The unsolved abduction and murder of a woman in Broward County more than four decades ago is being revisited with new DNA testing of evidence.
Delores Bailey, 24, was alone working an overnight shift at the 7-Eleven in the 1600 block of North 18th Avenue in Hollywood on Jan. 21, 1982, when she disappeared in the early morning hours.
There was no indication that she fought against whoever entered the store that morning. Some of her belongings were left behind, Davie Police Cold Case Detective Eddy Velazquez told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. A police officer who was in the area doing routine patrol had seen Bailey working alone, and less than half an hour later, a customer found the store empty and alerted police, Velazquez said.
There was no development in the case until her remains were found 11 months later in a wooded, rural area just east of the Florida’s Turnpike, south of Griffin Road in Davie.
An employee of a tree trimming service found the skeleton while working in the area on Dec. 8,1982, the Fort Lauderdale News reported at the time. Investigators determined she had been shot in the head three times.
Velazquez began working on the case within the last month and plans to send different pieces of clothes that were found at the scene to private labs that conduct advanced DNA testing.
Broward County Crime Stoppers is now offering a $5,000 reward for tips leading to an arrest.
Bailey was killed in the area where her remains were found, Velazquez said. She had moved to the area from Pennsylvania only a couple of months earlier.
Bailey had separated from her husband before moving south alone. Their son was young when she moved, Bailey’s niece Melissa Mcbride, 39, of Pennsylvania, told the Sun Sentinel. Once she moved to South Florida, her aunt lived with a woman she was in a romantic relationship with.
While different family members have shared different accounts of why, Bailey wanted to move back home to Pennsylvania not long before she disappeared, Mcbride, whose mother is Bailey’s sister, said.
“She had called her father to send money down, to bring her back home, and he didn’t have the means to send any money down to her,” she said. “And shortly after, she was missing from the store.”
7-Eleven offered a $25,000 reward for information leading shortly after Bailey disappeared, the equivalent of about $100,000 today, Velazquez said.
Her disappearance came less than six months after the high-profile abduction in the same town of 6-year-old Adam Walsh from the Sears department store at the Hollywood Mall.
“We had a lot of serial killers back then,” Velazquez said.
It’s unknown whether the abduction was at random or by someone she knew, he said.
Detectives early on ruled out robbery as a motive as only $30 was missing from the cash register and hundreds of dollars remained in the store’s safe, the Fort Lauderdale News reported in June 1982. For months after Bailey’s disappearance, investigators tried to track down the customer who found the store empty to no avail, the newspaper reported.
Though Mcbride wasn’t born until four years after her aunt disappeared, her mother made sure she knew who Bailey was. Mcbride has now done the same for her own daughter, Bailey’s great-niece.
When Mcbride learned in November that Velazquez would be revisiting the case, she was skeptical the call was even real, she recalled.
“I thanked him … This has been a question in my family and it haunts us,” she said. “It’s been a thorn in our sides trying to figure out what happened and who did it.”
Davie Police have had breakthroughs in multiple cold cases in recent years due to advancements in DNA testing and technology. Last October, DNA testing identified the man suspected in the 1987 murder of Marilyn Decker. Velazquez said the suspect in Decker’s case, who died in 1995, could be tied to similar unsolved homicides in South Florida.
In 2023, the remains of a woman that went unidentified for nearly 40 years were determined to be those of Lori Jane Kearsey, of Gloucester, Mass., who was married to a member of a notorious Boston crime family.
In 2021, Carolyn Dunn Moudy was identified as the woman whose body Davie Police found floating in a canal in 1975 after exhuming her body from Forest Lawn Memorial Gardens cemetery in Davie in 2019.