More than half a century after deputies found her body, the Sumter County Sheriff’s Office put a name to the woman previously only known as “Little Miss Lake Panasoffkee.”
Deputies announced Wednesday that they identified the murdered woman as Maureen Minor Rowan, known to her friends and family as “Cookie.” Investigators said they identified Rowan, 21, through latent print analysis.
At the time of her death, Rowan lived at 1206 Windermere Way in Tampa with her two young children, Capt. Jon Galvin said in a news conference.
Deputies found Rowan, then unidentified, floating under a highway overpass at Lake Panasoffkee in February 1971. She was found wrapped in carpet with a men’s leather belt wrapped around her neck, and investigators believed she had been thrown off the overpass about a month earlier.
Sumter County deputies began investigating the case, but they couldn’t establish an identity for the badly decomposed body. The case passed from deputy to deputy over the course of three sheriff’s tenures.
“I grew up with this case,” said Galvin, whose father investigated Rowan’s murder when he was a deputy. “And I’m grateful to be able to honor their legacy by helping to finally bring the name to perhaps our most well-known cold case victim, ‘Little Miss Lake Panasoffkee.’”
The sheriff’s office exhumed her remains in 1986 to draw a reconstruction of her face, which was distributed on flyers across the county. The case was featured on an episode of “Unsolved Mysteries” in 1992, which Galvin said yielded “a lot of calls” that never named Rowan.
“What we have recently learned is that someone that knew Cookie saw the segment and thought it could be her,” Galvin said. “But no one ever called.”
As technology evolved, the sheriff’s office sought new ways to put a name to the murdered woman. Investigators compared the fingerprints they had to those of every missing woman reported in the county, Galvin said, and they attempted to create a genetic profile for her. The profile, he said, was never viable enough to pinpoint her genealogy.
The sheriff’s office discovered Rowan’s identity after it implemented a biometric identification system in February and hired a latent print expert, Galvin said. The degraded fingerprint taken from “Little Miss Lake Panasoffkee” matched a 1970 arrest in Hillsborough County, Galvin said, in which Rowan had been charged with passing a worthless check.
The fingerprints from Rowan’s arrest hadn’t been uploaded into the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s fingerprint database until 2013, Galvin said.
When investigators matched Rowan to the murdered woman, they began to look into the motive behind her death. They found that Rowan’s marriage to Charles Emery Rowan Sr., her estranged husband who went by Emery, had been “tumultuous,” Galvin said, and they had separated just before she died.
“Emery’s actions and behavior leading up to the separation and continuing after the discovery of Cookie’s body are suspicious enough to list him as a person of interest,” Galvin said, “but not rising to the level that we want to identify him officially as a suspect.”
Emery Rowan died in 2015. Sumter County Sheriff Pat Breeden said the case is still under investigation and encouraged anyone with information to contact the sheriff’s office.
“To Cookie’s family: Cookie has never been forgotten,” Breeden said Wednesday. “I hope this gets you closer to finding the closure you need and helps provide some answers you never had.”