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DNA match leads police to suspect

Her family feared authorities wouldn't pay much attention to a 29-year-old's death at Mirror Lake.

By ALEX LEARY
Published March 25, 2005

ST. PETERSBURG - They feared the case would languish, that Marcia Elliott wasn't the "rosy-cheeked, upper-middle class victim."

In the harshest light, she may have been viewed as just another crack addict, a stripper, someone who could never get things together.

But this week, a detective told Elliott's family an arrest had been made in her strangulation death in July at Mirror Lake. George Sanders, a 36-year-old transient with a lengthy criminal history, was identified as the suspect.

"I'm totally elated," said Marcia's father, Lee Elliott, a mortgage broker in downtown St. Petersburg. "When they first told me, I felt like I had a blackout."

Until now, he said, he could not fully accept that his 29-year-old daughter had been killed. "Now I know she is gone."

DNA evidence led to Sanders, police said. Samples of DNA found on Elliott's body were added to a national database and earlier this month a match was made with a sample taken from the victim of a 1994 sexual assault in Louisiana. Then, on Monday, a name surfaced.

Sanders was not far.

St. Petersburg police arrested him on drug charges in February and he was still in Pinellas County Jail when Detective Karl Sauer questioned him about the strangling. Sanders was charged with second-degree murder.

"He made comments that put him (at the lake)," Sauer said. A motive is still unclear. Sauer said Sanders came to the area a few years ago from New Orleans. Criminal records there are not available but Sanders quickly accumulated a record in the Tampa Bay area, from larceny to cocaine possession and battery.

"If there's anything good out of this, he made it," Lee Elliott said of Sauer's detective work. "I'm just so grateful."

Like Sanders, Marcia Elliott was a crack addict, police said. She also battled heroin addiction, and on the night before her body was found, she rifled through a friend's bathroom in search of painkillers. She left with another man who said he was a computer programmer from Jacksonville, somehow ending up at Mirror Lake.

At 7:50 a.m. July 29, a passerby saw the body.

There was more to Elliott than the drug-addicted persona that died with her on the lakeshore. With dark hair and blue-green eyes, she was a striking figure even throughout her addiction. She was a waitress downtown who often could be seen riding her bike or walking her basset hound, Angela.

"She was a good kid," her father said. He fondly remembered going out for a beer with her downtown. "We could kind of sit and laugh, me and my daughter."

She was nearly born into misfortune. Her parents split when she was 3 and she and her mother moved a half-dozen times, between St. Petersburg and Brooksville, and Virginia and Tennessee. Elliott got pneumonia in her senior year at Hernando High School and could not graduate, earning a high school equivalency certificate instead. She dreamed of a job in the beauty industry, family members said, and tried college and fashion school, only to drop out and work in a gentleman's club.

"I know she's not the rosy-cheeked, upper-middle class victim, but she was a wonderful person and she deserves people to stand up for her," said Elliott's stepmother, Lynn Mask. "We've all made bad decisions, but you don't pay with your life."

Alex Leary can be reached at 893-8472 or leary@sptimes.com

[Last modified March 25, 2005, 01:18:12]