One-time Vine Street resident convicted of murder in Florida cold case

BARTOW, Fla. — One-time Vine Street resident Carl McCauley is guilty in a 1987 murder that Florida investigators once deemed a cold case, a jury in Polk County, Fla., decided on Thursday.McCauley is set to serve life in prison, according to a local Florida newspaper that covered his nearly two-week trial.McCauley, 67, had been living a seemingly normal life in Sandusky for approximately 15 years when Polk County deputies began to zero in on him as a suspect. They reached out to the Sandusky Police Department in 2014 to keep an eye on McCauley. At the request of their counterparts in Florida, local police also interviewed McCauley and collected a DNA sample.Sandusky police and Polk County deputies took McCauley into custody that August.A bewildered neighbor told the Sandusky Register at the time that McCauley, who the neighbor said worked for as a garage door installer, seemed like a responsible person and liked to crack jokes. Local police said they had never documented any incidents or complaints involving him while he lived in Sandusky.The following month, Florida prosecutors dropped the charges, apparently to gather further evidence to strengthen their case. The next year, in January, a Polk County grand jury indicted McCauley on charges of murder and sexual battery.That put his case in motion in Polk County Circuit Court, where he stood trial this week and last.The conviction pertains to the rape and stabbing death of Karen Watson, 41, inside her Lake Alfred residence. McCauley told jurors this week that he had gone to see Watson on March 24, 1987, to have sex with her. He insisted that Watson was alive when he left, according to local newspaper The Ledger.McCauley's defense cast Watson' husband as the killer, suggesting that he must have flew into a rage upon realizing that his wife was having sex within another man, according to The Ledger. The newspaper reported that the husband, who died in 2014, had been cleared as a suspect through DNA testing and through an investigation that proved he had been in another area at the time of his wife's death.The DNA sample collected from McCauley in Ohio in 2014 was determined to be consistent with evidence recovered from the crime scene in 1987.The Ledger reported that the jury deliberated for approximately four hours on Thursday before returning a guilty verdict on both charges.Carl McCauley