Miami-Dade detectives solve a cold case from 1980
On Oct. 28, 1980, Ronald Gilchrist left his parent’s winter home in Clearwater to drive down to Miami.
The 29-year-old drove his in-laws’ blue 1977 Ford LTD to spend a few days in South Florida before he had to pick them up from Miami International Airport on Nov. 3. He was supposed to help his inlaws move into their new Marco Island condo.
But he never made it to the airport.
The last time he was seen was when he bid his parents farewell in Clearwater.
Decades later, MiamiDade detectives solved one part of Gilchrist’s mystery. They identified him on June 7 as a John Doe found in November 1980.
The discovery came after Pinellas County
Sheriff’s Office detectives sent the department photographs of Gilchrist from 1980. The resemblance was uncanny — and detectives were able to make a match, though it’s unclear how. The Miami Herald reached out to MiamiDade police but hasn’t received a response as of Thursday night.
According to a St. Petersburg Times article from 1982, Gilchrist was traveling from Toronto before stopping in Clearwater. He had picked up a hitchhiker in Georgia known to his family as “Gene from Calhoun, Georgia.”
Gilchrist’s last communication with his family was on Oct. 29 from a restaurant payphone in Mulberry, a city a little more than an hour east of Clearwater. His last trace was on a receipt for gas and a car wash in Miami. It was dated to Nov. 2, a day before he was supposed to pick up his wife’s parents, according to the Times.
Pinellas County detectives had found credit card slips from the middle of November, but determined they weren’t authentic, according to the 1982 article. They had a fake signature and license plate of 123456-Quebec scrawled on them.
Gilchrist’s family told reporters in 1982 that he was going through a rough patch when he vanished. He and his wife were splitting up. He had quit his job at a Toronto radio station because his father-in-law was an executive. And he had developed a fear of crowds and open places.
“He started spending most of his time in the house with me,” wife Patty Gilchrist told the Times in 1982. “He didn’t want to go out. He wasn’t socializing, and it really started to bother him.”
With the lack of answers, loved ones developed their own theories. Some were more optimistic than others.
Brother-in-law Harvey Wright believed that Gilchrist, who was known for his love of boats and water, found a new life working at a marina in the Florida Keys, according to the 1982 article. Sister Linda Wright thought he may have been lured — and brainwashed — by a cult.
“He didn’t feel like his world was together like everyone else’s,” she told the Times, adding that he could easily fall into a cult due to his mental state.
But father William Gilchrist had the darkest theory. He believed his son was drugged, robbed and murdered by the hitchhiker they had met days prior.
His mother, Elizabeth Gilchrist, told the Times that she hoped her son would eventually come back and help her plant flowers in her yard.
“If he’s alive, I’ll cry for days,” she said in 1982. “But if he’s dead, we’ll have to accept it. But I think I’d like to know what the Lord has willed.”
Miami-Dade police are now investigating Gilchrist’s murder.