The Tampa Tribune from Tampa, Florida • 87

FLORIDA (Diipnm ivfeffefpfni THE TAMPA TRIBUNE UKMJU UKUHUl, I UUUljjUiiLJ lUT Mondayf Febmary 19, 1996 I' MJU JJJII J.HWJUMI II uu ItUUmn. Suwannee is singing to deputy Hillsborough sergeant is running for sheriff in the North Florida county. Hillsborough sheriff's Sgt. Nelson Zalva: "I'm going to go against the good ol' boys. I have no ties to anyone; I don't owe anybody anything." But he also owns property in Suwannee.

25 years later, body is unnamed! She was found under a bridge along 1-75 Steve Otto mililnriniini JAY NOLANTribune photo By BARBARA BOYER Tribune Staff Writer TAMPA Nelson Zalva wants a shiny sheriffs star to brighten his career, but come election time he won't challenge Hillsborough Sheriff Cal Henderson. Instead, his ambition has turned into a love affair between two The lifelong resident of Hillsborough County graduated from Plant High School, married his teenage sweetheart and has worked 23 years for the Hills- borough County Sheriff's Office. Now, 45 years old and ready for a new challenge, he has entered the sheriffs race in Suwannee County, where it is rumored the 24-year incumbent will not seek re-election. Zalva still lives and works in Hillsborough, but he is carving his campaign trail through Suwannee between Tallahassee and Jacksonville where he believes the rural lands checkered with chicken houses and tobacco fields hold more promise to achieve his profession- al dreams than Hillsborough. "Better up there than down here," Henderson jokes.

If he ran for sheriff in Hillsborough, "Well, I would feel he would have a harder fight. "He'll be a good sheriff, but I have mixed emotions because I would hate to lose him," Henderson said of Zalva, who has worked in nearly every department of the sheriff's office and currently is a squad sergeant in Brandon. See HILLSBOROUGH, Page 3 By JIM TUNSTALL Tribune Staff Writer LAKE PANASOFFKEE A man's belt, size 36, was wrapped around her neck. In her 18 or 19 years of life she gave birth to two children. I She had surgery on her right ankle and extensive dental work, including a porcelain crown on one of her front teeth.

She was about 5 feet 1 inch weighed 110 to 120 pounds and had black or dark brown hair. Not much more is known about her. Twenty-five years after her body was found under an Interstate 75 bridge, a few miles from this Sumter County town, she remains unidentified as does the; person who killed her. She is known only as Little Miss Panasoffkee. Her badly decomposed remains were found Feb.

19, 1971. Two hitchhikers who were on their way to Mardi Gras in New Orleans saw the body, which they first thought was an alligator. It was floating in the- southern part of the lake. A quarter-century later, investigators are no closer to knowing who she is or solving the crime. Authorities have reached far into their trick bag to put a name on her Jane Doe grave site and bring a murderer to justice.

The bag includes reconstructing her face from her skull, having a police artist sketch her possible appearance just before the time of death as rMmit il 111 'ia'-S? 'L' -sir-" nmwmnrtmm mmrnrn iAu-i ...1. "Little Miss Panasoffkee" Cool tunes, hot baubles and Deep Blue The Monday wash or, hanging out some mentionables: Arrgh mateys, how cold was it this weekend? Friday night we went over to Skipper's Smokehouse in North Tampa to lend our support to the Quivering Rhythm Hounds. The Hounds are of course the official band of the Steve Otto Chili Contest and they even cook up their own version of red using their notorious Mojo hand as seasoning. In 10 years they have yet to place. Most of the judges refuse to even sample their concoction out of fear of the well-known curse of the Mojo hand.

Nevertheless we went to Skipper's where the Hounds were to play in the open-air venue next to the restaurant, a place that has drawn huge crowds for more than fifteen years now. This time the wind and cold did them in and although the marquee advertised the band as the Shivering Hounds, the concert was canceled when the outdoor heaters kept going out. We did stick around for some of Skipper's great steamed oysters dipped in horseradish, which will warm anything up. Shiver me timbers The shivering continued into Saturday night's parade and bead-fest through Ybor City. Remarkably, as the night wore on the warmer it got.

