More than half a century after deputies found her body, the Sumter County Sheriff\u2019s Office put a name to the woman previously only known as \u201cLittle Miss Lake Panasoffkee.\u201d<\/p>\n
Deputies announced Wednesday that they identified the murdered woman as Maureen Minor Rowan, known to her friends and family as \u201cCookie.\u201d Investigators said they identified Rowan, 21, through latent print analysis.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s leather belt wrapped around her neck, and investigators believed she had been thrown off the overpass about a month earlier.<\/p>\n
Sumter County deputies began investigating the case, but they couldn\u2019t establish an identity for the badly decomposed body. The case passed from deputy to deputy over the course of three sheriff\u2019s tenures.<\/p>\n
\u201cI grew up with this case,\u201d said Galvin, whose father investigated Rowan\u2019s murder when he was a deputy. \u201cAnd I\u2019m grateful to be able to honor their legacy by helping to finally bring the name to perhaps our most well-known cold case victim, \u2018Little Miss Lake Panasoffkee.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The sheriff\u2019s 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 \u201cUnsolved Mysteries\u201d in 1992, which Galvin said yielded \u201ca lot of calls\u201d that never named Rowan.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we have recently learned is that someone that knew Cookie saw the segment and thought it could be her,\u201d Galvin said. \u201cBut no one ever called.\u201d<\/p>\n
As technology evolved, the sheriff\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The sheriff\u2019s office discovered Rowan\u2019s identity after it implemented a biometric identification system in February and hired a latent print expert, Galvin said. The degraded fingerprint taken from \u201cLittle Miss Lake Panasoffkee\u201d matched a 1970 arrest in Hillsborough County, Galvin said, in which Rowan had been charged with passing a worthless check.<\/p>\n
The fingerprints from Rowan\u2019s arrest hadn\u2019t been uploaded into the Florida Department of Law Enforcement\u2019s fingerprint database until 2013, Galvin said.<\/p>\n
When investigators matched Rowan to the murdered woman, they began to look into the motive behind her death. They found that Rowan\u2019s marriage to Charles Emery Rowan Sr., her estranged husband who went by Emery, had been \u201ctumultuous,\u201d Galvin said, and they had separated just before she died.<\/p>\n
\u201cEmery\u2019s actions and behavior leading up to the separation and continuing after the discovery of Cookie\u2019s body are suspicious enough to list him as a person of interest,\u201d Galvin said, \u201cbut not rising to the level that we want to identify him officially as a suspect.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s office.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo Cookie\u2019s family: Cookie has never been forgotten,\u201d Breeden said Wednesday. \u201cI hope this gets you closer to finding the closure you need and helps provide some answers you never had.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than half a century after deputies found her body, the Sumter County Sheriff\u2019s Office put a name…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28226,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[2026,21034,21036,19218,21033,21035,135,137,136],"class_list":["post-28225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-investigators","tag-jon-galvin","tag-lake-panasoffkee","tag-little-miss-lake-panasoffkee","tag-maureen-minor-rowan","tag-sumter-county-sheriff","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28225","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=28225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}