Deputies make arrest in 38-year-old cold case
DELRAY BEACH — After 38 years of waiting for an answer, the family of 21-year-old Carla Lowe now has a name for her accused killer.
Ralph Williams, 59, was arrested Monday in Jacksonville and faces a murder charge in Lowe’s death, Delray Beach Police announced Tuesday.
On the last day of her life, Lowe sat at a train station on a Sunday morning in 1983, waiting to travel to Tennessee to visit family.
Police found her body, beaten and run over, lying on an isolated road near the Delray Beach train station that same day, and the search for her killer began.
Detectives searched the road for hours but could not find anyone who heard or saw what happened, according to reports from then.
But on Nov. 13, 1983, the day Lowe’s body was found, Delray Beach police arrested Williams on two charges of grand theft auto and burglary of an unoccupied structure or conveyance, according to FDLE records. Williams was sentenced in 1986 to one year and one day in prison for those offenses.
Ted White, a spokesperson for Delray Beach Police Department, said it was not Lowe’s car that Williams was accused of stealing at that time.
Police “had long suspected” Williams as a person of interest, though, White said.
Williams’ criminal history is lengthy, FDLE records show, with over 20 arrests across the state on charges including burglary, resisting an officer with violence, robbery with a gun or deadly weapon, selling, manufacturing or delivery of heroin and marijuana and possession of burglary tools.
On Tuesday, a small group of Lowe’s family members sat together, some with tear-filled and tired eyes. Her sister Jackie Lowe-Repass said the family is “forever indebted” to Lt. Mark Woods and Detective Todd Clancy.
The moment she learned of Williams’ arrest was “surreal,” she said.
When the investigation began those decades ago, Clancy said there was not enough evidence for probable cause to make an arrest.
A fingerprint found on a piece of evidence left behind at the scene is what led detectives to Williams, who lived in Jacksonville and was originally from South Florida, Clancy said. Detectives would not say what the piece of evidence was.
New fingerprinting technology from a company based in the U.K. called Foster + Freeman allowed detectives to identify a latent fingerprint from evidence left at the scene as Williams’, Sgt. Luis Skeberis said. Clancy described the new process they used as allowing them to “to retrieve a fingerprint that we were not able to retrieve through traditional ways.”
Woods was the lead detective on Lowe’s case until he retired in 2009. Detectives attempted to reopen the case several times before his retirement, Woods said, as advances in DNA and fingerprint technology were still a work in progress. He worked with Clancy and Skeberis, who revisited the evidence to determine if the pieces could be tested in new ways, Woods said.
A few of her belongings were stolen, but police never found a motive for Lowe’s murder, Clancy said.
Delray Police Chief Javaro Sims created a position for a detective dedicated to working on cold cases in January. In February, Clancy reopened the case. Lowe’s case was the first one the department picked, believing it was solvable with new technology, and is the first case to be solved since Clancy filled the new cold case role.