains of a murdered girl.“Dorothy May Strickland … No family to collect, no family to order a death certificate,” Delashmutt said. “We were instructed to hold on for 120 days to the cremated remains and then scatter at sea.”
But Delashmutt hesitated.
“Something inside of me just said, ‘There’s got to be family. There’s got to be someone out there that knows her,'” she said.
Any records on Dorothy Strickland’s murder were held in the sheriff’s cold case files. In charge of that office is longtime Detective Ed Glaser.
“So the sheriff calls me,” Glaser said. “I said, the only thing — I don’t think it’s ever been done, and I’ll do it today or start — is looking for her school records.”
A coincidence almost unbelievable: After 45 years, shortly after Glaser’s call to the school system, another caller asked the school system about the same name. Between the clerks and his own detective work, Glaser located the caller on the other side of the state in Lee County, Florida, and called him on the phone.
“I said, ‘This is Ed Glaser with the Indian River Florida Sheriff’s Office, and I’m doing a cold case,”‘ Glaser said. “‘Does the name ‘Dorothy Strickland’ or ‘Dorothy Clowers’ mean anything to you?’ And literally the phone went really quiet … ‘She was my baby sister.’ And I’m like, ‘What?’”
It just so happened that Dorothy’s brother, Marvin McDonald, called the school district looking for his own records under his mother’s name, Clowers, shortly after Detective Glaser’s call. His mind reeled as Glaser explained to him that Dorothy’s remains were in Vero Beach.
“I was in shock. I was, ‘What, really?’” said Rebecca Clowers, Dorothy’s sister.
Piecing together her last moments, Glaser says she had partied with cousins at a bar in nearby Fort Pierce, hitched a ride home with two men, then decided to go back out after midnight, never to return.
Then, seven months later, in February 1980, hunters stumbled on her skeleton, partly covered in foliage.
Now, after all this time, Dorothy’s remains are finally in the hands of her loved ones.
As for who murdered 17-year-old Dorothy Strickland, the investigation is still open and active, with Detective Glaser on the case.
“Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson” airs at 10 a.m. Sunday, WJLA (Channel 7) and WBFF (Channel 45).