Maybe it was that a zillion bodies crammed onto Seventh Avenue can produce a lot of heat. If you think the natives were naive to sell Long Island for a handful of beads, you should have been in Ybor on Saturday to see what you could get for a nickel's worth of the plastic baubles. The glow was so strong in fact, that one person caught in the post-parade crush along Seventh said we ought to do it more often. Since that person was Dick Greco, who was checking out the doings with the missus, it might just happen. "These people are having such a good time I think we ought to just barricade the streets once a month and have a party," the mayor said.

Why not? Nobody would have to buy charter seat deposits and the going rate of exchange is a strand of beads. Gambling for a hotel The push to see who gets the nod for a new downtown hotel is getting pretty nasty as decision time nears. Over the weekend an anonymous fax suggested one of the finalists in the bidding was secretly planning to convert its proposed hotel into a casino. The fax which had no facts to back it up claimed that one hotel had two floors predesigned to accommodate slot machines and gambling tables. Fortunately, whether or not casino gambling becomes a reality in Florida is still a decision for voters to make and not anonymous letter writers who might stand to make a profit on something that has nothing to do with casinos.

Humans as pawns Finally, there seems to be some relief this week that man is still superior to the machine. Over the weekend reigning chess world champion Gary Kasparov captured the sixth game to beat a computer, four games to two. The IBM supercomputer, who goes by the name Deep Blue, won the first game of the contest in Philadelphia but then stumbled badly and finally resigned on the 43rd move of the sixth game. Tony Rooster" Morrell sups on trail food and regales fairgoers with tales of a Cracker cow hunter's life. Bovine intervention saving breed well as when she was a child, sifting through missing persons reports and getting her story on national television.

"It still runs on 'Unsolved and every; time it does we get some more calls," Sumter County Sheriff Jamie Adams says. "So far we haven't gotten the right lead." There have been plenty of wrong ones. Following the initial airing on the program, there were more than 200 tips. They included: A caller from Minnesota who said a member of her family was last seen in Clearwater shortly before the body was found. A woman from Orlando who said her mother disappeared near Ruskin in late 1970 or early A Pinellas Park woman who said her sister; disappeared in early 1971.

A prison inmate in Kentucky who said he went with a friend to a grave site in north central The convict's friend said a former girlfriend was in; the grave. He said he killed her because she -was lame and getting in the way. A Kentucky ex-con who said he overheard an-l other inmate say he strangled a woman with a belt in' Florida. While some of the tips were promising at the time, all have been dismissed. In 1986, Little Miss Panasoffkee's body was ex-; humed from her pauper's grave in Oak Grove Cemetery in Oxford.

William Maples, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Florida, performed second autopsy. The skull was sent to a medical illustrator, who used modeling clay to reconstruct the: victim's face. Two years later, an artist sketched her as she! might have looked as a young woman, then did ah' Preservation of the Cracker cattle is seen as a 'genetic gold By JAN HOLLINGSWORTH Tribune Staff Writer TAMPA It is late afternoon and a handful of scrawny red and black cows are milling around the rail pen beside the small encampment. "Rooster," the cow hunter, uncorks the corncob from a jug of home brew and takes a swig. He sprays a well-aimed stream at the campfire and the glowing embers blaze back to life.

It is a scene from Florida's past, yet the scrawny cows with their trademark handlebar horns could be the key to the state's agricultural future. This is Cracker Country. And the little herd of Cracker cows among the last of their breed are direct descendants of the hardy Andalusian cattle the Spanish conquistadors brought with them to the New World. "We may be sitting on a genetic gold mine in preserving these cattle," said Stephen Monroe, who manages the remaining herds of Cracker livestock for the state agriculture department. For 300 years they ran wild, multiplying and adapting to the heat, bugs and sparse forage of the Florida range.

