On a warm September morning in 1980, a motel manager in Dalton, Georgia, knocked on the door of Room 75 at the Country Boy Inn.
A young woman had failed to answer her telephone, but she had not checked out…something wasn’t right. When the manager entered the room, he found nineteen-year-old Demetra Parker dead on the floor.
The discovery shocked the community. The investigation that followed would lead to an escaped convict, a troubled teenage wife, a frightened toddler, and ultimately to Pensacola, Florida.
But more than forty years later, one question remains:
Why were they coming here?
Demetra Parker wasn’t a drifter or a runaway. She was a country girl from Kenton, Tennessee. Friends described her as pretty, friendly, and hardworking. She sang in church and had moved to Dalton to build a better life.
She was only nineteen years old. Living nearby was a couple named Danny and Janice Buttrum. At first glance, they appeared ordinary.
They weren’t.
Danny Buttrum was an escaped convict. His teenage wife, Janice, was only nineteen years old. Together, they had a nineteen-month-old daughter and another child on the way.
Then, during the early morning hours of September 3, 1980, evil came knocking on Demetra Parker’s motel room door. The crime that followed was so shocking that newspapers throughout the South struggled to describe it.
And perhaps the most heartbreaking detail of all? The Buttrums’ little daughter was present.
A toddler.
Too young to understand what was happening around her. When it was over, the Buttrums fled from Georgia in Demetra Parker’s automobile.
They headed south, toward Florida – toward Pensacola.
But here’s the part that still troubles me. Evidence later suggested that Pensacola wasn’t simply a city they happened to pass through. It was a destination. Money had been arranged, and plans had apparently been made. They were coming here for a reason.
But nobody seems to know why. Were they planning to disappear? Did they have friends waiting? Were they headed farther south? Or was something else in their plans? Maybe…they were looking for their next victim…
We’ll explore the rest of the story—including the arrival in Pensacola, the arrest, the trials, and the haunting question that remains unanswered—in this week’s subscriber-exclusive story.
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Because history remembers the criminals.
We try to remember the victims.
Michael Earl Simmons
Sweet Tea Murders
