For nearly 24 years, Vero Beach High School graduate Curtis Huff Jr. was identified as the “prime suspect” – the only suspect ever publicly named by Osceola County Sheriff’s detectives – in the February 1992 abduction and murder of Ruth Haut, a 42-year-old Kissimmee chiropractor whose lifeless body was found the next day in an orange grove on the outskirts of St. Cloud.
Last week, however, the supervisor of the agency’s Violent Crime Unit said detectives no longer are focusing their attention and efforts on Huff, who lives in Vero Beach and, coincidentally, is free on $20,000 bail after being arrested earlier this month on an insurance-fraud charge.
“We have done an exhaustive investigation, and we’re continuing to do so,” Sgt. Raul Correa said in a phone interview Friday. “I can’t discuss the details of an open and ongoing investigation, but what I can tell you is that Mr. Huff is not a suspect.”
Why is Huff no longer a suspect?
Correa provided no answers, despite revealing such stunning news, which baffled Indian River County Sheriff’s detectives, who said they still consider Huff to be a “strong person of interest” in an eerily similar abduction and murder of a Vero Beach woman that happened nine months after Haut’s murder, in November 1992.
He declined to offer any explanation, in fact, saying only that his detectives have the “most accurate and up-to-date information” regarding the case and warning that some of the information being disseminated via social media isn’t correct.
“There’s no way to make a connection,” Correa said of Haut’s murder and Huff. “People want to make a connection. They shouldn’t.”
But why?
What about that mountain of circumstantial evidence, which detectives investigating the case in the 1990s used to convince a judge to issue warrants to collect DNA samples from Huff and search his father’s St. Cloud home, where Huff had lived?
Both Jean Wagner, who was Haut’s live-in girlfriend, and Stephen Madonna, Haut’s grand-nephew, were appalled by Correa’s statement.
“That’s BS,” Wagner said. “They know. They know what happened. They screwed up the case, and now they’re trying to bury the story.”
The story had been buried for two decades before Osceola County detectives, seizing on the 20th anniversary of Haut’s murder, reopened what was then a cold case in 2012 and found new information that still hasn’t been released to the public.
In television interviews, though, an agency spokeswoman said in 2012 that detectives believed the suspect lived in Indian River County.
Six years later, with detectives no closer to charging Huff or anyone else with Haut’s murder, Madonna singlehandedly pushed the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office to again reopen the case in early 2018 and used his “Justice for Ruth Haut” Facebook page to spearhead the effort.
Madonna, who was 4 when his aunt was killed, gave no credibility to Correa’s dismissal of Huff as a suspect.
“There are things I can’t say, but I can tell you that I’ve spoken to five detectives who’ve worked the case – most of them from the 1990s – and they still feel he’s the prime suspect,” Madonna said. “They said they could never rule him out, and he was still a suspect just a couple of months ago.”
According to police reports: Haut, who was launching a new career as a chiropractor, went to her office for an appointment at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 26, 1992. She was reported missing later that night by Wagner, who had arrived home from work at 10 p.m., saw Haut wasn’t there and became concerned.
Wagner said she went to Haut’s office, where she found the door unlocked, the lights on and the phone lines cut. Haut’s keys were still inside, and her car was still in the parking lot. Haut’s body was discovered the next day. She had been stabbed more than 10 times and her throat slit.
A receipt found next to Haut’s body led detectives to a Vero Beach bank, where a camera produced a video recording of someone using her ATM card. Although the person was wearing a hooded sweatshirt pulled tight over his face and latex gloves, an enhanced image revealed the user was white, stood 5-foot-3 to 5-foot-6 in height and drove a red pickup truck.
Also found next to Haut’s body was a blood-stained shirt similar to the unstained shirt worn over the hoodie in the ATM image, prompting detectives to believe she was alive throughout the three-hour round trip to Vero Beach and was killed upon her return to Osceola County.
It wasn’t until mid-February 1995, however, that the Osceola News-Gazette broke the story that detectives working the case had identified Huff as their “prime suspect” in Haut’s murder.
At the time, Huff, who has a lengthy criminal history dating back to his younger years in Michigan and Indiana, was already serving a 20-year term at the state prison in Hardee County for a 1993 attempted murder that occurred during a botched robbery at a Kissimmee motel.
He ultimately served only 12 of the 20 years, but the News-Gazette reported that the judge who sentenced Huff in that case as a habitual violent felony offender told him: “My picture of you is someone who is afflicted with deep psychological disturbance, and there’s no doubt in my mind that you intended the death of your victim.”
