Legal affairs reporter Melissa E. Holsman has spent months digging into the cases of juveniles who committed murder — sometimes decades ago — as they return to court for resentencing and could go free. What originally was an investigation into the 23 Treasure and Space Coast cases has become a podcast where Holsman and producer Dacia Johnson explore the murders, the effect on victims' families, new brain science and the law changes that led to the resentencing of more than 600 Florida offenders.

You can listen to the free podcast on most major podcast platforms including Apple Podcasts, Stitcher Radio, Google Play Music and SoundCloud.

The transcripts for each episode will be presented here. Below is Episode 1: Dennis Creamer and the victim's family impact

Listen to more episodes, read more transcripts and discover bonus content at TCPalm.com/UncertainTerms.

Genie Rollings Billie: To whom it may concern, my name is Genevieve Rollings Billie and I’m the oldest sibling of the children of Robert S. Rollings. I’m speaking for the entire family today and wish to express our feelings of the resentencing of Dennis Michael Creamer.

On May 30th 1968, the above-mentioned inmate committed the most heinous crime of shooting our father in the head while he slept in the front seat of his car near Lake Washington. Mr. Creamer was tried as an adult and found guilty of first-degree murder. His sentence was life in prison until he took his last breath.

Melissa Holsman: That’s 70-year-old Genie Rollings Billie telling a judge about the day, 50 years ago, that changed the lives of everyone she knew.

Welcome to the first episode of Uncertain Terms. I’m TCPalm legal affairs reporter Melissa Holsman.

Dacia Johnson: And I’m TCPalm producer Dacia Johnson.

Melissa: We’re taking you back to Memorial Day 1968, when Genie’s 41-year-old father, Robert Stanley Rollings, was shot dead on a sunny afternoon at Lake Washington, a half a mile west of Interstate 95 in Melbourne, Florida.

His murderer was a 15-year-old boy named Dennis Michael Creamer, who was out target-shooting with two boys.

Dennis raised a .22-caliber rifle and fired a bullet at Bob Rollings’ face, killing him nearly instantly.

The boys stole his pistol, a wallet and ran away.

Dacia: It was a horrible time for Bob's wife, Eleanor, and her six kids, including Genie and sisters Robin, Diana and Vicki, who you’ll hear from later in this episode.

Melissa: You know this 50-year-old case pits the still-grieving Rollings family against Dennis Creamer and his legal bid to be set free based on new court rulings that made him eligible for a sentencing do-over.

That’s because for Dennis, who is now 65, times have changed, laws have changed and how harshly the courts punish juveniles has changed, especially in the past decade.

Dacia: In this podcast, Uncertain Terms, we’ll talk about why the nation’s highest courts have ruled that minors, even the ones who murder, should be punished differently than adults.

Melissa: And we’ll talk about how changes to juvenile sentencing laws could lead to judges freeing hundreds of Florida killers serving life in prison.

You know, Dennis is one of about 600 Florida prisoners who were juveniles when they killed and have been granted a new sentencing hearing.

Dacia: In the coming weeks, you’ll hear from four of these convicted killers and learn about details from each murder. You'll also hear from the families and law enforcement officials as they relive these cases, and ultimately learn the fate of each of these child killers, many who are now adults as they seek freedom from their life prison terms.

Melissa: Genie and her sisters, they faced Dennis for the first time in nearly 50 years at his resentencing in May 2017. The hearing lasted for a couple of days in the courtroom of Brevard Circuit Judge Jeffrey Mahl, up in Viera, Florida.

In the courtroom, Dennis was seated just a few feet away from Genie and her sisters. And he had two rows of family seated behind him.

Now, shortly after Genie testified, it was Creamer who took the stand, and he got pretty emotional when he started talking to his lawyer, Mike Pirolo, the chief assistant public defender in Brevard County.

Dennis Creamer: I came here to make a statement, but his daughter got up here and really read my statement that I would have made, and I want to thank her for that. I want to thank her and his other daughters for forgiving me.

Give me a second now. I’m not the same person I was at 15 years old. Every Memorial Day, May the 30th is Memorial Day, I share it with that family. I share it with that family right there, in honor of their relative that I killed.

And I asked her for forgiveness in that letter and I meant it. And the daughter shared it with me and I thank her for it. There’s nothing I can do to change what happened. I don’t know what else to say.

