J. Thad Collins, where are you? And who are you? Some Orange County, Fla., detectives would love to know.
Collins’ name keeps coming up in a murder mystery that has investigators matching wits with an unknown killer. There’s also an unidentified skeleton as a victim, a suspicious fire destroying the crime scene and someone who’s apparently trying to throw detectives off the trail.
There are even rumors of a one-armed man-J. Thad Collins-who seems to have vanished without a trace. He could be a suspect. He could be a witness.
“All we’re trying to do is find out who J. Thad Collins is or if he exists,” said Dan Nazarchuk, one of the Orange County sheriff’s homicide investigators assigned to the case.
The corpse was discovered April 24, 1989, by two teenagers wandering along a road. They happened upon a bamboo fence and thought they had found a marijuana farm. They climbed the fence but saw only a mobile home. Inside was a man’s skeleton.
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Sheriff’s detectives said they found many promising leads that ultimately proved fruitless. The victim, who was 50 to 60 years old, had been dead at least six months, probably more than a year. Detectives never disclosed the cause of death, but the man died violently.
Nazarchuk and fellow homicide investigator John Linnert eventually were assigned the case.
Enter the mysterious Mr. Collins.
Collins owned the trailer where the bones were found. Nazarchuk and Linnert tracked down the original sales receipt and found that a J. Thad Collins had bought the trailer in Tarpon Springs, Fla., in 1962.
The lot where the trailer sat is administered by Orlando lawyer Tom Watson. Sometime before 1966, Collins rented the land from him, saying he wanted to hunt there, Watson recalled.
For the next 22 years the lot was Collins’ official address. The electric company billed him for utilities, and he listed the address in several land transactions.
In the mid-1970s, a man calling himself Collins had an Orlando veterinarian treat his hunting dogs. In 1979 he insured the trailer.
Then, in the late 1980s, he seemed to vanish.
Since the corpse was found in April 1989, news of Collins has surfaced only a few times. One thing was certain, detectives said: Collins was not the victim; he was 4 to 6 inches taller than the dead man.
In July 1989, a man calling himself Collins bought a money order in Orlando and sent it to the company insuring the trailer. Two months later a suspicious fire destroyed the place.
A few months after the fire, a man calling himself George Clark called the insurance company. Clark said he represented Collins, who was sick in North Carolina. Clark left phone numbers in Jacksonville, Ala., but police said they were phonies.
A few months later, a man calling himself Joe Young told the insurance company that he had started the fire accidentally. In his letter, mailed from a Tampa hotel, Young claimed to be Collins’ nephew. He said he was repairing the trailer and cooking a meal when the fire started.
Nazarchuk and Linnert searched for Young without success. They believe the Clark phone call and the Young letter may have been faked to throw them off track and cloud the murder investigation.
But the detectives remain on Collins’ trail. This much they know: Collins never held a Florida driver’s license or owned a car in Florida in his name. He never was arrested and never paid any real estate taxes in Orange County.
He may have been an engineer, or he may have owned a steel fabrication company. He was 61 in 1979 and would be about 73 today.
Watson told investigators he had heard Collins lost his arm in an industrial accident in New Orleans a few years ago. He said Collins disappeared in a boating mishap near Biloxi, Miss.
Nazarchuk and Linnert checked for a missing-boater report matching Collins’ description but couldn’t find one. Watson told the detectives he couldn’t remember where he had heard about the accidents.
The detectives wonder whether the name is a fake, whether someone trying to conduct secret business deals created the name to cover tracks.
The dead man is another mystery, Nazarchuk and Linnert say. Most of his ribs had been broken and healed during his lifetime. He had a steel plate in his ankle for an old fracture. The investigators, noting the plate’s serial number, tracked down the manufacturer, hoping to find out who the man was, but the platemaker kept no records.
“Another dead end,” said Linnert.