FMBGN-EIHS-Murder, Mystery, And The Island That Remembers

Sunlight, salt air, and three stories that won’t let go. We bring Fort Myers Beach true crime out of the rumor mill and into the record, following the clues from a 1953 double homicide to a dream voyage cut short in the Bahamas and a neighborhood murder that hid in plain sight.

First, we revisit the Galloway murders. Newspapers once called it random, but a buried detective magazine hinted at a Detroit robbery, a controversial pardon, and a long shadow that may have stretched to the island’s north end. We connect the Mermaid Club, a cash-flashing drifter, a terrified teen, and a midnight traffic stop that turned deadly—then ask whether the simplest narrative obscured a targeted hit.

From there, the tide carries us to the Clea 3. Two locals saved for years to sail the Bahamas in 1980, only for a dinghy to surface with a body and a second sailor to vanish without a trace. With drug routes near Norman’s Cay and conflicting accounts from authorities, this case dwells in the uneasy space where evidence sinks and jurisdiction blurs. Was it chance, or did they witness something they were never meant to see?

Back on Randy Lane, we track the details that cracked a 2002 killing: bricks that matched, rope that matched, a gun near the dock, and a month of silence broken by a niece states away who asked the right questions. A hung jury gave way to a swift conviction, and the myth of the perfect plan collapsed under the weight of the bay itself. We close with a preview of the Lois Ann Reese case, a modern story less about whodunit and more about why—a stolen identity, a vacation friendship, and the unraveling of a life that once looked ordinary.

If you’re drawn to coastal history, cold cases, and the way communities remember, you’ll find fresh leads, sharp context, and questions that push past tidy headlines. Subscribe, share this episode with a fellow true crime fan, and leave a review telling us which case you want us to dig into next.

Estero Island Historic Society
161 Bay Road Fort Myers Beach, Florida, 33931
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Transcript

Welcome And Series Setup

Intro/Close 0:00

Welcome to the Fort Fire Speed. We preserve and stories Fort Fire Speed. Living memories of Astero Island has right up to Relic today. So settle in closely. On this island is re briefly story to tell.

SPEAKER_03 0:24

Welcome back to the sterile island historical historical society.

Janet Gottlieb 0:33

It's a grammatical.

The 1953 Galloway Murders

SPEAKER_03 0:40

There we go. All right. Well, just whatever you feel like. There you go. There you go. Well, welcome back. And now we're going to be talking a little bit about you guys are doing a murder mystery kind of series, right? So I was here for the first one, which was very interesting. Make the second one, but uh you guys are doing this. You've got a number of stories that you want to share.

Ellie Bunting 0:59

Yes, we do. We kind of stumbled upon this accidentally when I read an article about um the Galloway murders in 1953. So we started doing some research and we've come up with a whole list of topics, and we've done three already. Um, the first one was the Galloway murders. We had that last year, yeah. And that took place in 1953. They were very prominent members of uh Fort Myers Beach and they owned the Mermaid Club, which is where the beach whale is today. Oh, okay. And um, they were both murdered and their house was burned down. They had a house at the north end of the island, and it's uh kind of interesting on how it all came about. They um we were researching it and we had no idea. All the news said it was a random act of violence, that these guys just saw this house, it was deserted and did it. So I was digging through the archives and found an article from a detective magazine that said the guy that was killed, Jim Galloway, had a pass that was questionable. And then word got out, I did a blog on it, and word got out that we were going to be researching it, and I got a letter from this woman from Michigan, and she had the whole scoop of it. There was a bur a robbery in Michigan, and Jim Galloway was part of the robbers, and he kind of ratted out the other robbers, and he got a stake pardon. Wow, he was in prison for a while, he was in prison for a while, and it was in Michigan where he could have met the guy that killed him. We're not sure of that, we don't have that connection completely, but it's enough that's what we heard it was a Detroit mafia, interesting, and that this was a mafia hit. And the kind of sad thing is the guy that killed him, uh Ernest Moore, picked up this hitchhiker, a kid that was 16 years old, and was flashing his money around and saying, I'm a gambling man, I want to make you rich. And so this kid went with him, and they started robbing places along the way until they got here, and then they killed. I don't think this kid knew what was going on, he was totally clueless. They escaped, and uh a policeman from Fort Myers, a state trooper, they had a light out and he pulled him over, yeah, and more just started shooting at him, and then he ran away. And the the policeman was wounded, but he shot more, killed him. So this poor kid is in the backseat or the front seat of the car, just like this. But he got I think he had it, he had been given a gun, but he didn't yeah, he had a gun. He's not innocent. He was not, he was like he wasn't an innocent bystander, but he did get life in prison, and um he died in prison.

