Bradenton's Deputy Chief Retiring

He hadn't been a detective long, when J.J. Lewis got called out to the banks of the Manatee River where a city worker found a severed hand while cleaning the seawall in the summer of 1998.

There was nothing else. The hand was so waterlogged, it was impossible to get fingerprints to try to determine whose hand it was, The Bradenton detective worked with crime scene technicians to get fngerprints by cutting off the tios of the fingers and placing them like gloves over a technician's fingertips so that they could identify the person the hand belonged to.

What they discovered was even more chilling than they imagined. The hand belonged to a man who had died in the Manatee County jail months earlier. He was not missing his hand when he died.

The investigation uncovered the weirdest case Lewis ever worked on and it landed him on the old HBO series: Autopsy, where he was interviewed about what turned out to be a case of voodoo.

It was perhaps a fitting case for the law enforcement officer who began his career on Halloween day and who will retire on April Fool's day.

It turned out that the hand belonged to Willie Suttle, a 70-year-old man whose fingerprints were on file for the time he spent in the Manatee County jail. They followed a bizarre trail to find out how Suttle's hand ended up in the river. They county had sent Suttle's body to Green's funeral home for a pauper's funeral, Lewis said. Suttle's daughter said in reports that she asked that he be cremated, but that never happened. Instead his body was buried in the county's cemetary for the indigent.

Police exhumed his body and discovered that his hand had been cut off just below the wrist and that his wrist and forearm had been wrapped in plastic. Pins had been stuck in the body's arms and legs. When authorities X-rayed his body, the found about two dozen dolls inside his body cavity, Lewis said, Suttle's breast bone had been removed. All of the dolls had notes attached, most of them cursing the other funeral homes in the area.

Paula Green Albritton, owner of Green's Funeral Home, admitted that she practiced voodoo and that she had kept Suttle's hand for five months, as a "helping hand" in the funeral home. She threw the hand in the river as part of the voodoo ritual. That final act led to her arrest and that of her son, Jimmie Lee Clark.

While it was the case that brought Lewis the most attention, he said he has had far more gratifying cases in his career. Lewis began his career as a parking enforcement officer while he was still in school at the police academy. From there he worked his way through the ranks, to patrol, detective, sergeant and up through the ranks to second in command. His retirement, he said, will allow others to move up through the ranks.

As he looked back on what he loved, Lewis goes immediately to the satisfaction of locating a missing person or solving "a real who-dun-it."

One of those cases involved a man who had his military memorabilia stolen. Lewis and other detectives went through print outs of missing and stolen items and would compare them to lists of items in pawn shops. Using the pre-computer databse methods, they were able to find the man's lost military medals and other items.

He's also gratified to see the changes that have come to Bradenton through his career. He started out on patrol when there were open-air drug markets in neighbohoods, when downtown was largely boarded up and when criminals were far more blatant.

"Bradenton is a totally different city than when I started in 1985," he said. "Everything downtown has transformed into a better place."

He's also had disappointments in unsolved cases he still wants to see solved.

One involved a young woman who was raped and murdered near soon after Lewis became a detective. It bothers him to know that her killer was never caught. He said that he and other detectives go back and review te 22 year old case, looking for new clues and comparing DNA from new cases.

Once he retires on April 1, he plans to spend time with his family before deciding what to do next. He said he wants to catch up on vacations that they've missed over the years. He plans on having another career although he doesn't have anything specific to reveal.