How one victim helped another in the Jennifer Odom case

Years after she was attacked, detectives still came to see her.

She was a 17-year-old honor roll student at Land O’ Lakes High School when she was raped and nearly killed one afternoon in 1992 after she got off the school bus near her family’s home. A brain injury left her partially paralyzed, unable to speak beyond terse phrases. She tried to describe her attacker.

Bad guy. Woods. Short. Beard. Stunk. No teeth.

In her damaged mind, the girl grasped that detectives were also looking for clues about the case of another young girl, Jennifer Odom, whose 1993 murder seemed intertwined with her own ordeal. Sometimes, she asked, seemingly uncomprehending: How’s Jennifer?

Three decades later, investigators say it was the girl’s case — and what she told detectives — that finally helped them identify Jeffrey Norman Crum as the suspect in both crimes.

Now convicted and serving life in prison for the attack on the girl, Crum last summer was indicted in Jennifer’s murder in Hernando County. This month marks 31 years since Jennifer’s case first stirred fear in the Tampa Bay area. If what authorities say is true, this will be the first year that her killer has had a name.

Still unclear is precisely how Hernando County sheriff’s detectives confirmed the two cases were connected, and what specifically they uncovered in the eight years that elapsed between Crum’s arrest in the Pasco attack and his indictment in Jennifer’s murder.

In response to a recent inquiry, Hernando sheriff’s officials said that, due to the cases’ similarities, there was a belief that the suspect was the same man. They also said that DNA evidence played a “significant role.”

They declined to say more. Jennifer’s family also declined to comment for this story.

As Crum awaits trial, newly released public records, including court documents and sheriff’s reports from both counties, along with archived news accounts, illuminate parallel investigations of two separate but similar crimes.

Taken together, they tell some of the incomplete story.

A blue truck

For decades, all most anyone knew for sure about what happened to Jennifer Odom was what two of her friends said they saw after she stepped off the school bus.

It was Feb. 19, 1993, a Friday. Jennifer, a seventh grader at Thomas Weightman Middle School, wore jeans, a white turtleneck and a red sweater under a Hooters jacket. The 12-year-old toted a purse, a Jansport book bag and a clarinet case as she crossed the 200-yard stretch toward her family’s home on Jim Denney Road, west of Dade City.

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Glancing out the bus windows, the two girls saw a truck turn in behind their friend. The girls would later describe the truck as old, blue, with two metal poles rising from the bed. One said she saw the driver, a man with dark hair. Jennifer walked past the truck and was slightly in front of it by the time the bus moved out of sight.

The response to her disappearance was immediate. More than 400 police officers and volunteers spent days scouring northeast Pasco, a place where orange groves provided cover and hay bales dotted long, green fields.

Six days after she vanished, a couple found Jennifer’s body off a trail that wound through an abandoned orange grove south of Powell Road in Hernando County. Her clothing was missing save for a single red sock on her right foot. On her wrist was a Minnie Mouse watch. On her neck was half of a heart-shaped gold “best friend” necklace.

A half-eaten orange lay yards away from her body. She died, investigators determined, from a blow to her head with what seemed to be a long, slender object.

Case records center on the hundreds of tips that deluged investigators in the months and years thereafter. The reports, handwritten and typewritten, would come to number more than 75,000.

Tales of strange neighbors with troubling interests in children. Complex yarns about criminals considering giving themselves up. Vague sightings of suspicious men in blue trucks.

Blue trucks seemed to be everywhere. The right blue truck seemed to be nowhere.

A woman who lived near the murder scene said she heard screams two days after Jennifer’s disappearance, but another neighbor said the noise was just children playing. A maid at a Days Inn motel in Brooksville remembered blood in one of the rooms and a blue truck parked outside. Cops found nothing.

One early lead that investigators spent weeks running down centered on the late Pinellas County attorney Ron Smith. A confidential informant told detectives that Smith claimed he knew who the killer was, that he had been approached about representing him. The lead went nowhere.

Investigators looked into a fruitless tip about a suspicious man who’d attended Jennifer’s funeral. He denied being involved, said he just felt bad for her family.

Amid the many false leads and dead ends, some reports are intriguing:

Days after Jennifer vanished, a man reported that he’d driven behind a speeding blue truck on U.S. 41 in Pasco County. He could see two people in it, a man and an adolescent girl. She was yelling at the driver. A little south of Masaryktown, the truck came to a sudden stop, then turned down another road.

One day in early 1995, a couple came to Hernando County to collect scrap metal. Near sunset, they scoured a sandy road beneath power lines. At a dead-end street called Mabrick Court, the woman noticed a weathered box, like a suitcase, nestled in the brush.

She opened the front clasp and found a clarinet.

Her husband noticed another item in the leaves: a small, gray Jansport book bag. Inside was a hairbrush, two pencils and a math textbook.

The book bore the name Jennifer Odom.

The other victim

Even in the murder investigation’s earliest days, detectives believed there was likely a connection to the attack on the 17-year-old Pasco County girl.

