TAMPA, Fla. — The Walkers’ wood frame cottage stood plain and white, surrounded by pasture land and hardwood forest. There in tiny Osprey, on the southern tip of the vast Palmer Ranch, the family’s nearest neighbor was half a mile away.
As daylight broke on Dec. 20, 1959, half a dozen lawmen stood in the living room and stared down in silence.
Christine lay barefoot, bruised and bloody, her pink flowered dress pulled up, her slips and petticoats in a muddle. Clifford and the children had been ambushed, the young father on his back in the living room, still wearing his straw cowboy hat, a bullet hole in his right eye. Jimmie was curled up next to his dad, blood smeared on his clothes and in his hair, suggesting he’d crawled to his father as the killer shot him three times in the head. Baby Debbie, they found in the bathtub, facedown in 4 inches of water, also shot in the head.
