John Greer: Above the Law

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1:20On November 5th, 1979, just before 2 a.m., 32-year-old Sheriff's Deputy John Greer surveyed a gristly crime scene. The scene was a farm store near Punta Gorda in western Florida, and the crime was murder. Greer radioed dispatch and reported that he had discovered a homicide. 25-year-old Adele Marie Easterly, a clerk at the local store, lay on the ground. She had been executed with two shots to the back of the head. As far as a motive, Greer noticed that about$7 was missing from the till, but that hardly seemed a reason to take someone's life. At first glance, there was no other explanation for why Adele had been shot, and at such a young age.

2:08After Greer called in his gruesome discovery, he requested investigators to come examine the scene. Seemed he was simply doing his job. But years later, disturbing details about the killing of Adele Easterly would come out. Details that suggested Deputy Greer was involved as more than just an on-duty officer calling in a crime.

2:36This is The Opportunist, an original podcast from Podcast One. You're listening to a story told in one episode called John Greer, Above the Law. I'm Sarah James McLaughlin.

2:49In this episode, we dive into the story of John Greer, a Florida-based law enforcement officer who, in the late 70s and early 80s, found himself connected to several women who turned up dead.

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4:25Back in 1979, John Greer and his wife Jackie were new to Charlotte County, a beach community just north of Fort Myer on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. And Greer had yet to have discovered any strange deaths. To help shed some light on these events, we spoke with NBC2 reporter Alexia Chiropoulos of Fort Myers, Florida.

4:49So 1979, John Greer and his wife moved to the area. He had just gotten out of the military from what our understanding was, and he joined the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office. What we have learned is he did little stints here and there at different sheriff's offices. He was just a sheriff's deputy with the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office, and he would just do night watch. It was in this capacity as a night watch officer that Greer happened to be on duty the night Adele Westerly was shot and killed at a local store. So he called that in. He did a lot of investigating at the time on that case.

5:26There was a lot going on, obviously, 1979. There's, you know, not as much, I guess, when it comes to investigations and different DNA tests and all that. So they couldn't actually determine the cause and what happened at the time other than this poor girl. Her name was Adele Easterly. She was shot twice, once in the back, once in the head. And she had died at 140 in the morning.

5:52Investigators, including Greer, interviewed Adele's friends and acquaintances trying to find out if there was anyone she might have been fighting with or who could have wanted her dead. But in the end, they couldn't come up with enough evidence to point to a solid suspect.

6:09With a complete lack of other options, some suspicion even briefly fell on Deputy Greer. But ultimately, there wasn't any substantial evidence to connect him to the crime. Besides, Greer's standing in the community was like a shield, protecting him from accusations. They assumed he was a good person because of what he did, and being a veteran at the time too. I think they just had all that added up in their mind to be like, well, he would never do something like that. Greer happened to be at the bloody crime scene where a woman was found dead. but that was part of his job as a sheriff's deputy.

6:45And that was just one time. Except Adele Easterly wasn't the only dead woman that Greer was connected to. She wasn't even the only one that year. And she certainly wasn't the first. In late August of 1979, just a couple months before Greer called in the body at the farm store, he made another distressing call to the station. That time, it was to report that his wife, Jackie, was dead. According to Greer, Jackie had shot herself in their home in Port Charlotte, Florida, about 100 miles south of Tampa. Jackie Greer's death happened just 70 days before Adele Easterly was found murdered.

7:30Greer walked responding deputies through his version of events. He claimed he was sleeping when he woke up to the sound of a loud pop. When he went searching for his wife to find out what happened, he saw smoke coming out of their closet. Greer opened the door and made a gruesome discovery. His wife was inside, and she had been shot. It appeared that for some reason, Jackie had taken her own life and left her husband to find her body. At least, that's what Greer explained to responding officers. There were no other witnesses to question Greer's version of events. So the case was open and shut.

8:17So to recap, August 27th, Greer's wife Jackie shoots herself while Greer is in the next room. And then 70 days later, Greer happens to be the first to the scene of another killing. Being so close to one dead woman, well, you can call that bad luck. But two dead women in barely over two months? Maybe the two deaths weren't connected, one a personal tragedy and the other just another hazard of life as a sheriff's deputy. The life of a law enforcement officer can be complicated. But then, a third body turned up.

9:00There was another woman at the time, another female acquaintance, who was also found dead in a wooded area near Port Charlotte, in that same area where he would do his patrols.

