Forty-five years after Vero Beach High School teacher Jack Rose was shot dead in his car near the north jetty at the Fort Pierce Inlet, the detective who solved the cold case last summer was left with mixed feelings.
“I’m glad we were able to give the victim’s family a sense of closure,” St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Detective Paul Taylor said last week, “but, as a cop, I’d love to put somebody in handcuffs.”
Unfortunately, he can’t.
In this case, the crime was finally solved but the suspect was buried four years ago, in the Orlando area, after he died in Costa Rica at age 58.
Which means Frank Selvaggi Jr. got away with murder – while he was alive, anyway.
But Taylor is confident the former Vero Beach High student killed Rose with a rare, large-caliber, British-made Webley revolver shortly after 9 p.m. on June 13, 1974.
He said the case he built, though lacking DNA and ballistic evidence, would have been strong enough to establish the probable cause necessary to arrest Selvaggi for murder and the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office now considers the case closed.
“Would [the evidence] be enough to convict him and send him to prison? There’s no way to know,” Taylor said. “But I went through all the evidence we had, I talked to everyone that I could and, based on all the facts I was able to gather during my investigation, I’m convinced he committed the murder.
“There’s no other person who would’ve been a realistic suspect,” he added, “and Frank was the only individual I could find with a known motive for killing the victim.”
And that motive was?
Jealousy.
“He was insanely jealous,” said Claudia Baird, whose last name was Meyer when she dated Selvaggi for a year-and-a-half before breaking up with him during their junior year of high school after he beat her up in November 1973.
According to Taylor’s report, witnesses said Meyer returned to school with “two black eyes,” and she told him: “The entire school was aware of the incident, and the incident caused all the suspects friends to stop speaking to him.”
Baird, who now lives out of state, said Selvaggi was arrested and charged with battery, but Taylor was unable to find any record of such an arrest by the Vero Beach Police Department or the Indian River County Sheriff’s Office.
Baird said she believes Selvaggi’s father, Frank Sr., intervened and used his influence as a retired Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent to have the charge dropped and any record of the arrest destroyed.
Taylor said Selvaggi’s father was a “rock star for the feds” and played a major role in the highly publicized arrest of New York mobster Joe Valachi, who in 1963 broke the mafia’s code of silence and testified before a Senate committee about the organization’s structure, operations, rituals and membership.
The elder Selvaggi offered no help to Taylor’s investigation when the detective phoned him in late May and tried to discuss the murder of his son’s math teacher.
“Usually, a retired cop likes to talk to other cops,” Taylor said, “but his father shut me down quick.”
In his report, Taylor wrote that Selvaggi’s father was “uncooperative” and claimed he knew nothing about the murder, even though the shooting made headlines in local newspapers for months.
“He stated that his son had not spoken to him” for many years, Taylor wrote, adding that Selvaggi’s father said he was “not interested in speaking with me” and hung up.
Selvaggi’s father, who still lives in Vero Beach, did not return a phone message left at his home.
Taylor’s report also reveals that Selvaggi’s brother and sister were similarly unhelpful and said Rose’s murder was never discussed at home, despite the news coverage and other students saying the shooting “was all everyone in the Vero Beach talked about for months.”
Much of that talk revolved around Selvaggi.
Taylor wrote that Selvaggi’s “close personal friends” immediately assumed he killed Rose because he was “violent and would easily be considered a bully by modern standards,” and “he had access to and was known to carry firearms.”
Selvaggi’s friends knew Rose was upset when Selvaggi beat up Meyer in November, and knew that Selvaggi and Rose had gotten into a heated, verbal altercation three days before the teacher was killed that started when Selvaggi accused Rose of being sexually involved with Meyer.
Everyone, it seems, knew Rose and Meyer were friendly, and that Selvaggi was jealous of their relationship.
Baird vehemently denied any sexual or otherwise improper relationship with Rose, saying any such rumors were “absolutely false.” She said she was a teacher’s pet, straight-A student and student council member, and that she knew Rose – the student council faculty advisor – was fond of her.
“But nothing ever happened between us,” Baird said.
Though she broke up with Selvaggi immediately after he beat her up, Baird said her ex-boyfriend continued to stalk her throughout high school and beyond.
“When I worked at the Ocean Grill, he’d be standing outside in the parking lot, waiting for me,” Baird said. “I’d have to get the cooks to walk me to my car.”
Years later, when she moved to Georgia, he followed her to Atlanta, where she said he stood outside her condo, showed up at her office and followed her into a store.
“The last time I saw him was 20 years ago, but I was always worried he’d show up again,” Baird said. “He was a bad guy, and I knew he had a gun.”
It wasn’t until she spoke with Taylor during his investigation that she found out Selvaggi had died.
During his investigation, Taylor learned that Selvaggi as an adult had been arrested multiple times in the Orlando area on weapons-related charges.
On the fateful night in the summer of 1974, Rose was shot multiple times, including once “right between the eyes at point-blank range,” probably as he tried to climb out of the passenger window of his car after being shot in shoulder and crashing into a tree while trying to flee, Taylor said.
“He was executed,” he added.
The first shot appears to have been fired from a car parked immediately to the left of Rose’s car, Taylor said, but the detective has only theories as to why Rose was at the inlet – and why Selvaggi was there, too.
But he’s convinced Selvaggi was there.
According to Taylor’s report Selvaggi matched the description of the man witnesses saw running from the victim’s vehicle, and the car Selvaggi drove – a blue Oldsmobile Delta 88 – matched one witness’ description of the shooter’s vehicle.
The detective assigned to the case in 1974 wrote on a napkin that survived the decades, “Hit made by a kid named Frank,” who was driving a blue or green Thunderbird or LTD.
The note prompted Taylor to surmise that Selvaggi’s Oldsmobile “could have easily been mistaken for the other model vehicles in the low-light, evening hours” when the murder was committed.
Overall, the initial investigation conducted by St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Detective Richard Browning, who died years ago, raises questions and adds to the lingering mystery that surrounds the crime.
Even though Selvaggi’s name was listed numerous times in the original case file, there was no record of him ever being interviewed by Browning or other detectives.
Evidence was missing from the case file and a gun thought to be the murder weapon was never tested for a ballistic match with the bullets that killed Rose.
“Lead Detective Browning had located and submitted a Webley .455 handgun to the Crime lab for ballistic testing, and then canceled the request,” Taylor wrote in his report. “He removed the firearm from the lab before any tests or ballistic comparisons were conducted.”
The report also states: “There was no mention of the firearm, the owner, the location it was recovered from, or any copy of the lab submission in the case file.”
Making Taylor’s cold-case investigation more challenging was the fact that some witnesses were either never questioned or the notes from those interviews were missing.
Taylor, who took on the case after being placed on light duty due to an injury, said “there are a lot of questions” he’d like to ask Browning.
Still, Taylor believes his investigation, which concluded in late July, produced enough probable cause to clear the case, even if most of his evidence is circumstantial.
“There are a lot of people sitting in prison because of circumstantial evidence, so, as far as I’m concerned, the case is closed,” he said. “But as I told the families: If somebody came forward and said they had information about the case, I’d listen – because there are still some unanswered questions.”