Janet Gottlieb 4:01

Wow. And the sad thing was well, there are many sad aspects, but um whatever Jim Galloway's background, he was a respected member of the community, his wife as well. I'm not sure where she worked, but she was a reporter for the news press. Oh, right, the Fort Miners News Press. So these two guys, there's various theories about how they came to Jim Galloway's house. They met on the beach, they knocked on his door, whatever it was. I think they tied him up and they hit him with the gun, and he was either unconscious or dead. When she comes home from work, opens the door, and immediately they shoot her and kill her. And the first that the neighbors knew that something had happened was they see the flames of the house on fire. And they, I don't think they found the bodies until the next day because nobody they thought they had they had just bought a boat, they thought maybe the Galloways were out boating. Um, but she was certainly not not implicated in anything. No, and we don't know for sure he was.

Ellie Bunting 4:59

We we we just know that it there was there's a lot of there's a lot of mystery involved there, and and how to well it just seemed to me odd that these guys were in Miami routing houses, and then they decide, well, we're gonna go to Fort Myers Beach. Yeah, I mean this was in 1953, exactly, and then once you get here, you know, well, we're gonna go down the north end. And yeah, so I think they kind of knew it it seemed a little bit coincidence is kind of file up and he came down here with enough money to purchase the mermaid, which was Jim Gell thirty thousand dollars. He didn't build it, it was it was a lot of money back then, right? Interesting. So that was interesting. And the the one we did, I think the one you saw was the one on the sailboat.

SPEAKER_03 5:43

Yeah, yeah.

Mafia Links And The Run To Florida

Ellie Bunting 5:44

Kalea three. Kalia three, right? And these uh folks lived on the island for about seven years. He worked for um yachts, what was it? Olson Marine. Olson Marine, and and she worked for the hospital in town. She was a nurse, and their dream was to sail the Bahamas. So for seven years they worked on this boat, the Clea 3, and they finally left on uh in August of 1980. They uh went around, they were sailing to Bahamas, the islands. That was their goal, was to spend several months, meet up with different people, you know, different smelling community is pretty close, and the other people were sailing. Yeah, they're gonna meet up and hang out, and and they went to Pipe K, and that's where their boat was found in July. And um he was dead. They found his body in the dinghy, they never did find her body. There was blood around it, so it was obvious that they had run into some kind of trouble. And I think it's probably drugs because it was a big drug. Drugs, pirates, something like that. Yeah, that was a lot of that going on back in that day.

SPEAKER_03 7:00

And so see something you shouldn't see, and yeah, exactly.

Ellie Bunting 7:03

But they they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. I don't I mean the only mystery there is who did it, yeah, and why did the Bahamian authorities they did not let I mean the the the investigation went nowhere.

SPEAKER_03 7:17

But they I think you had mentioned that they never found her body, but they saw his body.

Janet Gottlieb 7:21

But when they went back, and someone photographed it, I believe. Yeah, they had an air. Yeah, they had photos of his body covered up with a sail cover.

Ellie Bunting 7:29

And even the people that flew the plane over had said, yes, we have pictures of the body. And then when they went to get the boat and they brought it back, there was no body, right?

Janet Gottlieb 7:41

And the Bahamian authorities were not cooperative. They basically said, Oh, we don't know anything about a body, and um no body, no crime, right? Right, exactly. There was drug dealing activity in that area at the time, right? And uh, I I believe one of the main drug smuggling people who was was he Bahamian or was he American anyway?