9:14On September 29, 1980, less than a year after Adele Easterly's murder, an unnamed female associate of Deputy John Greer was found dead. The woman's husband had reported her missing for more than a week prior, but it took time to finally find her, sitting in her Ford Mustang in a secluded area. As in the case of Greer's late wife, this woman's death appeared to be self-inflicted, though the method was different.

9:44Shortly after that, she was found, suffered from an overdose in her car, except her body was so badly decomposed when they found her, I believe, a week or so later. She was found with empty pill bottles and a note, so it looked like suicide. However, the woman's husband had other suspicions. The woman's husband claimed that in the months leading up to his wife's death, Deputy Greer was following her around, hounding her. According to the husband, Greer even went so far as to come around their home while he was on duty. the husband believed Greer was trying to pursue a sexual relationship with his wife.

10:25This was a shocking allegation, but there were no records to support this theory. However, the husband's accusations were the first suggestion that not all was right with Deputy Greer and that he might be using his position and authority as a law enforcement officer to hide some very nefarious deeds.

11:03In the year between August 1979 and September 1980, Florida Sheriff's Deputy John Greer was connected to three women who all ended up dead in different ways. First, he was in the house when his wife Jackie Greer allegedly shot herself. Then, he was the first on the scene of store clerk Adele Easterly's homicide. And after that, an unnamed female associate of hers was found dead in her car of an apparent suicide. A disturbing pattern was forming, and the question was, why were so many women in Greer's orbit meeting such a dark fate? Shockingly, the fact that women around him were dying off wasn't even his only problem.

11:47He was also under internal investigation at the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office for other incidents, including reported sexual assaults. On October 3, 1980, Greer was suspended from duty pending the results of those investigations, and he ended up cutting his losses and resigning from his post that same day. With a strong instinct for self-preservation, Greer managed to land on his feet. In fact, he went on to land a string of jobs with other police departments and sheriff's offices in the Florida area. Here's reporter Alexia Chiropoulos again, who's familiar with Greer's case.

12:30So he was kind of running all over the place. He was in Venice Police Department, Manatee County Sheriff's Office, the Bel Air Beach Police Department, Indian Shores Police Department, the Indian Rocks Police Department, and then, of course, he was also a veteran. So with all that being said, those were just a number of police departments or sheriff's offices that he was at at the time. We were told he only stayed in places for a couple years at a time before something would happen and he would leave and move on to the next.

13:03that a man under active internal investigation as a sheriff's deputy was able to secure additional law enforcement positions. But this exemplifies the significantly more relaxed standards for background checks, or complete lack thereof, in the 70s and 80s. We had that same question to Belize. How did he get involved in other departments after stuff like this happened? And they honestly didn't know at the time either. I think they basically chalked it up to be, You know, back in the day, there wasn't as much evidence or as much attention to detail when it comes to where people have worked and getting references and all of that.

13:44Regardless of how he did it, at the end of the day, Greer was able to slip through the cracks and continue to work in law enforcement. But once he left the Charlotte County Department, he left the door open for someone close to the case to come forward with some startling new information about Adele Easterly. And in October of 1986, seven years after the killing, that's exactly what happened.

14:13One of Adele Easterly's friends actually ended up coming to the Charlotte County detectives after she found he was not working for them anymore and basically said to them, yeah, my friend Adele had a relationship with John Greer. She said he was, he ended up scaring her to the point where she wanted to get away from him. And shortly after that is when she was found dead. Okay, let's unpack that for a second. Greer, a married man, is having an affair with 25-year-old Adele. She gets scared and wants to call the whole thing off. And then just a couple weeks later, she's shot and killed with no witnesses.

14:54and Greer just happens to be the first one on scene. And get this, the friend also reported that Greer would bring a gun along on his visits in addition to his service revolver because he wanted to protect Adele. This is looking pretty suspicious. Opportunistic, really. And it gets worse. So Adele Easterly was asking, you know, oh, you're married. She was telling John Greer this, like, if you're married, I don't want to be involved. I don't want to be a part of this. And he kept telling her, like, oh, I'm going to get a divorce from my wife. And that's going to be that. We're not going to be together anymore.

15:39Remember, just over two months before Adele was found dead, Greer's wife allegedly shot herself. Taking all of this information into account, it looks like Greer felt he had a problem to fix. He's having an affair. He wants to keep it going. But his wife is getting in the way. So he needs to get rid of her. Maybe a divorce was too long-term a solution. Or he just thought of another way that would be cleaner. More definitive. Furthermore, Adele's friend claimed that Greer told her a different story than he told police about how his wife died. In the friend's retelling, Greer's wife took his service revolver and tried to shoot herself.

