BROOKSVILLE -- Jeffrey Norman Crum Sr. is the person who murdered 12-year-old Jennifer Odom more than 30 years ago, a Hernando County jury decided Thursday.
After a four-day trial this week and five hours of deliberations, the panel of seven men and five women delivered a conclusive answer to a mystery that for three decades vexed law enforcement and left an enduring sense of fear and loss throughout the Tampa Bay area.
Crum, 65, was found guilty of kidnapping, sexual battery and first-degree murder in the death of Jennifer, who was abducted in 1993 after she stepped off a school bus near her home in rural Pasco County.
He remained stone-faced as the verdict was read aloud in court shortly before 5 p.m. Sheriff’s deputies immediately placed him in handcuffs.
The packed courtroom stood in silence. As a clerk uttered the word “guilty,” gasps were heard. In the gallery’s front row, Jennifer’s mother, father and sister wept and embraced.
In the aisle stood several law enforcement officers who’d worked the case. Detective George Loydgren, a cold case investigator who was the case’s lead detective, wiped a tear from his eye.
The guilty verdict pushes the case into a second phase, wherein prosecutors will ask the jury to recommend the death penalty.
Jennifer’s school portrait loomed on several overhead TV screens as Assistant State Attorney Richard Buxman began his closing argument Thursday morning.
The prosecutor summarized the state’s case, saying Crum’s guilt had been proven not by one piece of evidence, but by a variety of clues, including Crum’s alleged confessions.
“It’s based on the defendant’s own words,” Buxman said. “Not to one person, but to several people, even his own son, who told you at the end, ‘I still love him.’”
Indeed, Jeffrey Crum Jr. was a crucial witness for the state. He was one of several people who testified that his father had over the years admitted to killing Jennifer.
There was also the blue truck he drove — a 1978 Toyota pickup — which matched the description of the vehicle seen approaching Jennifer before she was abducted.
And there was Crum’s prior crime. He is serving a life sentence for the 1992 rape of a teen girl, who was attacked after stepping off a school bus in Pasco County.
Defense attorney Jenna Finkelstein urged the jury not to judge Crum based on his prior crime or how he’d lived his life, but on what she asserted was a lack of proof that he was guilty of killing Jennifer.
No forensic or physical evidence linked him to the crime. A DNA profile, identified on one of Jennifer’s fingernails, was not a match to Crum. It is unclear if the DNA came from one of her classmates or another source.
“You’re not being asked to decide whether you like Jeffrey Crum,” she said. “You probably don’t.”
A haunting crime
Jennifer was a darling of the rural Pasco County community where she lived.
She was short and petite and had auburn hair that draped her shoulders. A seventh grader at Thomas Weightman Middle School, she played clarinet in the school band. She competed in barefoot water skiing tournaments, climbing atop the human pyramid as she glided atop the water.
She lived with her family on their 15-acre property in St. Joseph, west of Dade City. She and her younger sister, Jessica, built forts, rode four-wheelers and spent summers swimming in the creek behind their house.
On Feb. 19, 1993, she rode the bus to school. It was chilly outside. Jennifer wore jeans, a turtleneck and a red cashmere sweater.
The bus brought her home about 3 p.m. that day. She stepped off at the intersection of Jessamine and Jim Denny roads. She waved to her best friend, Michelle Sample, as she began the 200-yard walk to her house.
As the bus pulled away, several of her schoolmates noticed a pickup truck approach her. It was light blue and had racks on the bed, as though it was used to hold construction equipment. They didn’t see the driver.
Her sister later arrived to find the house locked and empty. She phoned their mother, who came home and scoured nearby fields and orange groves for her daughter.
Pasco deputies and the community launched a widespread search. It ended six days later when a couple looking for Jennifer found her body along a trail through an abandoned orange grove in southern Hernando County.
She was nude but for a sock on her right foot. She’d been killed by a blow to her head.
A medical examiner noted deep bruising on her hands and arms. Her feet kicked up the dirt beneath the spot where she was found.
“We know that she fought like hell,” Buxman, the prosecutor, told the jury.
The case saturated local media for years and struck fear in the community.
Two years later, a couple looking for scrap metal found Jennifer’s clarinet case and book bag near an isolated roadside in western Hernando County, far from where she was killed.
The ensuing investigation saw involvement from law enforcement agencies nationwide. Investigators in Hernando and Pasco collaborated closely to probe the kidnapping and murder. Thousands of tips directed detectives to scores of possible suspects.
Jennifer’s story in the 1990s was featured on the popular TV show “Unsolved Mysteries,” drawing more potential leads. The FBI was brought in to do forensic testing and conduct behavioral analysis of the unknown suspect.
A complete report in the investigation would come to span more than 75,000 pages.
Carlos Douglas, the original lead detective who is now retired, testified that Jennifer’s murder was never truly a cold case.
“It was never put aside,” he said. “It was constantly being investigated.”
A case built on alleged confessions
It wasn’t until 2015 that Crum surfaced as a suspect.
It happened after he was linked through DNA to another crime — the 1992 Pasco County rape case. The teen victim in that case was attacked after she stepped off a school bus in Pasco County. She was beaten, suffering a brain injury that left her permanently disabled. He was later found guilty of that crime and sentenced to life in prison.
Loydgren, the Hernando County cold case investigator, began speaking with people who knew Crum the same year he was charged in the rape case.
A few told tales of purported admissions they’d heard him utter over the years — drunken tales of having abducted and killed a 12-year-old girl.
On the witness stand, Jeffrey Crum Jr. recalled a conversation with his father about 20 years ago.
“Son, you know I love you, but one day it’s gonna come out that I’m a monster,” he said his father told him. The elder Crum then admitted he raped the victim in the 1992 case and that he’d killed Jennifer, too, his son said.
Crum Jr. also recalled that when he was about 12, his father gave him a clarinet as a gift.
In what was perhaps the trial’s most dramatic moment, a prosecutor showed him Jennifer’s rusted clarinet, still tucked in its weathered case. Crum Jr. identified it as the same instrument his father gave him.
His father regularly worked construction jobs in Orlando and likely drove along Powell Road, past the abandoned orange grove where Jennifer was found, he said. He also often drove up U.S. 98 when traveling to visit family in Dixie County, past the area where Jennifer’s clarinet case and book bag were later found.
Other witnesses, including Crum Jr.’s former girlfriend, also claimed Crum had confessed to them. In 2019, investigators affixed hidden recording devices to a man jailed with Crum with instructions to get him talking.
The recording, at one point, picked up Crum saying that he had “two victims.”
“One’s a little bit f---ed up in the head and is in a facility,” he said. “And the other one’s a cold case from back in like ’92.”
Another jailhouse informant emerged late in the case to testify that Crum confessed to him, too.
Nicholas Romano, who is awaiting trial on drug charges, said he talked with Crum through a jailhouse air conditioning vent a week before the trial started. He said Crum told him he snatched Jennifer after she got off the bus and then dumped her off Powell Road. But Romano also said a jailhouse TV monitor featured information about people’s cases.
Three hours into deliberations, the jury sent a note with several questions to Hernando Circuit Judge Daniel Merritt Jr.
They wanted to know more about Crum’s relationship with the man who wore the wire, and they asked for a transcript of their conversation. They wanted to know if the TV monitor in the county jail included details of Jennifer’s case. They also wanted to know whether Romano or Crum’s son might receive immunity in future cases for their testimony.
To most of the inquiries, the judge simply told the panel to rely on the evidence that had been presented.
After the jury returned its verdict, Merritt scheduled the trial’s penalty phase to begin Monday.