“They looked like they didn’t have a worry in the world.”
The observation is from a witness statement taken eight days after five people were shot in broad daylight near Anna Maria Island’s busiest intersection by a man never arrested for the crimes.
The witness, then a 69-year-old man from Bradenton, was at the Kingfish Boat Ramp in Holmes Beach Aug. 1, 1980, with his five family members.
That afternoon he saw Dr. Juan Antonio Dumois, 47, of Tampa, with sons Eric, 13, and Mark, 9, and brother-in-law Raymond Barrows, 52, of Miami, returning to the ramp from a day of fishing. He watched them load their boat onto a trailer hitched to a 1977 station wagon.
“My son asked if we could give him help and he said no, we can handle it all right,” the witness recalled, referring to Dumois.
Not long after, about 5 p.m., a man fatally shot Dumois and his sons and critically injured Barrows, who died two years later of a heart attack.
The killer had approached them wheeling a bicycle, first asking for directions and then requesting a ride, claiming he’d hurt his ankle, according to Barrows’ statement to the FBI Aug. 18, 1980. The bike was loaded into the boat and the hitchhiker got into the backseat of the station wagon with the boys. The doctor was driving and Barrows was seated in the passenger seat when they started to exit the parking lot.
Next, Barrows said, he heard a loud noise and Dumois yelling and then, while semi-conscious, Barrows saw the doctor’s back covered in blood.
The hitchhiker had shot the occupants of the station wagon, which crashed, and then fled to the nearby Island Foodway, where he fatally shot Westbay Cove North resident Robert Matzke before escaping in the car via Manatee Avenue across the bridge to the mainland.
The witness at the boat ramp had noticed a man about 10 minutes before the boaters returned to the ramp, he was “strictly by himself and he was walking with his head down and walking slowly.” The man was sort of a “disheveled looking character. He looked it, you know, he hadn’t been groomed or anything.”
But he didn’t appear to be carrying anything, like a gun, and wasn’t wheeling a bike.
Witnesses at the Foodway, without question, observed a killer — a man at a brown-colored car walking over to Matzke in a Fiat convertible, leaning over Matzke, arguing with him and then shooting the islander.
Still, the mass shooting remains a mystery, revisited at least once a year by the local media and commanding the attention of true-crime devotees speculating about whodunit and why on sites such as WebSleuths.com and Reddit, diving into a deepening well of digital archives not accessible a decade ago.
The amateur investigators, with cyber names like CrimeSolver, xGumshoe and Sleuthster, read and review the reports and materials with a 2022 outlook and perspective.
In their search for clues, they speculate about motive and suspects: A thrill kill? An attempted robbery? A mob hit? A political assassination with connections to Cuba.
Barrows said in a statement to law enforcement that Dumois, in Cuba around 1958, had belonged to student group that plotted to assassinate Fulgencio Batista but that the doctor was no longer involved in politics. Barrows’ answers to repeated questions in search of a motive was he didn’t know why the man shot him and his family members.
The amateur detectives lament the lack of personal technology back in the day. Law enforcement have two black-and-white photos taken by an islander that show Dumois’ jackknifed wagon and boat and possibly the killer on the move but they’re too blurry for identification. The man had been driving into Holmes Beach and on seeing the crash, grabbed a 35-mm camera with one hand to shoot the images.
Today there might be smartphone photos and videos, as well as surveillance footage at what’s now a Publix Super Market. And maybe the Holmes Beach Police Department’s tag reader would yield some information about the brown-tan getaway car with a Florida plate.
The true-crime buffs also focus on details that won’t crack the case but impress upon them the very real loss that August day, details like Maria Dumois driving past Kingfish before 5 p.m., honking at her kids, husband and brother after picking up a chicken dinner at a restaurant because she didn’t know if they’d be successful at catching any fish. They had caught fish, lots of fish, which were found on the boat at the impound lot and tossed before the catch could rot.
Then there are the stories from the witnesses who saw the boaters arrive to the boat ramp and others who tended to the injured and the dying.
A 19-year-old witness from Bradenton Beach driving west on Manatee Avenue saw smoke coming from Dumois’ station wagon and stopped.
“I could tell it was an accident,” he said in his Aug. 18, 1980, statement to investigators. “So I pulled over and ran over to the car and there was two children hanging out the back door and two older men in the front and nobody really did anything to them because they were afraid to until the heavyset police officer from Holmes Beach arrived. He pulled them out of the car and, ah, then he asked people to hold the child.”
“I held him for a short time,” the witness continued.
But what really populates the true-crime enthusiasts’ cyber worlds are questions, questions similar to those raised by law enforcement 42 years ago:
- What became of the killer’s 10-speed bicycle?
In one 1980 record, responding to that question from a witness, Curt Siver of the state attorney’s office said, “Yes, there was a bicycle. But where it went to we have no idea. We would like the answer to that.”
A witness at the Foodway said in a 1980 statement, “I did not notice any bicycles and I do not believe that he put a bicycle in his car and I am pretty sure that he did not have a bicycle rack on the car.”
- If the killings were premeditated, how did the killer know the family members would be going fishing?
People knew the family was vacationing for two weeks at a place on 78th Street in Holmes Beach but, according to statements, the guys didn’t decide to go fishing until that morning.
- If the killings were not premeditated, what was the motive? How did the killer choose his victims?
- Did the killer stop at the crime scene to watch? Is he among the onlookers in photographs taken by the press?
- What did the killer say to Matzke and did the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel know a shooting had taken place or only suspect a car crash at the boat ramp?
- Did Dumois and the killer exchange any words when they placed the bike in the boat? Did the doctor ask to check the man’s injured ankle?
On Aug. 6, 1980, investigators interviewed an employee in Dumois’ medical office who said, “I just can’t believe he didn’t look at that guy’s ankle.”
- Was there an accomplice? There’s no mention of a second person being involved in available witness statements but the physical descriptions of the suspect and his clothes vary widely. Maybe there were two men?
- What became of the recordings contract killer Tony “The Greek” Frankos made for an autobiography that supposedly contained information about the Kingfish murders?
Major James Foy of the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office had written to Frankos when the man was in prison, detailing the crimes in Holmes Beach and asking, “If you knew anything about these murders we would be grateful for any information you may have. We know it may be a long shot but we know too that organized crime has ties to the Tampa and Miami area and there might very well be a connection.”
In an interview with Foy May 27, 1993, Frankos said he knew the identity of a contract killer who “used a 22 all the time on hits” and was paid $15,000 for the killings plus “a couple of ounces of cocaine.”
A person could spend hours reading the records — the incident report from the Holmes Beach Police Department is 47 pages.
And then spend hours binge-listening to Jeni Decker’s “Down & Away” podcast episodes on the killings. She’s looking for threads and working through bits of information with her mom.
Decker released seven episodes exploring the day of the killings, the witness observations, the words of Raymond Barrows, the timeline and the “unlikely drug hit theory.”
She plans more episodes but, for now, she’s left an audience hanging, asking her question: Is this the work of a serial killer?