At dusk on a hot humid night five years ago, a beat-up red van drove onto the front yard of the large two-story, ranch-style house owned by Byrd âBudâ and Melanie Billings on a secluded tract of land in Beulah. When the van pulled away ten minutes later, the couple was dead and nine special needs children, ages 4-11, were left orphans.
In the days and months that followed, Pensacola was hurled onto the national stage as the veneer of this sleepy Navy town with aspirations to return to its former glory days was pulled back revealing a seedy side that few locals wanted to admit existed. The Independent News made its mark for its investigative reporting on a much grander scale, the political career of a novice sheriff was launched, and one man ended up on Floridaâs Death Row.
When I look back at my reporting on the story for The Daily Beast, I see how much I have grown as a writer and how much this town helped me with tips and encouragement to best some of the top reporters in the country. There was so much I didnât understand about law enforcement and crime reporting back then.
The Billings case was also the first time that I had been attacked for my reporting. Nancy Grace, Shepard Smith and other reporters openly went after me claiming that my sources were unreliable and that I was only reporting hearsay. However, when the State Attorneyâs Office released the transcripts of its interviews with those arrested and witnesses, my reporting was vindicated.
Today, Iâm the only local reporter who covered the murders that is still writing in Pensacola. The News Journal had Thyrie Bland, Kris Wernowsky and Sean Dugas covering the story. WEAR had Dan Thomas and Greg Newman. Local media has changed significantly since then.
Sheriff David Morgan became a superstar because of how he handled the murder investigation. He used social media and the regular media to help his deputies arrest all the suspects in less than a week. Today he has the highest approval rating of any elected official in Escambia County, maybe the entire state. Something County Administrator Jack Brown might want to pay attention to during the budget process.
Patrick Gonzalez sits on Death Row in Stark, Fla. He insists that he was framed, that all the evidence against him is circumstantial, and that those who helped to convict him were only protecting their own hides. He has lost all of his appeals, but there are those who are trying to help him prove his innocence.
Pensacola has moved on. The following year, the BP Oil Disaster hit our shores bringing President Obama and the national media back to town.
Still some of us remember the murders, the hectic days of covering the investigation and the story leads that never quite panned out.