In August 1979, a Florida sheriff’s deputy told authorities that his wife fatally shot herself at their home south of Tampa.
A few months later, the same patrol deputy, John Greer, said he discovered the body of another woman — a store clerk who’d been fatally shot.
But in an interview with authorities decades after their deaths, Greer admitted killing both women, identified Tuesday by the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office in a news release as Jackie Greer and Adele Easterly, 25.
John Greer made the admission to investigators in April 2023 while he was living at an extended care facility in Tennessee, the sheriff’s office said. He died March 2, 2024, at age 77, according to the release.
“I have always said that we will not hide from our past, no matter how dark,” Charlotte County Sheriff Bill Prummell said in a statement. “This case shows that we will always seek the truth, even when we may not like what we find."
John Greer resigned from the sheriff’s office in October 1980 amid an internal investigation that the release said may have been prompted by Greer's actions with another woman, who is not identified in the release. That woman's husband told the sheriff’s office at the time that Greer had been following his wife and trying to have sex with her.
The woman died on Sept. 29, 1980, in what the sheriff’s office described as a possible suicide.
John Greer reported his wife's death a little over a year earlier, on Aug. 27, 1979. He told responding deputies that he was awakened by a "pop" and saw smoke coming from a closet in the couple's Port Charlotte home, according to the release.
Inside, Greer told the deputies, he found his wife's body, the release says.
"Although investigators suspected something was not right about the incident, there was no evidence to prove the case was anything other than suicide," the sheriff’s office said.
Seventy-one days later, at 1:40 a.m., John Greer radioed dispatch and reported discovering Easterly's body at a farm store in the nearby city of Punta Gorda, according to the release. The medical examiner's office found Easterly had been shot twice with a 12-gauge shotgun — once in the head and once in the back, the sheriff's office said.
A friend of Easterly's later told investigators that the clerk had dated a deputy she believed was Greer but had become fearful of him, according to the release. The friend recalled Easterly describing the deputy's account of his wife's death as an accidental shooting that occurred after an argument.
Decades later, after the sheriff's cold case unit put out a release seeking information about Easterly's death, a woman who had been in a youth program at the sheriff's office told investigators that Greer repeatedly sexually assaulted her and threatened to kill her, according to the release.
During one assault after Easterly's death, the release says, the woman said Greer invoked the dead woman's name: "Ask them dead b----es like Adele Easterly what happens when they say no to me.”
The detectives who questioned Greer in 2023 found the woman's allegations credible, but the statute of limitations for potential crimes linked to the alleged assault appeared to have run out, a spokesman for the sheriff's office said in an email.
The detectives instead focused on the killings of Easterly and Jackie Greer, they said in an email provided by the spokesman.
After detectives developed probable cause for Greer's arrest, they found him in Tennessee and questioned him at the long-term care facility.
At the time, the release says, he was bedridden and could not carry on long conversations, but he appeared to understand the questions and answered in the affirmative when he was asked directly whether he had shot his Easterly and his wife.
The detectives were unable to determine whether Jackie Greer's shooting was intentional or an accident, according to the release.
The sheriff's office said it will continue to investigate Greer, who worked for other law enforcement agencies after he left Charlotte County, to determine whether he is linked to other crimes.