Ellie Bunting 8:07

Yeah, I don't know what his I think he was American. I guess Carlos Letterer, right? Something like that.

Janet Gottlieb 8:14

Yeah, Mexican, perhaps.

Ellie Bunting 8:15

Yeah, and he had a big cartel on Norman's K. Right, and that was close to Pipe K. So they're thinking that he had a he had a drug deal going down, and either they were in the way and they got rid of them, or they actually witnessed it and they got rid of them.

SPEAKER_03 8:29

Right.

Ellie Bunting 8:29

So we don't know who did it, but we do know that um that was probably what happened.

SPEAKER_03 8:35

And that was their maiden voyage on the boat.

Ellie Bunting 8:37

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that was that was too bad. And then the last one we did was very local. It happened on Randy Lane, and that was the murder of Fern Morangello. That was the one we did last week, and that was kind of fun because there were people here who actually knew her and knew about the house and could provide a little bit more. That was in the early 2000s. That was in 2002. Wow. Okay.

Janet Gottlieb 9:06

Yeah.

Ellie Bunting 9:07

And um that is a little bit mysterious. It's uh the body was found five doors down from where they lived. Floating in the bay. Floating in the bay. They found the gun right by their dock. Wow. So, and then there was a lot of blood evidence in the house, and they found um she was the body was tied down with bricks, and they found bricks matching that in the house. So they arrested the husband who claimed that they had a fight on July 15th. She walked out, and he didn't report her. Well, she never he never reported her missing. But she used to travel to Europe. Yes, on her own. Yeah, so she stormed out when they had a fight and said, I'm going on vacation without you, because he was gonna go visit his daughter, whom she did not like from the previous. Yeah, so they had a fight, and um, we don't really know what happened, but for it was I think it was sad was that it was a whole month went by before she was identified.

unknown 10:07

Really?

Ellie Bunting 10:07

They they found because she had nothing on her to identify her. She was wearing gardening type clothing. Um, they passed around pictures of the clothing and the bricks and knocked on doors, and nobody well, I mean, nobody knew she was missing, so nobody made a connection. Yeah, right. And people that were at the here at the meeting said, you know, we all, and I remember that, I don't know where I was at at that week. But he said that we all thought it was like somebody fell off a shrimp boat, or yeah, you know, nobody knew it was gonna be somebody from Randy Lane. Yeah, it was uh it was really weird. And then finally what happened was um Well, he blamed his son. He he was blaming his son once they arrested him because his son was a drug addict, he was dead, so it was easy to blame him.

Janet Gottlieb 10:53

Had been living with them, didn't they didn't get along. He the the son and and uh fern did not get along, so the father cast suspicion on the son and said, Well, it's probably him. I don't know anything about it.

The Clea 3 Sailboat Tragedy

Ellie Bunting 11:06

Yeah, and and he but he he but his he called Fern's niece, and she lived in Alabama, and this was three weeks after the the the murder. Yeah, and um she was trying to get in touch with him with Fern and couldn't do it. So when he called, she was really happy to hear from him. But his first thing was, is Fern with you? And then she got well no, Fern's not with you. Where is she? He goes, Well, we had a fight and she left. And she says, Well, when did she leave? Well, she left about a month ago. And then the woman asked, Well, what did the police say? And he goes, Well, I I never called the police. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So master criminal, yeah. She called the local police in Alabama and they contacted the Lee County Sheriff's Department. So once they had a missing person report, then it could see they identified the body, and that's when all the news broke. Because we went looking, um that they got copies of the Beach Bulletin and the Observer and the sandpaper at the library, and we kept looking for July 18th to see if if there was a body found, nothing. And then when we looked in the observer for the 24th, which would be the week after they would have come out, the front page was torn out. So I don't know if there was an article on it. I mean, there wasn't it wasn't front page news if there was, and we didn't find anything else in any other papers, so I just don't think it was a big deal. An unknown body, yeah, right, until they found out who it was.

