BRADENTON -- Manatee sheriff's detectives say they've made an arrest in a cold case murder dating back to 1996.
72-year-old Stephen L. Ford was arrested in Delaware in mid-August and has been brought back to Manatee County to face charges of second-degree murder.
Sheriff's Office spokesman Randy Warren says that 45-year-old Doris Korell's body was found in a ditch along U.S. 41 in the Palmetto area in December of 1996. The medical examiner determined that she had been stabbed 83 times. It took several months to identify Korell's remains. Meantime, police in St. Petersburg were investigating Korell's disappearance. Quoting evidence and reports from the time of the killing, Warren says Ford had been her boyfriend and the two had shared a duplex on 92nd Avenue North. Korell's daughter reported her missing after Ford called her in Maryland, asking if she'd seen her mother. Warren says Ford never reported Korell's disappearance to police.
Detectives in St. Pete went to the duplex and reported a smell like decomposition. Stains were discovered on the bedding and mattress. DNA evidence analyzed decades later was used by detectives to assert that those were from one of two suicide attempts by Ford. In one of those attempts, detectives say they entered the residence on Christmas Eve 1996, and found Ford foaming at the mouth after ingesting bleach.
By the time Korell's remains were identified in May of 1997, Ford had moved to Delaware and the case had gone cold.
When investigators reopened the case in 2017, new evidence included some of Korell's acquaintances describing her fear of Ford. The cold case team concluded that Ford had deliberately misled law enforcement and that taken along with his alleged suicide attempts, taken in total, gave them probable cause to arrest Ford.
Even now, Warren says there are questions about the crime that can't be answered by anyone except the attacker. For example, was Korell killed in St. Petersburg and her body brought to Manatee County, or was she killed in Manatee?
The case will be prosecuted by the Attorney General's Office of Statewide Prosecution.
Listen to an interview with Randy Warren on our Beyond the News podcast below.
Photos: Manatee County Sheriff's Office