Dacia: So how did you learn about Dennis' case and that he’d been granted a sentencing do-over?

Melissa: You know, Dennis is what legal experts refer to as a “Miller defendant.” It’s named after a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court decision called Miller v. Alabama that banned mandatory, automatic life prison terms for minors.

Now that ruling led to more changes in federal and state laws that eventually opened the door for juvenile lifers like Creamer to get back before a judge to see if a life sentence was still warranted.

So while you have these kid killers coming back to court trying to go free, the families of the victims are forced to relive the crimes and really unhappy memories. It's stirring up a lot of debates about how people feel about fairness and justice and that age-old idea of retribution, you know, paying a debt to society for taking a life.

And another theme running throughout all of this is the idea of rehabilitation. And whether proof that a young killer has matured into a nonviolent, educated and well-behaved prisoner, should that be enough to convince a judge that they are safe to live among the rest of us?

Dacia: Melissa, you've been digging into these cases for several years now, and the idea for this podcast came after a big story you wrote in 2017.

Melissa: That’s right. And we learned that there are about 600 of these juvenile homicide offenders in Florida coming back for resentencings and a lot more across the United States.

And we know that it’s really rare when murder happens, first of all. And when a juvenile commits murder, it’s even more rare. And the cases returning for resentencings, some of these, they’re the most notorious killers of our time, really. So we went back in and we dug into these records from these older cases, like Dennis' that's from 50 years ago.

We’ve been listening to hours of court video, we’ve been finding sometimes confessions on old cassette tapes, even trials on reel-to-reel.

And in this case the victim, Bob Rollings, he worked at Cape Kennedy fixing cameras attached to the outside of rockets. This was like during the Apollo astronaut program, so he was part of NASA’s mission to take us into space.

Dacia: And why was Bob out at Lake Washington that day?

Melissa: Well, remember it was May 30, 1968, and it was Memorial Day.

And back then it fell on a Thursday, so it was a weekday, and Bob had the day off from work. He had six kids — ages five months up to 21 years old — and they were all home from school that day, or from work in Genie’s case, she was off from work.

And they said their house was kind of the house on the block where all the kids liked to come play; they had a tetherball set up. So Bob was just taking advantage of the day off during the week, he was out mowing the grass that morning, doing his morning chores.

Dacia: Around 3:30 he came inside the house, grabbed his gear — he grabbed his wallet, a couple of beers, his pistol — and he jumped into his green Oldsmobile and drove out to Lake Washington just to enjoy a little R and R. And Dennis, who was 15 at the time, was also off from school, and he was at Lake Washington.

Melissa: And the idea was to just go out target practicing. In fact, in court, Dennis talked about going out to Lake Washington when he was being questioned by his lawyer, Mike Pirolo.

Dennis: We went out toward Lake Washington to the marl pits they had out there on the other side of 95, by Lake Washington Marina.

Mike Pirolo: What did you boys do when you got to Lake Washington?

Dennis: Well, we went out there shooting, shooting at rats, snakes, whatever we seen. Basically target practice, our, our version of hunting, I guess you’d say.

Dacia: Dennis also testified about seeing Bob for the first time.

Dennis: We seen him; he was by Lake Washington Marina, that’s before you ever get out. We didn’t go all the way to Lake Washington. We went down the canal that comes off Lake Washington out through the marl pit area. And we passed him on the way out, and nodded at him and he was sitting there drinking a beer and we went on out shooting.

Melissa: Now, we just heard in his testimony that he and the two boys saw Bob on their way out to go shooting. And Dennis said they returned to Bob’s car a couple of hours later and there he was.

Prosecutor Bill Respess: So you saw him there. Is the door open?

Dennis: Yes, sir.

Respess: And did you walk over there and see him there sleeping?

Dennis: No sir, we were on the other side when we seen all this.

Respess: OK, you’re on the other side of the canal?

Dennis: Yes, sir.

Respess: And did you guys walk around or get over across the canal to where the automobile was?

Dennis: We all three swam across the canal, sir.

Respess: All right. And you did that and you had two rifles with you? Two .22 rifles?

Dennis: We had two rifles, yes.

Respess: And uh, so uh, was there a decision to take his things, to try and take his things?

Dennis: No, sir.

Respess: So there was never a discussion about taking his property?

