A young Californian carrying lots of cash disappeared 50 years ago in Florida. Can you help detectives solve his murder?
James Norris left California in early October 1974. He didn’t tell his family where he was going, only that he’d be back in a week or so.
He dropped his dog off at his family’s home and left. The next, and last, time they heard from him was by postcard. His sister Rosemary Southward still remembers it — dated Oct. 4, 1975, from the small town of Inglis, Florida, just 5 miles east of the Gulf of Mexico to the north of Crystal River.
The postcard, decorated with a peacock and trees, was addressed to “my favorite family.” She laughed when she remembered that detail, nearly 50 years later. That was his sense of humor. She still remembers the picture on the card. She remembers what it said. She has kept it over the years in a box of items that have become sacred to her.
Norris came to Florida to buy Colombian marijuana from dealers in Citrus County at a time when marijuana smuggling was rampant in Florida. One of the largest busts the country had seen at the time — where 9 tons of marijuana were seized — happened in the Gulf coast area in Dixie County just a year earlier.
Two years after Norris’ disappearance, human remains were discovered by a bulldozer operator in a wooded area of northern Dixie County off of U.S. 19, not far from the Taylor County line, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said. It wasn’t until 2010 that the remains were identified as Norris and his family learned he was murdered.
The case is still unsolved, but FDLE agents think there are people in Florida today who know what happened to Norris and have information that could help finally close one of the oldest cold cases in the state, one that they believe is solvable. Anyone who may remember Dan Bever, Willis Gillette, who went by Will, and Mitchell Lazor, who went by Mitch, may have information that could help.
“We have a lot of different pieces, and there’s somebody out there (who) doesn’t realize that they have a missing piece or two that we could use … When we put it all together, it’s what we need to make an arrest,” FDLE Special Agent Supervisor Michael Kennedy told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Smuggling in ’70s
One of Southward and Norris’ sisters kept a diary, like most young teenage girls. Except the diary’s musings revealed more than high-school crushes. Years later, when they revisited it, the diary confirmed that the family was surprised to see Norris’ postcard was from Florida, Southward said.
It wasn’t uncommon for Norris, then a 24-year-old living on his own in the San Francisco Bay area, to take trips on a whim. But they had never heard of this small, rural Florida town.
“We thought, ‘Florida? Gosh, who goes to Florida?’ Because back in those days, that would have been a huge deal to take a vacation that far,” Southward said.
Norris, who was traveling under the alias Richard Gunning, carried a substantial amount of cash with him on his flight from California to Miami, the FDLE said.
Kennedy, who has been working on the case for years, said marijuana smuggling boomed in Florida’s Big Bend region in 1974, partially because the rural area sat outside the larger law enforcement jurisdictions of Tallahassee and Tampa.
“It made for a perfect combination if you’re going to try to smuggle something in,” Kennedy said. “It was an area that smugglers wanted to exploit.”
And it was a lucrative business. Newspapers across the state printed an Associated Press story in August 1973 detailing the high demand for the drug, which was coming in largely from Colombia and Jamaica. The Associated Press reported that nearly $30 million worth of marijuana had been seized in smuggling operations on Florida’s coast that year.
“Florida’s 8,426 miles of coastline with its remote bays and proximity by air and sea to the illicit marijuana fields of Colombia and Jamaica have made the state a center for the new breed of international smugglers,” the Associated Press reported in December 1974, a few months after Norris’ disappearance.
An issue of the Florida Sheriff’s Association’s magazine “The Sheriff’s Star” in 1979 was titled “For Sheriffs: Marijuana is a pot of gold!” The law-enforcement magazine detailed reports of sheriffs from the west to the east coast confiscating trucks, cars, boats, planes and motorhomes in busts and seizing an estimated $1.1 billion worth of marijuana in under four years.
“Anyone fishing around in Florida’s crime files will find that pot has been smuggled in shrimp boats, house boats, sail boats, rusty freighters, World War II bombers, fast jets, four-wheel drive trucks, 18-wheel tractor-trailers, swamp buggies, air boats, expensive cars, horse trailers, vans, motor homes, school buses, yachts, speedboats and the innocent-looking under-wear of an innocent-looking girl,” the magazine said.
A pilot could make a minimum of $25,000 for flying one load of the drug from Colombia. Boat skippers could get $50,000. Even loaders could make a few thousand, the magazine said. It quoted a fisherman who talked to reporters about the quick cash.
“Hell, if I was younger,” the fisherman continued, “you damn well know I’d be hauling grass. Wouldn’t you accept a million dollars with the stipulation there’d be a five or 10 percent chance of getting caught and serving a year or two in prison?”
The organization Norris came to meet with was based in Citrus County but had connections in the Miami, San Diego and San Francisco areas, Kennedy said. In South Florida, the group was associated with a since-closed bar in Miami called the Calypso Lounge, which was located in the 8700 block of Northwest Seventh Avenue, Kennedy said.
Southward wrote on a website dedicated to sharing information about her brother’s case that after a month went by and her brother hadn’t returned, her family hired a private investigator who discovered from Norris’ friends the reason Norris traveled to Florida.
“My brother must have met someone in San Francisco who said, ‘Hey, I can get you get great pot from Colombia,'” Southward said. “I think the situation was you could get Colombian pot here back then, but it was abundant and a lot cheaper if you go get it, pick it up in Florida.”
