JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — "I have changed so much, because I don’t trust. It could be anybody," said Diane McMinn as she sat outside the First Coast News studio, preparing to tell the story of how she lost her husband.
This story begins in October of 1995. It was Friday the 13th.
Diane had said goodbye to her husband, Cecil "Pat" McMinn the night before as he left to go to work the midnight shift at the post office on Kings Road. She had no idea the next people to visit her home would be homicide detectives.
The original police report gives only basic details about how her husband was found. It was around 10:30am on the morning of Oct. 13 when a worker at the Ramona Flea Market spotted Pat McMinn's red Ford truck at the end of the road nearby. At first the worker told police he thought it was maybe someone sleeping off a night of drinking, but when the truck was still there an hour later, he went to check on the driver inside.
That's when the worker found McMinn inside the truck, shot twice.
"Reviewing the file, his wallet was never found," says Det. Glenn Warkentien, a member of the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office Cold Case Unit going back over the case.
He says officers suspected robbery could be a motive. Diane McMinn had told officers Pat McMinn had been carrying cash on him from a loan, but other valuable items in the truck, like his watch, were not taken.
The location itself presented a challenge for detectives. The end of Ramona Boulevard by the flea market is an isolated area with woods on one end, and the flea market on the other, which would have been empty overnight: no one to hear the gunshots that took McMinn's life.
"Reading through the reports it really couldn’t be explained his reason for being back there," Warkentien says.
Diane McMinn believes Pat McMinn may have stopped for gas and cigarettes at a nearby gas station, where someone could have seen the money in his wallet.
"He went that way because he would usually stop for gas and then go to work and we think that’s what he did, but nobody knows yet," Diane McMinn says.
With no witnesses and no definitive motive, it didn’t leave much for detectives in 1995 to go on.
Diane McMinn wasn’t sure how to break the news to their two children, just 7 and 4 at the time.
"When your own heart is broken, that’s one thing. When your children’s hearts are broken, that is a whole other level," Diane says.
She describes Pat McMinn as the love of her life, saying the years without him have ticked by painfully. Their son, Jason, holds onto two things – first, the memories he has of being carried on his dad’s shoulders when they would go fishing.
Second, he’s kept the unopened pack of cigarettes he believes his father stopped to buy that night.
"I fear loss probably more than I should," Jason explains. "People don’t get it. It is hard to explain that to a new friend or a new significant other or whatever the case may be because unless they have been there. They don’t understand."
He even became a corrections officer himself, a piece of him hoping that maybe he will cross paths with the person that killed his father.
"Maybe I will walk past an inmate someday and he will see my face and inadvertently see my dad’s face and have flashbacks and spill the beans. I don’t know. I think about that a lot," Jason says.
While Jason is hoping for a confession, detectives are reexamining the evidence to see what can be submitted for DNA testing and testing for latent prints. Familial DNA and latent print technology have been game changers in cold cases.
Detectives are hoping it could garner some new leads in this case too.
For Diane McMinn, she says she will never have closure. Her husband never got to see his children grow up and never got to meet his grandchildren. But, she wants to know who took his life on that October night.
"I want to know. People tell me 'no you don’t, maybe you don’t.' Well, yeah I do. They tell me no you don’t because they think the answer might hurt worse than the actual murder. But I don’t have peace," Diane says.
Cold case detectives haven’t given up. The answers are out there. Someone knows who killed Cecil "Pat" McMinn.
"We hope that through these cold case spotlights we can generate people looking at it and saying 'you know I remember something about that, maybe I should call' and it has helped us in the past," Warkentien says.
If you know anything about the murder of McMinn in 1995, contact the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Homicide office at 904-630-1157 or Crime Stoppers at 1-866-845-TIPS.
For more a look at the cold case database run by Project: Cold Case, visit the link here: www.projectcoldcase.org.