Lady in the Trunk: Mystery Solved

4/20/2024

By M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
It was Halloween, 1969, and St. Petersburg police was called to the scene of a gruesome murder. The body of a woman dressed only in a filmy, green nightgown was discovered neatly wrapped in plastic bags, and concealed in a black, steamer trunk near the parking lot of the Oyster Bar Restaurant at 4200 34th Street South.

Sylvia Atherton remained a Jane Doe for over 50 years

This case was recently solved in 2023 via DNA. Known as Trunk Lady she was finally given her name. This is her story.

Sometime between 1966 and 1967, Sylvia Atherton, 41, left Tucson for Michigan with her husband Stuart Brown, along with their 4-year-old daughter Kimberly Brown (b. Oct. 3, 1961).

Accompanying the couple was June's adult children Gary Sullivan and his 20-year-old sister Donna with her husband Clarence David Lindhurst (m.1966). They were from Sylvia's first marriage (1946) to Harry Lee Sullivan.

Sylvia's sister lived in Detroit.

Her other children by a second marriage, Syllen, 8, and Leonard, 11, stayed in Arizona with their father, Leonard Cheney Smith. In the 1960 census, Sylvia still lived with her husband Leonard and her four children.

Sylvia's son Gary Sullivan eventually went to live with his father. He along with his two siblings who stayed with Leonard Smith lost contact with her, and they never saw their mother or sisters again after they moved.

Stuart L. Brown during the time he was married to Sylvia in Arizona c.1961

It was approximately two years after Sylvia Atherton Brown moved, that St. Petersburg police made the gruesome discovery in a wooded lot next to the bar. Inside was a woman that appeared to be in her mid-twenties, measured 5 feet 9 inches and weighed 130 pounds. She was described as a statuesque brunette with brown eyes.

Besides being strangled, she had been beaten around her head and shoulders. Her dark hair was in rollers. She was lying on her side and had a towel wrapped around her head. She had been dead two to three days, and appeared to have head trauma. She still had a thin bolo tie around her neck. Further signs of trauma were hard to discern due to the state of decomposition of her body, however her cause of death was later determined to be strangulation.

Her fingerprints, dental records and the trunk were sent to the FBI. It was determined she had not been raped, but at some point had given birth to a child. Despite her age, she wore a partial dental plate for her two front teeth and two side teeth. Six other teeth had been extracted. Initially authorities were hopeful that due to her extensive dental work a dentist in the area could help to identify her.

Later Sylvia's son would go on to verify the steamer trunk her body was found in was used as a "TV stand" when the family lived in Tucson, Arizona.

Sylvia Atherton Brown with her daughter c.1960s

Police have no explanation why Atherton had come to the St. Petersburg area. The only clue police had was information from witnesses who told them they had seen two men in a pickup drop off the trunk and take off.

Her identity has left other mysteries unsolved. One is why she was never reported missing, and where are Sylvia's two daughters, Donna and Kimberly.

Sylvia's third and last husband, Stuart L. Brown was living in Las Vegas, Nevada when he died in 1999, age 76. There was no reference on his death certificate of a wife or child. Whatever secrets he had about the whereabouts of his wife, daughter and step-daughter died with him. Most importantly the answer as to what happened in those last 30 years of his life when his wife and her daughters disappeared as if the earth had swallowed them.

Stuart L. Brown had divorced his first wife Anita in 1959, while they lived in Arizona where he owned Bunny's Joke Shop.

The trunk found in the parking lot of the Oyster Bar with the woman's body inside c.1969

By February 1972, almost three years had gone by and no matches had been made with her fingerprints or dental records. There were no leads from a family member or witness. Without a name, the opportunity to apprehend her murderer became more remote.

The police then had a sketch drawn and published it in the local papers in an effort to finally give her a name. The months and years rolled by and the tall brunette who had been buried in a pauper’s grave at Memorial Park Cemetery in November, 1969, remained a mystery. It was almost as if she had not existed prior to her body being found inside the trunk.

In February 2010, her body was exhumed with the hopes that DNA might finally give her a name. By then The Oyster Bar had been demolished, and the area had changed considerably. Sgt. Bill Carlisle, 83 years old and retired, was present at the exhumation by USF anthropologist, just as he had been when her body was found 41 years earlier.

It's not clear what happened to the hair and skin samples, and why it took so long for them to be processed, but it wasn't until 2023 that a comparison was made to her children's DNA which confirmed her identity.

The cold case unit contacted Syllen Gates with their findings, and learned that her sisters Kimberly Brown and Donna Sullivan Lindhurst who lived with their mother, have never been heard from since.

Syllen said she had not heard of St. Petersburg until Donna left a message with a grandparent, because she thought her brother was killed in the Vietnam War. The family never heard from her again.

Undoubtedly if they are still alive they could explain what happened with their mother after the mid-1960s, and how she came to be a murder victim in Florida.