A man already serving five life sentences for murdering young women and girls in California and Florida has confessed to the murder of a sixth victim, an 18-year-old Ohio woman who was abducted and killed while on spring break in Florida in 1980.
Carol Ann Barrett was abducted from the Treasure Island Motel in Daytona Beach Shores on March 23, 1980, and found dead the next day along Interstate 95 in Jacksonsville, 100 miles away.
The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office said it reopened Barrett’s case in 2017 and identified 65-year-old Billy Mansfield Jr. as a suspect in her death. Mansfield is currently serving a life sentence in California for the rape and murder of René Saling, a mother of three whose body was found in a ditch at a campground where Mansfield was staying in 1980.
That murder led detectives back to Mansfield’s family home in Spring Hill, Florida, where they found four bodies buried on the property: Elaine Zeigler, a 15-year-old from Ohio; Sandra Jean Graham, a 21-year-old Tampa woman who disappeared on April 17, 1980; 17-year-old Theresa Caroline Fillingim, a Florida girl who also disappeared in 1980 and was just identified in 2022; and a still-unidentified woman believed to have been in her 20s.
Detectives interviewed Mansfield about Barrett multiple times over two years until he finally admitted he was the man in a sketch drawn from witnesses who saw him. He admitted to abducting Barrett from the motel and killing her shortly afterward.
The State Attorney’s Office in Florida’s 4th Judicial Circuit decided not to charge Mansfield in Barrett’s murder, the sheriff’s office said. He will remain in prison in California, where he is serving a life term for Saling’s murder and for the other four concurrent life sentences he received for the Florida murders.
The sheriff’s office said Mansfield is cooperating with detectives in other jurisdictions on other cold cases.
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[Featured image: Billy Mansfield Jr/California Department of Corrections and Carol Ann Barrett/Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office]
