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| south end of Marine Street | Athalia's home | the Stanford home |
Murder On Marine Street
On January 23, 1974 around six pm Athalia Ponsell Lindsley was beheaded by an unknown assailant as she sat on the front steps of her home at 124 Marine Street in downtown St. Augustine. Almost immediately her next door neighbor, St. Johns County Manager Alan Stanford, became the prime suspect.
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| south end of Marine Street | Athalia's home | the Stanford home |
Stanford and Lindsley were perpetually at odds both politically and personally. She had tried to get him fired and he had taken her to court over noise issues in the neighborhood. While Stanford was liked by those who knew him, Lindsley made many enemies with her conservative views and brusque manner. One month after her murder, Stanford was arrested and charged following a fairly haphazard investigation. It would be a full year before the case came before a jury.
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| north end of Marine Street | the alley near where Frances | |
| at the corner of Bridge Street | was murdered |
Athalia Lindsley would not be the only person to die on Marine Street that year. On Sunday, November 3rd, around seven pm someone brutally beat Frances Bemis to death as she walked home from a friends house. Her battered, disfigured body was discovered in a vacant lot near the corner of Bridge Street and Marine Street.
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| the apartment house Frances owned |
It is probably more than coincidence that Bemis was not only one of Lindsley's few supporters, but she had also expressed her dislike of Stanford on several occasions. Frances Bemis may have been collecting information for a book about Athalia Lindsley's murder and would have most certainly been a witness for the prosecution during Alan Stanford's trial. Her house, the Maria Sanchez Apartments, was just four doors down from the Lindsley and Stanford residences. She had been on her evening walk the night Lindsley's body had been discovered on the front lawn. Her friends said she had become obsessed with solving the murder of her neighbor.
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| the Casa Monica Hotel was the site | the St Augustine Police Department | |
| of the St Johns County Courthouse | ||
| until 1994 |
On January 22, 1975, Alan Stanford's trial began in the St. Johns County Courthouse. Despite what might seem to be overwhelming evidence, Stanford was acquitted thirteen days later after just two and a half hours of deliberation. He left St. Augustine shortly thereafter and has never returned. The murders of Athalia Ponsell Lindsley and Frances Bemis have never been solved. They remain open in the cold case files of the St. Augustine Police Department.
