In April 1980, two men were shot in the head at point-blank range in a St. Petersburg motel room.
A black Ford was seen speeding away from what was then the Siesta Motel at 701 34th St. N.
One of the victims was quickly identified by an ex-wife as Jack Roy Davis of Knoxville, Tennessee. The second victim and his affiliation with the situation was a mystery until St. Petersburg cold case Detective Wallace Pavelski announced his identity on Friday.
Pavelski said Johnny Bradshaw was a 29-year-old man who was born in Texas and at some point lived in Tennessee.
Pavelski shared the news that Bradshaw had been killed in St. Petersburg more than four decades ago with Bradshaw’s two elderly sisters, who live in Texas and California, a couple weeks ago.
“It answered a 46-year-old question of where their brother went,” he said. “They’ve been looking for him since 1980.”
Pavelski said there was a lot of rumor and speculation surrounding the circumstances of the 1980 shooting. He doesn’t know why the men were staying at a St. Petersburg motel for a week, or how they were known to each other. But he suspects Davis was in some kind of trouble with the killer and was running from him.
Bradshaw may have been an innocent bystander, Pavelski told the Tampa Bay Times.
At the time, detectives found that the getaway car was registered to a 39-year-old woman from Tennessee, who, along with her boyfriend, were suspected of killing the men.
Kyle Coy Watson, 39, went by the name “Cowboy” and was being sought on two counts of murder, according to a 1980 article in the then-St. Petersburg Times.
His girlfriend, David Ann Thomas, killed him when they returned to Knoxville before police could arrest him.
Police eventually caught up with Thomas for being an accessory for driving the getaway car. She pleaded guilty in 1982 and served five years in prison, court records show.
She died in 2014.
Because Bradshaw’s identity was a mystery, detectives at the time circulated an artist’s rendering of him as well as a photo of the Italian horn pendant he wore.
Detectives exhumed Bradshaw’s body in 2010 in an attempt to identify him but were unsuccessful, according to a news release from the St. Petersburg Police Department.
When Pavelski moved from homicide to the cold case unit in 2022, there were a handful of homicide cases involving John Does. Bradshaw marked the city’s final one, he said.
In 2023, detectives used DNA to identify the “trunk lady” in a 1969 murder case, and shortly after identified the suspect in the 1997 murder of 18-year-old Richard “Juicy” Evans. Police said the killer was 15 at the time of the homicide and has since died of natural causes.
That same year, Pavelski sent new bone samples from Bradshaw to a lab in Texas. The lab was able to extract a full DNA profile and modern genealogy research allowed Pavelski to find Bradshaw’s family members.
Pavelski said the Pinellas Medical Examiner’s Office will be sending Bradshaw’s remains to his sisters so that they can conduct a proper burial.