In April 1980, two men were shot in the head at point-blank range in a St. Petersburg motel room.<\/p>\n
A black Ford was seen speeding away from what was then the Siesta Motel at 701 34th St. N.<\/p>\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.<\/p>\n
Pavelski said Johnny Bradshaw was a 29-year-old man who was born in Texas and at some point lived in Tennessee.<\/p>\n
Pavelski shared the news that Bradshaw had been killed in St. Petersburg more than four decades ago with Bradshaw\u2019s two elderly sisters, who live in Texas and California, a couple weeks ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt answered a 46-year-old question of where their brother went,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019ve been looking for him since 1980.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pavelski said there was a lot of rumor and speculation surrounding the circumstances of the 1980 shooting. He doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Bradshaw may have been an innocent bystander, Pavelski told the Tampa Bay Times.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Kyle Coy Watson, 39, went by the name \u201cCowboy\u201d and was being sought on two counts of murder, according to a 1980 article in the then-St. Petersburg Times.<\/p>\n
His girlfriend, David Ann Thomas, killed him when they returned to Knoxville before police could arrest him.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
She died in 2014.<\/p>\n
Because Bradshaw\u2019s identity was a mystery, detectives at the time circulated an artist\u2019s rendering of him as well as a photo of the Italian horn pendant he wore.<\/p>\n
Detectives exhumed Bradshaw\u2019s body in 2010 in an attempt to identify him but were unsuccessful, according to a news release from the St. Petersburg Police Department.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s final one, he said.<\/p>\n
In 2023, detectives used DNA to identify the \u201ctrunk lady\u201d in a 1969 murder case,<\/a> and shortly after identified the suspect<\/a> in the 1997 murder of 18-year-old Richard \u201cJuicy\u201d Evans. Police said the killer was 15 at the time of the homicide and has since died of natural causes.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s family members.<\/p>\n Pavelski said the Pinellas Medical Examiner\u2019s Office will be sending Bradshaw\u2019s remains to his sisters so that they can conduct a proper burial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In April 1980, two men were shot in the head at point-blank range in a St. Petersburg motel…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":155203,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[74574,74469,74573,202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":{"0":"post-155202","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-st-petersburg","8":"tag-jack-roy-davis","9":"tag-johnny-bradshaw","10":"tag-siesta-motel","11":"tag-st-pete","12":"tag-st-pete-headlines","13":"tag-st-pete-news","14":"tag-st-petersburg","15":"tag-st-petersburg-headlines","16":"tag-st-petersburg-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155202\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}