He was my librarian. What ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ revealed to me about Mr. Mullins’ death
It was late January 2013 when I received a text message from a former Palmetto High School classmate telling me that our librarian, Patrick Mullins, had gone missing.
His boat was discovered miles from his house, and he had vanished without a trace.
His body was found nine days later floating in 4 to 6 feet of water near Emerson Point, just four miles from Palmetto High, with a shotgun wound to his head and a rope wrapped around his torso, through his legs, and over his chest with an 25-pound anchor on the end.
At the time, I had just finished my second semester at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. It was a chilly day in the state capital, and hearing the news of Mr. Mullins’ death made it feel even more frigid.
In some ways, it foreshadowed how his death would still be a cold case 10 years later.
What I remember most about him was his fatherly demeanor and his voice, which sounded like a great radio announcer filling the library.
“There is no food or drink allowed in the library,” he would say.
“One person per computer,” he would tell us often when we would huddle around our friend’s computer.
Mr. Mullins was someone who followed the rules, and he made sure we did too.
A medical examiner ruled that the manner of death in Mr. Mullins’s case was “undetermined.”
Sheriff’s office detectives and medical examiner’s thought suicide seemed the more likely cause of death.
Mullins’ death has been the topic of much speculation. Some say he witnessed a crime on the river and was murdered by the mob, while others don’t know what occurred but don’t believe it was suicide, and yet others believe he did kill himself.
His death is truly a mystery, one that Manatee County residents, his former students and his family have been left to ponder.
The “Body in the Bay” episode of “Unsolved Mysteries Volume 3” is now on Netflix, and it takes a look at Patrick Mullins’ death and discusses some details about the case.
The episode raises many questions about whether he was murdered or committed suicide.
Jodeci Walker, a 2012 graduate of Palmetto High and former student of Mullins, said watching the episode changed how she felt about his death.
“At first, I was going along with what others were saying. Suicide. I thought, ‘Wow, he was always in good spirits at school,’ but you never know a person’s circumstances outside of their workplace,” Walker said. “But he was a by-the-book type of guy, so I questioned it a little.”
“Then when the episode came out, I knew law enforcement had failed him and his family; there were so many things they should have looked further into.”
Details and theories ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ highlights:
Some of Mullins’ family and friends believe he encountered some illegal activity on the river or someone in distress. He may have gone to help as a good Samaritan and he was killed.
Mullins’ boat would have had to go undetected past the CSX train bridge and under the Green Bridge to reach Egmont Key. The CSX train bridge has cameras installed, but when the Mullins family requested the footage, they learned the video file had been corrupted and no other version could be downloaded.
Mullins didn’t own a gun, and according to his wife, he had no interest in them. Investigators couldn’t find any record of him purchasing a gun before his death.
The lack of animal scavenging on Mullins’ corpse makes it seemed unlikely that he was in the water for 10 days.
Lori Baker, a forensic investigator, was hired by the Mullins family to investigate the suicide possibility in 2021. She determined that the lack of a contact wound on the skull made suicide unlikely. The expert also stated that if it were a suicide attempt, Baker said it would be “almost impossible” not to have blood in the boat.
Damon Presswood, a family friend, began to exhibit “markedly different” behavior after Mullins’ disappearance, some of Mullins’ family and friends said. They witnessed Presswood tie a rope around his dog and then himself in a way identical to the rope placed around Mullins’s corpse on Memorial Day after his death. Every year after that, Presswood would have a mental breakdown around the anniversary of Mullins’ death. Damon eventually shared that he’d been using crystal meth and had episodes of “extremely erratic behavior.” He would die of an overdose in 2017 .
Mullins’ family noticed red paint lines on the side of his boat that had not been there previously. Presswood had a boat with a red stripe. A paint chip was taken from Presswood’s boat to be tested against the marks on Mullins’s boat. The sheriff’s office told Mullins’s family that the “boat could not be eliminated as a possible source of red paint smear on the victim’s boat” and the red paint was a common variety. His family believes the paint was a match but that it wasn’t important to investigators.
This story was originally published November 4, 2022 at 1:59 PM.
CORRECTION: Damon Presswood is the name of the family friend. An earlier version of this story contained an incorrect spelling