Janet Gottlieb 12:44

And there were also stories about flyers, missing person flyers being placed in mailboxes in the neighborhood that were then from some of the closest neighbors were removed. They never got the flyers, right? So it was the fingers of his house. That's right. So he was collecting them.

Ellie Bunting 13:03

Yeah. And I believe he went to prison, he was convicted. Yeah, the first time though was a hung jury, right? And it was five to one. One person holded it held out, which was thank God. Um, but one person stuck with it because they said they didn't present enough evidence connecting the crime scene with the husband. Yeah, but the second trial that went again and they only deliberated for three hours and found him guilty. So he's 84, 86 now, right?

Janet Gottlieb 13:34

I did read something in the archives that the files of the prison that he had died, but I have never found official corroboration of that. So I don't know if he's still alive.

Ellie Bunting 13:47

But I'm not sure. These are part of the mystery, yeah, exactly. Yeah, where is he finding the whole story? And the whole defense was this guy was an aeronautical engineer, and it was like, how why would he be so stupid as to you know, well, shoot his wife in the bedroom, dump her in the bay right next to his house, right? Right.

Janet Gottlieb 14:13

And he obviously didn't know how much weight to put on her because you got right up, yeah. Right, or the the ropes broke, and they also found, I think, the same kind of rope in his house. So it was yeah, wasn't the best at that. No, not was not the best.

SPEAKER_03 14:26

I love I love the series though. I love what you guys are.

Ellie Bunting 14:28

Yeah, so that's what we got so far. And next year, Joanna's gonna start out with right Sub Harbor people.

Janet Gottlieb 14:34

Right. There's um uh in the fall, perhaps for Halloween. We didn't like to have a gathering around Halloween. We'll do the story of uh Lois Ann Reese, who was from Minnesota, ended up here on Fort Myers Beach in 2018. And I don't have all the details in front of me, but I remember that she met a woman at at a bar on the north end of the island. Just, you know, they were chatting and they became friends, and uh they started going shopping together on various outings, and they, you know, they just became fast friends, as sometimes happens, you know, you meet someone on vacation and shit off. And then um the woman that she met, who sadly her name I can't remember at the moment, but uh had a she was staying in a condo at Snug Hart because she had come down to help a friend spread her late husband's ashes. And um, she was she invited Lois Ann Reese up to her condo for a drink. She uh serves her a drink, goes to the bathroom, comes out, and is shot dead, point blank. Uh her body was not found for another week in the condo, but in the meantime, surveillance video showed her car driving away that same night. So once they put the pieces together, it was pretty clear who did it, but that woman was gone and they were trying to figure out where she had gone. And there's a whole chain of events that led up to her being here and what she left behind in her hometown in Minnesota, what she was actually fleeing, which we will talk about. So the mystery in this case isn't really so much who done it, but what led a person, Lois Ann Reese, who had been a homemaker, a respected member for community, a doting grandmother. What happened that led her into basically what became a little crime spree that ended up in the death of someone she had never known before and just met. And that was probably that woman was killed for her identity. Her identity was stolen. She probably picked her right because she looked like her because she looked, they were almost the same age and they looked quite a bit alike. So the I think the mystery in that one is motivation and what causes a person to do something to do something like that completely out of character. So we'll talk about that in in the fall.

SPEAKER_03 16:59

I'm looking forward to that. I love this. True crime is uh podcasting platform, and uh people tune into that. So I hope that's a good idea.

Ellie Bunting 17:07

We have we have more stories. Oh, yes, we have four stories, yeah. And we hope to put it together into a book. Very nice. So that would be fun.

SPEAKER_03 17:15

Yeah, yeah. I'm looking forward to all of it. Well, thank you again for your time today, and thank you. We'll see you guys in the next episode. All right, thank you.

Intro/Close 17:25

Thanks for spending this time with the Astero Island Historic Society, where every story is a tide that brings our island past back to shore. If today's episode sparked a memory or a question, we'd love to hear from you. We hope you'll visit us at the museum and discover events on Fort Myers Beach at the end during the journey together. Until we meet again with the island history, one footprint.