16:21But Greer valiantly fought to stop her, and tragically the gun went off during the struggle. Well, she finds out that there was some type of struggle, I guess, with him and his wife, and there was a gun involved. And at the time, he claimed to Adele that they were fighting over the gun because the wife claimed she was going to commit suicide, shoot herself if she couldn't be with him, and ended up shooting herself after he tried to grab the gun from her. Greer's story was shifting. He was telling different versions to different people. To the police, he was in another room when the gun went off.

17:02To Adele, he was right there with his wife when it happened. Was either of these reports even true? Or was the truth even more sinister? In November 1986, just a month after Adele's friend came forward, more evidence surfaced that suggested Greer had been lying about how his wife met her end. A blood spatter investigator analyzed the scene of Jackie Greer's death, revealing evidence that cast doubt on John Greer's account. While the results were ultimately inconclusive on whether Jackie's death was a suicide or a homicide, they did decisively disprove one version of his story. He initially told police that he was asleep in the other room, heard a loud noise, and discovered smoke coming out from under a closed closet door.

17:56However, there was no blood spatter detected on the inside of the closet door, which seems impossible. If the door was closed with Jackie inside, alone, you would expect to see some blood on its surface. Evidence of blood was found in the door jamb, which suggested that the door was almost certainly open at the time of the shooting, which could have been the case if there was a struggle for the gun, or if someone other than Jackie had pulled the trigger. Bottom line, Greer's story was starting to fall apart, and as more evidence came out, he seemed more and more suspicious by the day. In 1986, significant progress was made in the case against Greer.

18:45Unfortunately, the evidence just wasn't strong enough, and the case ultimately went cold, remaining unsolved for nearly 30 years.

18:59In 2009, the Charlotte County Sheriff's Department started up their own cold case unit. So Charlotte County is interesting. They have their own cold case unit. Not a lot of departments in our area do. I think Fort Myers Police is another one that has a cold case unit, and obviously Charlotte County. They came together in 2009. There were quite a few cases they were looking at at the time. So that's why the question we had is, why did it take so long to catch Greer? And that was just because there was three guys roughly working on a bajillion cases, it seemed at the time. So it just takes a while to go back through all that evidence.

19:35Obviously, you don't have those crime scenes happening in front of you anymore. So it's looking back through pictures and old documents and whatever. It's just kind of form your opinion, going back to talk to those people that detectives talked to way back in the day, maybe using some type of DNA and analysis now that there wasn't back in the day.

19:56Charlotte County's newly formed cold case unit started working through their backlog. Then, seven years later, they made a concerted effort to restart the investigation into the case of Adele Easterly. In 2016, the cold case unit posted on the Unsolved Cases website. They released a statement laying out their suspicions about the case. Without including Greer's name, they mentioned that they suspected a law enforcement officer was potentially involved in Adele's death. The statement said, quote,

20:44This was a big swing. The cold case unit initially released more information about the case and their investigation than they normally would. This was because they were hoping that this information might embolden a witness to come forward, who might otherwise have been wary of accusing someone in law enforcement. And this big swing paid off with the biggest break in the case to date.

21:1125-year-old store clerk Adele Easterly was shot and killed in Charlotte County in 1979. Though some suspicion fell on John Greer, the sheriff's deputy who called in the crime, there was not enough evidence to make him an official suspect. I think one of the major things was, for one, he called in the death at the time of Adele Easterly at that farm store back in the day. I think the fact he called that in and he happened to know everything about the case and he had his hands on everything right at the beginning, I think he was able to hide evidence. I think he was able to act like a deputy in moments like that and take care of the situation and obviously make him not look suspicious.

21:58Decades went by and the case went unsolved. Then, in 2016, the cold case unit posted on their website requesting any information that people in the community might have about Adele Easterly's death. A woman who had been involved in the sheriff's office at the time came forward with information that finally broke the case wide open. She had been what was called a sheriff's office explorer, which was basically a volunteer role. So back in the late 70s, this woman was working with the sheriff's office and she came into contact with Greer. She later reported that while they worked together, Greer sexually assaulted her repeatedly.

22:39And he even threatened to kill her. Back in the day, they just kind of tagged along to see what the job was to see if they wanted to join the police department or sheriff's office. Obviously, that was someone she should have trusted, she should have looked up to, and this was going on is also very unfortunate to hear. Unfortunate to say the least, but in a surprising twist, the same sheriff's explorer also happened to be on duty working dispatch at the station on the night that Adele Easterly was killed, and she witnessed some suspicious behavior from Greer firsthand. The explorer stated that she saw Greer drive into the sheriff's office and head into the east side of the building.