Osprey, a fishing settlement near Tampa in Florida, enters the narrative as the setting of a second, still-unsolved killing of an entire family. Its isolated cattle ranch and the timing of the deaths drew investigators’ attention to Dick and Perry Smith, linking the place to the wider search for explanations after the Garden City murders without establishing who killed the family there.

Setting and the killings

Slightly more than a month after the Garden City tragedy, four members of the Walker family—a young couple and their two children—were killed on an isolated cattle ranch in Osprey. All four had been shot with a rifle. The parallel with the earlier case was striking: both involved the deaths of four members of a family, and the Osprey killings became a possible lead for officers seeking to solve an unrelated set of murders.

The investigation turns to Kansas

The sheriff of Sarasota County, which includes Osprey, had no other leads and sought to have Dick and Perry Smith questioned and given polygraph examinations. Their whereabouts offered an immediate complication: on December 19, the date of the Osprey murders, they had spent the night at a hotel in Tallahassee. Nevertheless, both agreed to take the tests. Perry Smith remarked that whoever had committed the Osprey killings might have read about the murders in Kansas and been unstable, presenting the connection as a possibility rather than evidence against a known suspect.

An unresolved case

The polygraph results were decisively negative for both men, dismaying the Osprey sheriff and Alvin Dewey, who was reluctant to accept exceptional coincidences. The investigation did not identify another perpetrator in the account: the killer of the Walker family remained unknown. Osprey therefore marks both the reach and the limits of the Kansas investigation—an apparent resemblance and a line of inquiry that produced no solution.