Authorities Raced To Identify A Mystery Woman Caught On Video Near A Strange Murder Scene
When 59-year-old Pamela Hutchinson was found murdered in a Florida condo, investigators zeroed in on a suspicious woman seen lurking around the neighborhood.
Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc. (Screenshot from ID's "See No Evil")
It was prime spring break season when the 911 call came into the dispatch center in Lee County, Florida around 9 p.m. on April 9, 2018. It was the manager at the Marina Village condominiums in Ft. Myers Beach — there was a dead body in unit 404.
Investigators walked into the condo where things appeared almost normal. There was a dish rag on the kitchen floor, but there were no signs of a struggle or forced entry. In one of the bathrooms, officers found 59-year-old Pamela Hutchinson dead on the floor. She was covered in white towels, and whoever killed her had stuffed towels under the bathroom door in an attempt to keep the smell of death from spreading.
She had been shot once in the back, and the medical examiner was certain that she had been dead for more than 24 hours before the manager found her. As the investigators walked through the scene, they realized that the bed in the second bedroom had been slept in. Whoever had been in the condo with Pamela had also stolen her drivers license and credit cards from her purse. Police also found an important clue — there was a receipt from a nearby brewery in Pamela’s purse. She’d been there on the evening of April 5, four days prior.
The receipt led officers to another important clue: surveillance footage from the brewery. Officers watched as Pamela sat at the bar and chatted with a man before a woman in a blue shirt plopped down at the bar next to her. The women struck up a conversation and spent the next two hours chatting before paying their bill and leaving.
The investigators returned to the condominium complex to review their surveillance footage. Three minutes after Pamela and the mystery woman left the brewery, they appeared on the 4th floor walkway heading towards Pamela’s condo.
45 minutes later, the mystery woman appeared on the walkway again; this time looking upset and disheveled. She appeared to talk to herself and run her hands through her hair as she stared out across the parking lot. Pamela was nowhere to be seen. Eventually, the woman went back to the condo.
Meanwhile, there was a similar horror unfolding 1600 miles away in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota. Authorities there had found a man lying on his bathroom floor covered in white towels. More towels had been stuffed under the doors to try and hold the smell of death inside.
See how authorities linked the cases on See No Evil on ID at 9/8c on Jan. 25. More episodes are available now on discovery+.
