Holmes Beach horror: 30 years later, murders still unsolved

Maria Dumois still remembers kissing her husband goodbye 30 years ago today.

“He kissed me in the morning — the boys did, too. We kissed whenever we were going somewhere,” recalls Dumois, now 73, sitting in her living room in St. Petersburg.

Hours later, Dumois’ husband and their two youngest children were dying at Blake Medical Center. All three had been shot in the head.

They were gunned down inside their own car along the causeway, in one of Manatee County’s most notorious cold cases. A witness who chased after their killer was shot and killed. A man driving by with a new camera saw someone emerge from the station wagon, and he snapped the killer walking away from the scene, frame for frame.

The settings on the camera were wrong.

No one — despite the blurred images of the killer, more than 100 suspects questioned, rumors of links to the Mafia investigated — has ever been arrested in the murders. The weapon, a 22-caliber handgun, was never found.

Now, for the first time, investigators have opened most of the murder file in hopes that the information will lead to some new clue. It might be their last chance.

Any hope of solving the case becomes less and less likely with each passing year, says Holmes Beach Police Chief Jay Romine. He first took on the case in 1988 as a Holmes Beach detective.

“Every time we do a story on this and I say, ‘Somebody out there knows what happened. Somebody knows who did it and why they did it,’ But with every five years that rolls around with this thing, that statement has less and less truth to it,” Romine said. “People are dying. Thirty years has gone by and eventually anybody who had anything to do with it or any knowledge of it will be gone.”

Meeting their killer

Maria Dumois and her family were renting a beach house on Anna Maria Island — she and Dr. Juan Dumois with their four children, and they planned to stay two weeks. Her 46-year-old husband, a pediatrician, was on vacation from his private practice in Tampa.

On Aug. 1, 1980, Dr. Dumois took their two youngest — 13-year-old Eric and 9-year-old Mark — fishing with his brother-in-law, Raymond Barrows. Just the day before, the boys were photographed clutching their fishing poles, tanned and smiling.

They launched their boat from the Kingfish Boat Ramp at about 9 a.m. and made a day of it, returning just before 5 p.m., triumphant with a couple dozen fish spread before them.

They all climbed back into the family station wagon, a 1977 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser, pulling the boat behind them as they started to head back to the beach house.

Their killer emerged from behind the trees at the boat landing.

He was pushing his 10-speed bicycle, claiming he had a lame ankle.

He appeared to be in his early 30s, about 6 feet tall with a lean muscular build. His wavy thick brown hair was pulled straight back. His bushy eyebrows turned up slightly at the ends above large, piercing blue eyes. Deep lines creased his forehead and a cleft marked his chin. He brought the bicycle up to the station wagon as they stopped.