Posted on 01/02/2010 5:23:27 PM PST by workerbee
ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — Authorities in northeast Florida say they've closed the 24-year-old case of a missing seventh-grader, but the girl's mother says she doesn't believe it.
Martha Jean Lambert vanished near her St. Augustine home on Nov. 27, 1985. Her mother, Margaret Pichon, says she remains convinced that the 12-year-old girl was kidnapped.
However, the St. Johns County Sheriff's Office said Friday that Pichon's son David Lambert has confessed to accidentally killing his sister in an argument.
Sgt. Chuck Mulligan said Lambert told police that he panicked and buried the girl in a shallow grave. Lambert was 15 at the time.
The State Attorney's Office decided not charge Lambert with manslaughter after prosecutors considered his age at the time, the statute of limitations manslaughter charges had in 1985 and "other mitigating circumstances," Mulligan said.
Investigators had considered Lambert a suspect, but they had no evidence nor a confession until sheriff's detectives Sean Tice and Howard Cole III reopened the case in June.
Lambert, now 38, had previously told investigators that he last saw his sister as she walked off to play.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Hell of a thing to find out.
It’s seems hard to believe that a 15 yr old, in a panic over the accidental killing of his own sister, could conceal her so completely that no one was ever able to find the body.
Hell of a thing to keep inside you for 23 years, too.
My sisters and I used to get pretty ruthless and rough with our play and fights but there were certain lines we seemed to avoid crossing.
My thought, exactly.
The police may just be trying to close a cold case, and this man may be mentally unbalanced.
Losing a body buried in a shallow grave seems highly unlikely. Construction would have exposed the bones from a shallow grave as soon as clearing took place -- and believe me, the equipment operator would have called the cops. Nothing quite so unsettling as turning over human bones with a bush-hog! (Old, unmarked graveyards on construction sites are the usual reason. But those folks are six feet down!)
Hell of a thing to keep inside you for 23 years, too...............................Yes, but not if you are a Kennedy.
How could a 15 yr old,fool the cops?
I would have been scared sh*tless and the guilt this kid musta had,i would say he did a lot of drugs and prolly a alcoholic...
You mean this is something that Bush DIDN’T do??
I wonder if the son is somehow trying to help bring closure to the mother, as terrible as that sounds.
I know nothing else about the case than what I read here, but it just rings hollow otherwise.
Shades of Michael Skakel (a Kennedy) who got away with a murder for a very long time...
I think you are right. Guilty or not, he definitely has a few screws loose.
I don’t doubt that he killed her, but his story sounds fishy. “I pushed her and she fell and hit her head” sounds too much like something you would hear out of a 4 year old.
it’s like, “I was cleaning my gun, and it went off”.
Reading about this brought that up in my mind. What happened in that case, was Skakel finally convicted?
Interesting.
They haven’t found her remains but note that the area has had a lot of construction and demolition.
He gets off with this?
Maybe it was accidentaly- and maybe not.
Usually what happens when bones are found on a construction site cops block off the site all work is stopped until a criminal investigation is carried out..
This could take up to a month or longer, so sometimes construction workers turn the other way and not notice anything strange..
The article says he was terrified of his mama and still is.
That must be a helluva thing too.
Yes, that’s part of what prompted me to wonder about the son’s motives (see #11).
Regardless, I just can’t help but feel for this mother. The disappearance of your child — and never knowing where they are or what actually happened — has got to be the worst, the absolute most ghastly nightmare a parent could go through. I don’t know how people go on with their sanity.
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