Lisa DeCarr's family finally places headstone 26 years after her murder

TAMPA

The rain had stopped by the time their SUV pulled into the cemetery. The new headstone stood by the sidewalk, just beyond the shade of a large oak tree.

LISA LEA DE CARR

SEP 26, 1967

MAR 24, 1983

"It looks good, Michelle," Bill Hayes told his wife.

"Yeah, it does," she said.

Four members of the dead girl's family had come to visit her grave: Her sister, Michelle, and Michelle's husband, Bill. Her mother, Barbara Wallace. And Michelle's 5-year-old grandson, Dakota.

They stood for a long time, looking. Barbara wiped tears from her eyes. She had not wanted to come. Even after so much time, it was hard seeing the grave site, knowing her daughter was there.

"She's finally got a home," Michelle said.

"Yeah," Barbara said.

• • •

Lisa DeCarr loved to dance and hated going to school. Twenty-six years ago, when she was 15, she got suspended for smoking.

Her mother remembers Lisa wearing a pink bathrobe the morning of March 24, 1983. Barbara left the house that morning, and when she returned, Lisa was gone.

Barbara's live-in boyfriend, Wayne Tompkins, said she had run away.

But 15 months later, police unearthed skeletal remains from a foot of dirt below the porch of the family's Seminole Heights home. A pink bathrobe shrouded the remains, its sash tied tightly around the neck bones.

Detectives pinned Lisa's killing on her mother's boyfriend. They said Tompkins strangled Lisa after she resisted his sexual advances.

A trial and conviction followed, then a sentence of death.

Year after year, Lisa's family waited for the execution to be carried out. And year after year, Lisa's grave sat almost bare among a sea of granite headstones, marked only with a basic white cross provided by the cemetery. The family didn't feel right laying a permanent memorial for Lisa until the man who killed her was also dead.

In February, that day came. Michelle drove with her husband from their home in North Carolina to the Florida State Prison in Starke. They sat in the front row in a small room with Lisa's mom and siblings. When the curtain rose, revealing her sister's killer strapped to a gurney, Michelle wanted to burst into the death chamber and knock the man right in the head. The feelings surprised her.

Afterward, Lisa's family felt Tompkins should have suffered more. But finally, nearly 26 years after her death, he was gone.

Finally, they could make things right for Lisa, and maybe themselves, too.

The family left the headstone decision to Michelle. She picked out an $800 block of pink granite etched with roses and praying hands. She thought of them as God's hands, holding Lisa.

• • •

After getting word from Rest Haven Memorial Park in Tampa that the stone had been placed, Michelle returned to Florida recently with her husband to see it.

The voices of children playing across the street from the cemetery filled the sticky-hot air. Bill and Michelle's grandson, Dakota, knelt at Lisa's grave site.

He was born on the anniversary of Lisa's death, a coincidence Michelle has always considered a gift.

"Sorry, Grandpa," Dakota told Bill.

"For what?"

"For her dying."

Lisa's burial had been a blur, rushed by rain and by detectives impatient to interview Barbara about her daughter's disappearance.

On this visit, the family lingered.

Michelle knew the stone was as much for her as it was for her dead sister. Though it hurt, she needed to see Lisa's name on a headstone to feel peace.

"There's nothing more we can do," she said. "Now people know she's here. She existed."

Dakota hopped around the grave sites nearby and tried to squish bugs. His grandfather told him to stop.

"I'm bored," Dakota said.

The family piled into the SUV to head back to Barbara's home in St. Petersburg, where they drank coffee and didn't talk anymore about the cemetery that day.

Colleen Jenkins can be reached at cjenkins@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3337.