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Accomplice Also HeldSuitor Held In Quadruple SlayingsBRANDON, Fla. (AP) -Pleading please shoot me and leave them alone, a young divorcee and her two children watched helplessly as her rejected suitor gunned down four persons including her parents and brother in a Brandon farmhouse Sunday.Police said Thomas Turner Chambers, 32, of Gadsden, Ala., allegedly fired one 9hot through a screen window killing one person and then burst into the farmhouse and shot three others.Chambers’ former girlfriend Evelyn Johnson Sanders and her two children were spared,police said.The victims were identified as, John T. Sanders, 50; his wife, Catherine, 37; their 15-year-old son, Earl, and a friend of the family, James Richmond Bridges, 28, who was shot as he lay in bed, police said.Police said they arrested Chambers and an alleged accomplice, 21-year-old Robert Harris of Largo, after a highspeed car chase and charged both men with first degree murder.Neighbors told police theysaw Harris waiting in a pickup truck outside the rural farm house, about 10 miles east of Tampa.A neighbor, Mrs. Mary Davis, said Evelyn came running from the house, crying hystericallyand yelling, “They’re all dead. They’re all dead.*’Evelyn told the Davis family Chambers spared her, saying “I'm not going to kill you, just the one3 you love most.” Hillsborough County sheriff’s officials said the young divorcee had been seeing Chambers for three years but left him about three weeks ago in Texas.Chambers reportedly followed her to Clearwater and threatened the family if she wouldn't go back with him,”Ma;. John Sal a of the Hillsborough sheriff’s department said. He blamed the slayings on “domestic problems between the young woman and the spurned suitor.The Sanders family movedfrom Clearwater to Brandon about three days ago.Another brother, 24-year-old John Sanders, was at work in the dairy behind the house when the early morning shoe ting occurred.Police said Chambers and Harris were being held in Hillsborough County Jail in Tampa without bond.Bonita Shores Asks lighting DistrictBy THELMA BRUCE Spedalto the News BONITA SHORES - Controversy still rages over a proposed lighting district in the Bonita Shores-Little Hickory Shores community located on the northwest comer of Collier County.The subdivisions cover a haL-mile square. It is one of theAP WliepYtfloQUADRUPLE SLAVING - Tiny wood frame house in rural Brandon where four persons - including three members of the John Sanders family - were slain in pre-dawn stillness Sunday. At rightblood soaked curtain hangs by bedroom window screen pierced by two bullets' from a powerful 44 magnum. Hillsborough County deputies captured two men, one a rejected suitor of Sander's daughter, and charged them both with first decree murder.
Newspaper Details
Naples Daily News
Naples, Florida, US
Mon, Oct 02, 1972
Page 1
Full Page
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USA 18 Aug 2018
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