From the archives, they speak — witnesses in the investigation into the Kingfish Boat Ramp killings 43 years ago.
Their voices are recorded on cassette tapes kept in evidence at the Holmes Beach Police Department. Some of them were interviewed Aug. 1, 1980, the evening of the shootings, and others were interviewed in the months or even years after the four murders that remain unsolved.
At about 5 p.m. Aug. 1, 1980, Dr. Juan Antonio Dumois, 47, of Tampa, with sons Eric, 13, and Mark, 9, and the doctor’s brother-in-law, Raymond Barrows, 52, of Miami, returned to the boat ramp after a day of fishing.
The vacationers, who were staying on the island, had put their boat on a trailer hitched to a station wagon when, according to Barrows, a stranger asked for a ride.
Dumois and Barrows helped the hitchhiker put his bike into their boat and then all three got into the wagon, with the hitchhiker joining the boys in the backseat and Dumois at the wheel.
Dumois was driving toward Manatee Avenue when the hitchhiker shot all four — Dumois and his sons would die — and then fled toward the nearby Island Foodway on East Bay Drive, where Westbay Cove resident Robert G. Matzke was shot during an altercation in the parking lot.
Not known today is the identity of the killer or killers or the motive.
Some of the witnesses, in recorded interviews with HBPD or the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office, spoke while working through what they saw that day.
Some witnesses — in the days that followed — wondered if they offered a clue or a tip that might help solve the mystery.
And in several recorded interviews, one eyewitness, Raymond Barrows, was dealing with the loss of his two nephews and brother-in-law, his own injury and the confusion over what happened that afternoon.
Barrows, in an interview from then-Blake Medical Center in Bradenton, told police that a man wearing a tennis-like outfit, looking about 35 years old and walking a bike approached the wagon and asked for a ride.
“I opened the back door for him,” Barrows said.
“As soon as we got on the highway, I heard something, I couldn’t tell you what it was,” Barrows added. “I kind of slumped in the seat. … And then I saw Juan yelling.”
Barrows soon stopped that interview.
In another, also conducted at the hospital, an investigator asked Barrows whether the hitchhiker said anything after he got into the wagon.
“Not a word,” Barrows replied.
Theodore David Stahley of Bradenton Beach was driving near the boat ramp that day and saw, in his rear-view mirror, the Dumois’ station wagon moving erratically and what appeared to be a fight between the driver and someone in the backseat.
Stahley told his wife, “They ain’t watching where they are going.”
Then he said he heard two muffled bangs and saw the wagon swerve off the road.
“After that, after the dust settled … I seen somebody running towards the road from the car,” Stahley said. “They had brown cutoffs.”
Norma Stahley, in her interview, said she saw the station wagon and trailer jack-knife and then saw “this guy. He had to come from someplace around the car. … He was on foot. But he didn’t have a bike. … I kept watching. I didn’t see anyone else.”
The man was headed toward Manatee Avenue.
Another witness, Warren Baxter Pearson of Bradenton Beach, interviewed with the MCSO’s criminal investigations bureau Aug. 18, 1980.
Pearson was traveling west on Manatee Avenue and stopped to help the victims after seeing the station wagon “with smoke coming from it.”
“Do you recall seeing anybody that looks like this?” an investigator asked. “This is an artist’s sketch of a witness’s idea of what the guy might have looked like.”
Pearson answered, “Not right off hand. I was really too busy to look.”
The day of the killings, investigators interviewed a woman who witnessed Matzke’s murder.
Matzke was in his car and another man stood outside the car, she said.
“The next thing I knew, he shot him,” she said.
She described the man with the gun — kind of curly dark hair, about 5-foot-9 or taller, 25-30 years old and shirtless — and said he drove away in a rusty brown sedan, “like a Ford LTD.”
Her son also was interviewed: “I heard a bang, thought it was a firecracker.”
Then he saw a “tall guy getting in his car and he took off.”
He described the man as skinny, having dark, wavy hair and wearing blue-jean cutoffs.
The investigator remarked, “It would be a big help if we could figure out what kind of car that was.”
Leads and tips — many of them — followed but ended with no arrests.
In October 1981, investigators interviewed Harold E. Wanzo, the manager of the Holiday Cove Trailer Court in Cortez, who on the recording told them a resident with a gold bike left abruptly Aug. 3, 1980, leaving his clothes behind.
“He was very restless and uneasy,” Wanzo said.
In a Feb. 23, 1981, recorded interview, Richard Wormuth told investigators about picking up a hitchhiker outside of Ruskin earlier that day who was traveling to Bradenton and seemed suspicious because he usually got around on a 10-speed bike, brought up the Holmes Beach murders and carried a pistol.
“The gun was the most beautiful shade of metallic blue you ever saw in your life, Wormuth said, adding that it appeared to be loaded.
Editor’ note: People can submit a tip to Manatee County Crime Stoppers at manateecrimestoppers.com.