That's why today's ranchers are looking at the old Cracker bloodlines to cross with beefier, but less well-adapted modern breeds, said Monroe. Cracker crossbreeds don't require special care or supplemental feeding an increasingly desirable trait in the face of impending changes in the state's cattle industry. "We're losing the better pasture-land to development and cattle are going to be forced to go back into the ranges and rough country again," said Monroe. For visitors to this year's Florida State Fair, the cow camp in Cracker See CRACKER, Page 3 See LITTLE MISS, Page 3 nam a ft a um- 4 -i Man found slain, dismembered Clearwater insurance agent accused in killing Daniel Greenwald, right, a prominent local hand surgeon, coaches Russian doctor Vladimir Kluchnikov on using a multipurpose saw. By SEAN LENGELL Tribune Correspondent CLEARWATER A Clearwater insurance agent is accused of killing an elderly client, dismembering his body and then hiding its parts in his back yard.

James Rogers Hootman, 62, has been charged with the slaying of Deuward "Tex" Tune, 89, said Pinellas sheriffs spokesman Sgt. Greg Tita. Tune, a widower, was reported missing late Saturday night after neighbors noticed the man's 1992 Mercury was missing from his home at 350 Colonial Drive in Dunedin. Sheriff's deputies found blood Inside and outside the home. A neighbor who checked on Tune Saturday about 11 p.m.

noticed a pool of blood leading from his front door to the middle of the carport. "I could see the blood, it looked like it just poured out of the door," said next-door neighbor Sue Ann Spors. "It looked like a body had been dragged through from the door, then the trail stopped, like it had been lifted into a car." Early Sunday morning deputies found Tune's blood-stained car in a parking lot at Main Street and Dougles Avenue. By noon detectives began questioning Hootman at his home at 1844 Springtime Ave. in north Clearwater, police said.

Detectives later found the remains of Tune in a yard adjacent to Hootman's home, police said. Hootman was booked into the Pinellas See MAN, Page 2 DAVID KADLUBOWSKITribune photo Bay area helping Russians ft For those of us who have become chained to computers and told that we become their slaves or perish, It was a needed triumph; a message that it's not over yet. But it may be getting close. The New York Times notes that computers are getting better. It quotes one grand master who says he used to play simultaneous games against 10 or 12 computers at once and beat them all blindfolded.

"Today," he says, "I couldn't beat one of them with my eyes open." Deep Blue, it turns out, not only has a technology allowing it to search out more than 100 million chess positions a second, but has programmed within it the ability to evaluate millions of games already played utilizing those moves. So maybe computers can't think. Maybe what they do is done with quantity of information over quality of reason. All I know is that the only reason our newsroom Is kept cool in the summer Isn't because management ants Its humans to be comfortable. dren's Fund, said the new hospital will train pediatric plastic and neurosurgeons from across the former communist bloc.

Moscow money will support it, he added, aided by charity dollars raised by doctors in America. Construction is set to begin in August. Surgeon Vladimir Kluchnikov of Russia's National Pediatric Center, site of the new hospital, arrived in Tampa Jan. 5. He's studying for three months with Gallant and Children's Fund partner, Daniel Greenwald, chief of hand surgery for the University of South Florida and Tampa General Hospital.

The Tampa General Hospital Founda-tlon financed Kluchnikov's stay with a $10,000 grant. He is seen as a future hos- pltal leader, Greenwald explained. Kluchnikov, 30, said he finds his cur- Building a new children's hospital in Moscow is the partnership's priority. By DANIEL BERGER Tribune Staff Writer TAMPA Since 1992, Tampa Bay area surgeons have pitched in to help colleagues overseas whose techniques for treating children seemed frozen a half-century in the past. This month, the partnership bore fruit that will bring world-class children's care to the capital of the former Soviet Union.

Moscow has approved building a Russian-American Children's Hospital, said Michael Gallant, plastic surgery chief of All Children's Hospital In St. Petersburg. Gallant, founder of the Russian Chil- Cannon aid Lawn watering with power: Central Florida Landscaping workers use a water cannon to spray sod at Parker Street and Kennedy Boulevard in Timpa Sunday. Sej DOCTORS, Pagp 7 JIM RtEDTnbune photo xwmn.