The Karen Gregory murder case ended with the conviction of her across-the-street neighbor, George Lewis, a 22-year-old St. Petersburg firefighter and neighborhood watch captain, who raped and killed the 36-year-old graphic artist inside her Gulfport, Florida home in the early morning hours of May 23, 1984. He was arrested nearly two years later after an FBI lab matched a bloody barefoot print in Gregory’s bathroom to him, was sentenced to life in prison in 1987, and died behind bars in 2015 without ever admitting guilt.
What Happened on May 23, 1984
Gregory lived in a quiet residential part of Gulfport, a small city on Florida’s Gulf Coast. She was in a relationship with a man named David Mackey, who was out of state the night she was attacked. When Mackey could not reach her by phone, he called a neighbor and asked them to check on her. The neighbor looked through a window and saw Gregory on the floor in a pool of blood. Her body had been there for two days.
Inside, police found broken glass, blood pooled around her head, and stab wounds to her neck. She was partially clothed. Bloody barefoot prints on the floor did not match her own feet. Someone else had walked through her blood.
Medical examiner Dr. Joan Wood determined that Gregory had been stabbed thirteen times with a weapon consistent with a buck knife and had suffered severe head trauma. Dr. Wood concluded she had been sexually assaulted, citing the presence of nonmoving sperm cells and the positioning of her clothing.
How George Lewis Was Identified
The Gulfport Police Department assigned Detective Sergeant Lawrence Tosi to lead the investigation. He spent months on leads that went nowhere. Among the first people he interviewed was Lewis, who lived directly across the street. Lewis told Tosi he had heard only a “faint scream” from his garage that night and had walked into the street to check but seen nothing. He also described a tall man with a red beard near Gregory’s home.
About five months in, a resident several blocks away told police that what she heard was not a faint scream but “long, sustained wailing.” Tosi caught the contradiction: a woman blocks away had heard far more than a man across the street. As Tosi later put it, “George is right across the street, and he didn’t hear more than what he said was a faint scream. It didn’t make any sense.”
Around the same time, a woman in the neighborhood identified Lewis as someone she had caught watching her through her window. Lewis first denied it, then said the peeping was part of his neighborhood watch duties. He failed a polygraph on both the peeping incidents and the murder.
The FBI crime lab then matched the bloody barefoot print in Gregory’s bathroom to Lewis. Confronted, he changed his story again. He now said he had gone to Gregory’s window, seen her in distress, climbed in to help, found her with her throat cut, panicked, and fled. Police noted that the cut throat detail had not been publicly disclosed. Lewis also testified that he had vomited in the bathroom on finding her, but Tosi testified that the toilet bowl and seat were clean when he processed the scene.
Tosi arrested Lewis in March 1986.
The Neighbors Who Heard Her Scream
More than six neighbors, some living more than two blocks away, later told police they had heard screams during the attack. None called. According to the organization Parents of Murdered Children, “Had someone called the police, she may have lived.” Gregory’s body was not found until two days after the attack.
The Trial and Conviction
Lewis was indicted on April 9, 1986, on charges of first-degree murder and sexual battery. The venue was moved from Pinellas County to Polk County, and the trial ran from June 2 to June 14, 1987.
The prosecution rested on several pillars. The FBI footprint identification placed Lewis inside the house. His shifting statements undercut his credibility, and he admitted on the stand that he had lied from the start of the investigation. Dr. Wood’s testimony established the sexual assault.
One further piece of evidence tied Lewis directly to Gregory. David Mackey testified that a white teddy undergarment belonging to Gregory had gone missing from the house four or five weeks after the murder. Tonya Dishone, a seventeen-year-old neighbor who was in a sexual relationship with Lewis, testified that Lewis had given her a white teddy for her birthday during the summer of 1984. Mackey identified the garment Dishone had as “exactly like” the one missing from Gregory’s home. The defense argued the teddy had never been positively identified as Gregory’s and that the testimony existed largely to expose Lewis’s affair with a teenager. The trial court admitted it.
A separate dispute arose over Gregory’s diary, which the defense said prosecutors had failed to disclose promptly. The trial judge held a private hearing, declined to declare a mistrial, and granted the defense a day and a half of additional time to review the diary.
The jury found Lewis guilty on both counts and recommended life for the murder. The trial judge then took the unusual step of arresting judgment on the sexual battery conviction and ordering a new trial on the murder conviction.
The Appeals
The State appealed. In 1989, the Second District Court of Appeal of Florida reversed the trial judge on both points, reinstating both convictions and rejecting Lewis’s cross-appeal for a judgment of acquittal on the murder charge. The appellate court held that the teddy evidence had been properly admitted and that the diary discovery issues did not warrant a new trial.
Lewis kept fighting. He filed a motion for postconviction relief under Florida Rule of Criminal Procedure 3.850, alleging a violation of Brady v. Maryland, the constitutional rule requiring prosecutors to disclose evidence favorable to the defense. At an evidentiary hearing, Chief Circuit Judge Susan Schaeffer found that the prosecution had withheld documentary evidence meeting the first three requirements of the Brady test, but concluded there was no reasonable probability that disclosure would have changed the outcome. The Second District affirmed on August 7, 1998. The appellate court referred the matter to The Florida Bar for investigation into potential ethical violations by members of the prosecution team for their failure to furnish discovery.
The Innocence Project of Florida later took on Lewis’s case. Every effort to overturn the conviction failed. Lewis never admitted guilt.
Lewis’s Death in Prison
George Lewis died on December 27, 2015, at the age of 52, while serving his life sentence at Tomoka Correctional Institution in Daytona Beach. His original defense attorney, Robert Paver, had represented him pro bono through years of appeals. Tosi, who had retired on disability, maintained that Lewis was guilty and theorized that Lewis had been stalking Gregory and killed her after she rejected him. In a 2008 interview, Tosi described the appeals as unending: “It’s like a nightmare. It just goes on and on and on.”
The Book That Kept the Case in Public Memory
Thomas French, then a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, covered the investigation and trial and expanded his reporting into Unanswered Cries: A True Story of Friends, Neighbors, and Murder in a Small Town, published by St. Martin’s Press in 1991. The book reconstructs the crime, Tosi’s investigation, and the legal proceedings. Kirkus Reviews called the writing “crisp and clear” with “vivid characterizations.”