St. Augustine, Florida — the nation’s oldest city and, as far as we know, home of Florida’s first unsolved cold case.

One hundred eighty-eight years before the brutal slaying of Athalia Ponsell Lindsley on the front steps of her Marine Street home, long before Frances Bemis left for her usual evening walk never to return (both cases unsolved to this day), there was the unsolved murder of Lieutenant Guillermo Delaney. Delaney was stabbed and beaten as he walked along a dark stretch of Charlotte Street late in the cool Northeast Florida night in the waning weeks of 1785. Delaney succumbed to his wounds in January of 1786, dying in the same month as Lindsley would many years later with his assailants never having been identified or brought to justice.

Ancient City in the Dark

In November of 1785, East Florida was stabilizing post evacuation of around 10,000 British loyalists who had fled to the area during the period of the American Revolution. St. Augustine was, at the time, home to approximately 2,700 inhabitants with civilian population counting for less than 1000 of those. The majority were military personnel stationed at the Castillo de San Marcos along with their families. A garrison town, St. Augustine was then as it still is in many ways — insular, with everyone knowing everyone and everyone’s personal business being a matter of public discussion — in which daily life was structured by military rank.

Delaney, having served in a unit seeing much action during the Revolution, served as lieutenant in the Hibernia Regiment of Spain’s Irish Brigade. He was stationed at the Castillo de San Marcos by 1784, by all accounts a seasoned soldier continuing his tenure at a quiet post. But November 20, 1785 changed that.

Some time, between the hours of 9:30 to 10:00 that night, as Delaney was walking along Charlotte Street (at the time, known as San Carlos), a block north of current-day Treasury Street, he was attacked suddenly and without warning — stabbed and beaten by persons that he was unable to identify. Severely wounded, he made his way to the residence of one Josef Gomila to which he was already deliberately heading. This detail may be a significant clue.

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…”