To obtain the search warrants in the Haut case, the News-Gazette reported, detectives filed an affidavit loaded with circumstantial-but-damning evidence linking Huff to the murder. The connections included:
nHuff’s red pickup truck, which was seized in the 1993 attempted-murder case, matched the description of a vehicle seen near the area where Haut’s body was found the night she disappeared.
nTire tracks in the grove matched the tires on Huff’s truck.
nA cassette tape of Billy Thorpe’s “Children of the Sun” album was found inside Huff’s truck, but without the box. A box for a “Children of the Sun” cassette tape, without the tape, was found near Haut’s body.
nHuff stands 5 feet 4 inches tall, which fit the size of the person in footage from the ATM camera.
nHuff grew up in Vero Beach and had lived a short distance from the bank where Haut’s ATM card was used. Also, his then-girlfriend told police he often traveled to Vero Beach from his home in St. Cloud.
In addition, once armed with a search warrant, detectives seized from Huff’s father’s home a pair of Reebok tennis shoes that matched footprints found in the grove.
Somehow, though, Huff was never charged.
“I was told they felt they didn’t have enough – that they were missing a couple of pieces to the puzzle,” Madonna said. “They had a lot of circumstantial evidence, but they wanted to make sure they had enough to convict him, because they’d get only one shot.”
That could explain why Huff was never prosecuted. The abundance of circumstantial evidence pointing to Huff, however, makes it difficult to understand what convinced detectives he was no longer a suspect.
Among those puzzled by Correa’s revelation are Indian River County Sheriff’s detectives investigating the Nov. 2, 1992, murder of Mary Ellen Wise, who lived across the street from Huff and was close friends with Huff’s stepfather, Johnny Herron.
Wise, 39, was home alone when she was abducted from her Vero Beach home. She was forced to drive her red 1990 Honda CRX to a Melbourne bank to withdraw money from an ATM before returning to a Vero Beach bank, where she withdrew more money from a drive-through teller.
Her abandoned car was found the next day in the parking lot of the Ramp Raw Bar in Fort Pierce. Five days later, her brutally beaten body was discovered in a field near Peanut Lake in rural St. Lucie County.
“Sound familiar?” Indian River County Sheriff’s Detective Chris Cassinari said, referring to the similarities between the Haut and Wise murders. “They’re the only two cases I’ve worked in 30 years where the killer forced the victims to drive to an ATM an hour or two away to withdraw money, then took them to a remote area to be killed and left the bodies in a field.”
Cassinari also cited the proximity of the victims to Huff’s home and his then-girlfriend’s home – Wise was Huff’s neighbor in Vero Beach and Haut’s office was only a few blocks from the girlfriend’s home in Kissimmee.
“There’s so much stuff,” Cassinari said, adding that the killer in both cases wore latex gloves.
There’s enough “stuff” that Cassinari said he won’t allow Osceola County’s decision, which he found to be perplexing, to dissuade him from continuing to view Huff as a person of interest in the Wise case – especially since even Herron can’t say his stepson is innocent.
“I haven’t spoken to Curtis in five years, and I can’t tell you what I don’t know, but with everything the Sheriff’s Office has shown me and told me … It’s very difficult for me,” Herron said, adding that he’s “aghast” to think his stepson might’ve killed two women, including someone Herron considered a friend.
“There are just so many coincidences.”
Madonna and Wagner think so, too, but the Osceola County Sheriff’s detectives disagree.
“I’ve talked to Mr. Madonna, and I understand his zeal for this case, but this isn’t a TV show,” Correa said. “This is an old case, and it’s going to take time. We want to find the person or persons who committed this crime, and we’re going to do it the right way.”
What does Huff think of this latest development?
Contacted by phone last week and told he was no longer a suspect in Haut’s murder, Huff said, “I’d rather not comment.” He referred any future inquiries to his Vero Beach attorney, Julia Graves, whom he hired to represent him in the insurance fraud case.
Wise’s sister, meanwhile, wasn’t surprised that Huff kept quiet.
“What’s he going to say?” said Sharon Correa, who lives in Sebastian, and believes Huff is more than a person of interest in her sister’s murder.
“To me, he doesn’t really have any conscience or regret,” she added. “His only worry now is that, while he has built this persona of being a great guy, he knows there are people from his past who won’t let this go.”