Southward said her brother left behind his address book, which contained the names of contacts in Citrus County.
“So now the truth (or part of it) was out and it was clear to my parents that if Jimmy was a month overdue from a drug deal with virtual strangers on the other side of the country, there was a good chance that he had met with some sort of foul play,” Southward wrote on her website.
Remains identified
As the weeks went on, Southward said she remembered feeling “a hole” and recalled their mother’s worries, an instinctive sense that something went wrong.
Their mother reported Norris missing to police in San Francisco. The private investigator was searching for information about what happened by November 1974, Southward said. Her mother had scribbled notes from call after call, but they got few answers.
“The notes she took as she made her phone calls speak to her desperation: Names and numbers scrawled over numerous pages, some scratched out so vigorously that the paper was nearly torn in spots,” Southward wrote on her website. “Life at home in this time period was stressful and frightening, the worst memory I have.”
Southward began searching again in earnest in the mid-1990s when she got a computer, she wrote on her website. All of the notes and items her mother had kept in the immediate aftermath of her brother’s disappearance proved invaluable. She and her family submitted cheek swabs to California officials in 2004, and a DNA profile was completed a year later, Southward wrote.
It would be those DNA samples that later helped to identify the remains discovered in the woods in April 1976, Southward said. She had entered the information into NamUS, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, by 2008 or 2009.
Separately, the FDLE sent Norris’ remains to the University of North Texas at Special Agent Supervisor David Wilson’s request given the advancements in DNA testing, and while researchers were able to create a DNA profile, it wasn’t enough information to enter into CODIS, the national DNA database maintained by the FBI, the FDLE said.
The testing results were given to Kennedy, and researchers recommended he enter information in the NamUS database. He found the listing about Norris, reported missing in Florida 100 miles away from where the remains were found, the FDLE said. And the database noted that Norris’ family had submitted DNA samples.
The DNA came back as a match in 2010, Southward said. The homicide investigation began.
The FDLE said their investigation has revealed names of people who were in the organization from which Norris planned to buy marijuana but have released few other details. Special Agent Supervisor Kennedy said FDLE’s pushes to get information from the public over the years have generated leads in the case, and they have identified people of interest who are still alive.
Investigators think people in Citrus County, Panama City and Miami may have information that could help in solving the case.
Without revealing details, Kennedy said he believes people who remember the Calypso Lounge in Miami or people who remember a man named Dan Bever, who lived in the Hialeah area and frequented the bar, may have useful information. Bever died in Palm Beach County about 25 years ago.
Kennedy also believes a man named Willis Gillette, who went by Will, may have known what happened to Norris. Gillette lived in Citrus County and in San Diego and died about 30 years ago. Norris’ roommate in 1974, Mitch or Mitchell Lazor, may have had information, too. Lazor disappeared in the San Francisco area in 1994, Kennedy said. The FDLE does not believe his disappearance is related to Norris’ murder.
One man associated with the Citrus County drug organization is believed to have lived in Aspen, Colorado, since the 1980s, the FDLE told the Aspen Times in October 2021. Investigators believe the man, who is in his late 60s or early 70s, has talked about it there in the last 10 to 30 years, the Aspen Times reported. Kennedy declined to speak about the Aspen connection.
WMC-Ch. 5, a TV news station in Memphis, published a story on Norris’ murder last week, reporting that the FDLE believes people in the Memphis area may know something.
“We’d like to see some justice for what had happened to Mr. Norris,” Kennedy said. “We can’t imagine, both his parents passed away without knowing what happened to their son. For 37 years, his siblings didn’t know what happened to him.”
Anger and hope
Once the remains were identified and the homicide investigation began, Norris’ family put him to rest.
Southward retrieved her brother’s remains in 2011, and she and her sisters planned a memorial for him. A local police detective and old friends who hadn’t seen Norris since his disappearance attended. They played Norris’ favorite songs.
He was put to rest with his mother, the plot marked with a headstone sculpted to resemble the mountains in the Suisun Valley area that Norris often visited, Southward said. She visited the cemetery every day for nearly a year after he was laid to rest, finally having a place to be with him after all of the years he was missing.
“Something about that day brought up how many things that he missed,” Southward recalled. “All these things, and all of a sudden it just hit me like a ton of bricks, all these dates that popped up that were meaningful for our family.”
On her website, Southward said her brother was a nature and animal enthusiast, an artist, poet, musician and teacher. After his remains were identified and a story ran in the local paper in 2011, people who had been touched by Norris in their lives called Southward to share their memories.
She described “a kind of magnetism” that her brother had and from a young age, she realized “there was something really special about him,” she wrote.
“Over the years I’ve noticed that people tend to distill his life down to James the Missing Person, James the Drug Dealer, and now James the Murder Victim,” Southward wrote. “I suppose it may be natural for people who never knew him to do that but I want everyone to know that he was so much more than any of those things.”
Southward has faith in the agents who are still working on solving her brother’s murder, the persistence they’ve shown keeping her hopeful over the years.
“When they said they’re going to do this investigation … it was so shocking to me,” Southward said. “They were able to kind of re-awaken that optimism that I used to have when I was young.”
Southward said with the optimism, though, remains anger for people who were involved or people who have information about what happened but have chosen to stay silent for nearly 50 years.
Anyone with information about the murder of James Norris is asked to contact FDLE Tallahassee at 800-342-0820.