The Tampa Bay Times is not naming the girl due to the nature of the crime. The attack happened at the corner of Twin Oaks Road and U.S. 41. She got off the bus there every day, usually arriving at her family’s home within minutes to watch her favorite TV show, “General Hospital.” That day, though, she wasn’t there when the show’s theme music began to play.

Her family grew worried. They went to the school and verified she’d gotten off the bus. They soon found her behind a vacant house.

She lay unconscious, bleeding from a severe head wound. She was flown to Bayfront Medical Center in St. Petersburg. Swelling inside her skull required a neurosurgeon to remove part of her brain.

She lay in a coma for three months. She was moved to a head trauma recovery center in Pennsylvania, then later a facility in her native New York.

She spoke in fragments, her mother recalled in a recent interview: “Beat up. Florida. Sick. Left to die.”

She would stroke her chin, a gesture detectives later interpreted to mean that her attacker had a beard. He’d taken her gold ring, she said.

They developed a description: A short man, who smelled, with long dark hair, no teeth and a tattoo on his upper left arm.

A detective made a sketch based on the girl’s description. But without a name, the attacker remained a phantom.

Investigators collected DNA from a rape exam, but tests in the 1990s yielded no suspects.

In September 1993, Pasco County detectives presented the case to the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. Agents drew up a criminal profile:

They estimated he was a loner in his late 20s, a “cowardly type.” They said he was poorly educated and had trouble maintaining a job. They guessed that he was probably not from Pasco but was familiar with the area. They said his relationships would be short-lived and abusive. They said he would feel no remorse.

DNA yields a break

In October 2014, Vicki Bellino, a Florida Department of Law Enforcement lab analyst, reviewed the 1992 rape case. She thought it could be a good candidate for a more advanced type of forensic testing.

The new method, known as familial DNA testing, sought to identify possible family members of a criminal suspect.

A cold-case detective, David Boyer, sent over samples of DNA from the rape exam. Four months later came a lead. The DNA linked to a man in a state prison database.

His name was Jeffrey Crum Jr. He was serving 30 years for a 2012 string of robberies in Hernando County. The testing indicated the rapist was directly related to Crum on his father’s side.

Boyer researched Crum’s family, finding names for his grandfather, father and uncle. In 1992, they all lived at a home on Somerset Acres Lane in Spring Hill. It is a short, wooded street that sits off U.S. 41, south of Masaryktown, a little more than a mile from where the attack occurred.

Boyer and another detective, Allen Proctor, set out to speak with the men and take samples of their DNA. Their journey took them to the end of a long drive and a field of parched grass in Holiday, in western Pasco County. The small building was the Darlington Residential Treatment Facility.

It was there that they met Jeffrey Crum Sr.

He was from Ohio but had lived in Florida for many years. He was short — 5 feet, 6 inches — and skinny. He had thinning brown hair and a graying goatee.

He’d checked himself into the facility for a 90-day alcohol treatment program. He puffed on a 305 cigarette as he spoke outside with the detectives.

Boyer and Proctor asked what Crum remembered about what he was doing 23 years earlier.

He was in his early 30s then. He was on probation for robbery and gun charges, he said.

He’d also done time for sexual battery. In that 1985 case, a woman in Tampa said he’d forced her to commit a sex act on him in his truck, threatening to kill her. He’d been released from prison in 1990.

The detectives noticed tattoos on Crum’s left arm. He lifted a sleeve and talked about them, including one that depicted an eagle head above his bicep.

The detectives asked about his teeth. He’d had a dental disease when he was 23 and had them all pulled.

They showed Crum pictures of the victim. Crum said he remembered the case but denied having anything to do with it. He admitted the suspect description sounded like him.

The detectives said they wanted to take his DNA. They rubbed cotton swabs on his cheek and tongue and collected his cigarette butts.

A week later came a lab report with results: Crum’s DNA matched.

The detectives returned. Crum came outside donning a black Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. The detectives read him his rights. They asked him more about where he’d lived, jobs he’d worked, his friends, cars he drove.

After he got out of prison, Crum said, he worked for a Tampa tree-trimming company. He left in 1993 for Miami. He did drywall and construction for a company that helped build Walmart stores, he said. He said he traveled all over the country.

He was asked if he had any connection to Dade City.

Yes, he said. In the early 1990s, he reported to a probation office there twice a week. He took State Road 52.

He was asked what kind of car he drove.

Back then, he said, he drove a 1978 Toyota pickup. It was blue. He sold it in 1993, he said.

The detectives again showed him pictures of the rape victim. They told him his DNA was found on her body.

“I don’t believe it,” Crum said. “You said at any time I can walk away.”

He opened the car door. Detective Boyer stepped out behind him with the handcuffs.

Crum was convicted in 2019 of two counts of sexual battery for the attack on the Pasco County girl. He received a life sentence. Hernando County investigators watched closely as his case was appealed, and his conviction and sentence upheld.

In July, a grand jury returned an indictment charging him with murder, kidnapping and sexual battery in Jennifer’s case. A trial date has not been set.