Ailing Ex-Deputy Admitted to Killing Florida Store Clerk in 1979

Early on Nov. 5, 1979, a Florida sheriff’s deputy radioed dispatch to report that he had found the body of a convenience store clerk who had just been fatally shot — once in the back and once in the head. About $7 was missing from the register.

Decades passed and no one was ever arrested in the murder of the clerk, Adele Marie Easterly, 25.

But some investigators always suspected that the deputy, John J. Greer, might have been involved because he was odd, even “creepy,” said Detective Mike Gandy of the cold-case unit at the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office.

Their suspicions were finally confirmed, Detective Gandy said, when investigators confronted Mr. Greer in April 2023 as he lay in a bed in an extended-care facility in Kingsport, Tenn.

Unable to feed himself and barely able to speak, Mr. Greer managed to tell investigators that he had shot Ms. Easterly at the Farm Store in Punta Gorda, Fla., more than 40 years earlier, Detective Gandy said.

Detectives did not arrest Mr. Greer, believing his failing health would have made his extradition to Florida difficult and that the case would have been a coin toss at trial, with no physical evidence and only one witness with hearsay linking Mr. Greer to the murder, Detective Gandy said. Mr. Greer died nearly a year later, on March 2, 2024, at age 76.

The investigation into Ms. Easterly’s murder has now been closed, the Sheriff’s Office said in a statement on Tuesday that disclosed Mr. Greer’s confession in 2023. Detective Gandy said information about the confession had not been made public earlier because the office was contacting other law enforcement agencies in the South to see if Mr. Greer might be connected to other crimes and because investigators were busy with other homicides.