Daughter: Mother’s murder like a lifetime ago
The last time Judy Schult saw her mom, Ora “Lea” Hawkins, they were sitting and talking on the back porch of Schult’s home in St. Cloud.
The two and a half years since have felt “like a lifetime,” Schult said.
Days after that last talk on Sept. 19, 2015, her 79-year-old mother’s body was discovered buried in Hawkins’ backyard. Money from Hawkins’ bank account vanished. Soon, Schult’s younger sister, Amy Day, was arrested — charged with first-degree murder.
On Jan. 16, Schult sat in the front row of an Osceola County courtroom with her husband and her mother’s siblings and watched as a jury, after less than two hours of deliberations, found Day guilty in their mother’s slaying. Day, who maintains her innocence, was sentenced to life in prison.
Now, Schult would rather
remember her mother the way she was — a compassionate and independent woman who worked hard and spent every moment she could with her only grandchild.
“She always made sure she was there for us,” Schult said in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel. “She would go out of her way to make sure she was there for people.”
Schult used to call her mother every day on her drive home to St. Cloud from her work in Seminole County. She relished marathon Christmas shopping trips every winter and loved seeing how much Hawkins enjoyed spending time with Schult’s son, her only grandchild.
“We still would meet up and go shopping together, for groceries, for clothes, for whatever,” Schult said. “We would do that every week. We would talk on the phone a lot, about everything. World peace all the way down to family crisis. … we’d cover everything.”
Born in 1936, Hawkins grew up in Turtletown, Tenn., a small community near where Tennessee meets North Carolina and Georgia. She was the third of Alvin and Myrtle Taylor’s seven children. Hawkins graduated high school, attended college and met her husband through his cousin at The Varsity, an iconic drive-in restaurant in Atlanta. They had Judy, then Amy. “Mom and I did Girl Scouts, we did tap dancing, we did all that mommydaughter stuff,” Schult said.
Hawkins’ husband worked as a manager for a railroad company, so they moved about every 18 months before settling in St. Cloud in 1973. They got a divorce about 10 years later. Hawkins got a job with the manufacturer Mercury Marine and took electrical engineering classes offered through the company, Schult said, remembering the circuit drawings in her mother’s books.
Hawkins’ life centered on her two daughters and her friends, Schult said. When Schult had a son, Morgan, now 19, Hawkins constantly
doted on him.
“The last few years, the world revolved around her grandson. Taking him to school, bringing him lunch,” she said. “They spent as much time together as they could.”
After her mother’s death, Schult and her son got matching tattoos — his first, her only — on their forearms: “I love you all the way around and back again,” the phrase Schult’s mother and mother-in-law used to say to Morgan, with a feather to represent Hawkins’ Cherokee heritage.
The month Hawkins went missing, Day had $1.87 in her bank account and mounting credit card debt. Investigators believe Day raided her mother’s bank account, cutting herself a $2,500 check, drawing on a
$6,000 line of credit, and withdrawing $400 in cash from her mother’s debit card.
Deputies zeroed in on her as a person of interest and, after a few days of searching, found Hawkins’ body buried in the backyard of the home Hawkins and Day shared for 5 years. Details of Hawkins’ last hours, as well as her cause of death, remain a mystery. At trial, prosecutors said Day killed Hawkins over “a few thousand dollars.”
Schult has not spoken to her sister since she was arrested.
“I wasn’t allowed,” she said, because she was a witness in the case. “But I am going to try. I doubt she’ll see me. But I am going to try.”