Frances Bemis — The Woman Who Knew Too Much?

Florida Unsolved, based in St. Augustine, takes on one of the Ancient City’s most infamous cold cases and is forced to grapple with a seemingly connected murder that time, history and true crime enthusiasts seem to have forgotten.

With documented cold cases dating back as far as the murder of Lieutenant Guillermo Delaney in 1785, St. Augustine, the nation’s oldest city, has no lack of murder, mystery, and intrigue. The most well-known of these is, no doubt, the (technically) unsolved murder of Athalia Ponsell Lindsley on January 23, 1974.

Lindsley lived on 124 Marine Street in St. Augustine, one of the city’s oldest and historically layered residential neighborhoods running along the Matanzas River waterfront. On January 23, 1974, a singular moment that would come to define St. Augustine’s cold case history — a former model, Broadway dancer, and TV personality was murdered on the front steps of her home, in plain daylight. And this wasn’t just a murder, it was a murder most gruesome. Lindsley was found nearly decapitated having been struck at least nine times by a machete. Virgil Stuart, Chief of Police at the time stated, “a crime of just pure hate…”