On Thursday, police in Florida arrested a guy they say killed a woman in 1999. This ended the murder case almost 25 years after it happened.
Police in Sanford, Florida, said at a news conference on Friday that Sherry Holtz was found dead in the woods on December 4, 1999. Bianca Gillett, a spokeswoman for the police, said that Holtz’s body was found by someone who was collecting cans in the woods.
Gillett said Holtz, who lived in Sanford, was 50 years old when she died.
When her body was found, the police saw that her throat had been cut and that she had been hit, strangled, and sexually assaulted. Gillett said she was found with most of her body bare because her clothes were off.
Gillett said, “There’s no other way to describe it but a brutal murder.” Holtz was found on her back on a concrete slab.
Gillett said that in 2000, a bloody lock-blade knife that was found near Holtz’s body was sent to be tested. The results showed that the blood on the knife came from a person, but DNA testing could not be done at the time because the samples were so small.
Gillett said that a sexual attack kit did not show any DNA.
Officials say that the case was restarted in May 2023, when DNA evidence was sent back to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for more testing. The evidence was kept safe.
Last month, it was found that the blood on the knife belonged to Holtz, and DNA from her longtime boyfriend was also found on the knife, police said.
The boyfriend was named Gary Durrance by the police. He was caught in Volusia County on Thursday and taken to the Seminole County Jail on a charge of second-degree murder.
Gillett said that Holtz was living in a house in Sanford with Durrance and three other people when she died. The police talked to all the other people living in the house and found that Holtz and Durrance had a fight, which caused Durrance to kick Holtz out on December 2, 1999, the day before she was killed.
Gillett said that Sanford police had been called to a number of domestic violence cases involving Holtz and Durrance between 1996 and 1999.
Gillett said that Holtz was last seen at Uncle Nick’s Bar in Sanford on December 3. People who saw her leave the bar said it was sometime between 7:30 p.m. and 11:30 p.m.
Those who lived with Durrance said to the cops that he was home the night Holtz was killed, but they couldn’t remember where he was all night. Gillett said there were also signs he had left the house at some point, which filled in holes in his story.
He told police that he hadn’t seen Holtz since December 1, Gillett said.
When the investigation was started again, witnesses were asked again about what Durrance said when he got home from work and said he had seen Holtz’s body and helped with the crime scene. But Gillett said he said those things before the Sanford cops knew she was dead or found her body.
The only person they think is guilty is Durrance. Gillett said that Durrance admitted to killing Holtz after he was caught.
She said, “We are absolutely sure that the right man is in jail.”
“We just kind of hope that this brings some peace to the family, knowing that the person who was a longtime boyfriend… will spend the rest of his natural life in jail and have the chance to face justice for the things he has done to Sherry,” Cecil E. Smith, chief of police for Sanford, said on Friday.