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.

The Discovery

Crescent Beach, April 10, 1985. Construction workers building a new beach walkover discovered human remains buried in a shallow grave. The victim, buried for years, was a white female estimated to have been between 30 and 50 years old at the time of death. Her death was ruled a homicide. For almost 40 years she was just one among many Jane Does.

The Face Without a Name

In 2011, the victim’s skull and mandible were sent to the Florida Institute for Forensic Anthropology and Applied Science at the University of South Florida. There, forensic experts were able to produce a facial reconstruction. While new leads are said to have surfaced, she would not get her name back for another 13 years.

In 2022, SJSO detectives attended training on cold case homicides in which forensic genetic genealogy was presented. They brought their newfound knowledge back to the Major Crimes Unit (MCU) and, after consulting with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), submitted portions of the remains to Othram, a Texas-based laboratory specializing in advanced DNA techniques. The lab was able to successfully extract a viable DNA profile. This sample was then processed against the consumer-facing genealogy databases, the results of which identified potential relatives.