Posted on 01/03/2010 11:53:14 AM PST by inflorida
ST. AUGUSTINE, Florida -- Authorities in northeast Florida say they have 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 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 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.
When Tice and Cole interviewed him again last summer, Lambert told them he and Martha Jean were arguing near the old Florida Memorial College site over $20 he refused to give her, the detectives said. The girl punched him in the face, and Lambert said he shoved her backward. Her head landed on a piece of metal sticking out of the ground, he told the detectives.
(Excerpt) Read more at orlandosentinel.com ...
How awful that this family must endure yet another tragedy in relation to this case. I can’t imagine the pain.
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