A guy accused of killing 50-year-old Sherry Holtz in 1999 was taken into custody by the Sanford Police Department in Florida. Holtz was last seen alive in a neighborhood bar.
According to media reports on Friday, Bianca Gilett, a public information officer with Sanford Police, Gary Durrance, 74, was taken into custody on Thursday and is accused of second-degree murder.
Holtz was dating Durrance when she passed away.
“This was someone’s mother, someone’s daughter,” Smith stated “Durrance will not face justice for the horrible and despicable things that he did.”
On December 4, 1999, someone going through some cans in a wooded area along South Orlando Drive in Sanford discovered Holtz’s lifeless body and called the local police.
Officers on the scene discovered Holtz’s body with her neck slashed on a slab of concrete. She had been sexually abused, strangled, and had blunt force trauma, according to a medical examiner.
Despite using a sexual assault kit and discovering a knife smeared with human blood, investigators were unable to obtain a sufficient sample of DNA for testing in 2000.
They preserved DNA samples for analysis by later developments in DNA testing.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement received some DNA evidence from Sanford police investigators in May 2023, and on Thursday, the agency verified that the knife’s handle contained Durrance’s DNA and that the blood on it belonged to Holtz.
In 1999, Durrance claimed he hadn’t seen Holtz the night before her death. However, detectives found that on December 2, after an argument, Durrance had thrown Holtz out of their house.
When she was killed, Durrance’s roommates at the time verified he was home, but they were unable to provide an explanation for his whereabouts during the whole night.
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About 0.5 miles separated the tavern where Holtz was last seen alive and the location of her body the following day. She left sometime between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m., according to witnesses who spoke with the police.
Durrance is said to have told some witnesses that he was present at the crime scene the night Holtz was murdered and that he had seen her body.
It is believed that he said those things prior to Sanford Police announcing her death.
Sanford police spotted Durrance in a forested area in Volusia County close to Veteran’s Memorial Parkway, and they were able to acquire a warrant and make an arrest thanks to the tangible evidence and witness accounts.
Durrance is awaiting trial and is being detained in the Seminole County Jail.