Dennis: No sir, not until after he was dead. ... I had no intention on shooting that man that day. I had no intention of shooting nobody that day.

Dennis: How I pulled that trigger, I can’t explain it, sir.

Respess: All right. So what you’re saying, what you’re saying today is that you then went up and it was kind of like a firing squad thing, where the two of you were, were pointing the gun at him and then, uh, the second time, uh, you pulled the trigger and shot him in the head?

Dennis: Yes, sir.

Respess: That’s what happened?

Dennis: Yes, sir.

Dacia: So we drove out to Lake Washington and we drove through what would have been Dennis’ neighborhood in 1968. The area is no longer called Eau Gallie, it’s now part of Melbourne. It was a beautiful lake, tranquil. We saw a few boats, some people fishing, definitely not the sign of a murder scene 50 years ago.

[More:See a map of Lake Washington]

Melissa: But it was the scene of a murder. Fishermen found Bob’s body in his car the next morning, that would have been a Friday morning. And it took a couple of more days for the police to connect Dennis and his 15- and 13-year-old pals to the murder.

Dacia: Right. Dennis and the two boys he was with, they were showing off the gun at a local skating rink that Saturday after the murder happened. A couple more teenagers saw the gun, took it from Dennis and turned it into the Eau Gallie police, who later tied it to the Rollings murder.

Melissa: Now that turned out to be a big break. Now the two boys in this case — they were never convicted of a crime. The 15-year-old originally was charged with a crime, but prosecutors dropped the charge against him in exchange for his testimony against Dennis when he went on trial. And the 13-year-old, he never faced any charges at all. But they both pointed the finger at Dennis as being the shooter in this case.

Dacia: Let’s talk about Dennis for a moment. So he was 15 at the time of the crime. During his testimony during the resentencing hearing, Dennis talked a lot about his childhood. He said that he was molested by two neighbor boys. His dad left at a young age, and at one point he was at reform school, at the Okeechobee Florida School for Boys.

Melissa: And that was a pretty notorious place back in the day. For his resentencing, Dennis was evaluated by a neuropsychologist and he came to court and described his home life as really stressful and chaotic. He said he lived in poverty and had very little supervision as a kid. And yet, Respess, he really wanted to make sure that the judge understood that in his trial in 1969, Dennis never confessed; he lied on the stand, and he convinced other people to lie for him.

Respess: Obviously, the jury found that it was the defendant who shot Mr. Rollings in the head while he was asleep in the car, um, and then took his gun and then later his wallet and other property. The defendant's testimony, which was a lie, and, frankly, the PSI (presentencing investigation) confirms it was a lie based on what he said there. The manipulation of people to lie for him: his parents, his next-door neighbors, uh, his girlfriend's sister, his — someone that was in jail with him — a black fella named Maci, who testified — all these people this defendant was able to organize to offer a lie as a defense.

Melissa: For nearly 50 years, Dennis never admitted to being the shooter — until his resentencing. And I can tell ya, the Rollings sisters — when he was sentenced in ‘69 — they thought for sure he was gonna die in prison.

Diana Rollings Gardner: We thought he was in jail for life.

Vicki Reaves: And that’s what they said. I don’t remember if we were in the courtroom at that point to hear the …

Genie: No.

Diana: We weren’t.

Genie: I don’t think so …

Vicki: But he was given life with no chance of parole, life at hard labor, with no chance of parole.

Melissa: Do you remember how you felt when you were told that?

Vicki: I was very glad.

Robin Rollings Billie: Lock him up, throw away the key, we never have to hear the name again.

Vicki: Yeah.

Robin: I think is what we all thought.

Vicki: Yes.

Melissa: And you kind of went through most of your life thinking the same thing, right?

Robin: Right.

Genie: For 25 years.

Dacia: These law changes, which led to the resentencings, are based on a better understanding of the new brain science. Basically, research now shows that adolescent brains are not fully developed; they lack the behavior control of an adult, which the Supreme Court decided reduces their culpability, even the ones who murder.

Melissa: And to find out more about all this, I called Laurence Steinberg at Temple University. He’s a psychology professor and a child development expert whose research has been cited several times by the Supreme Court. Now, Steinberg talked with me a lot about the area called the prefrontal cortex, that’s the area of your brain right behind your forehead. It’s also the region that’s responsible for curbing risky or impulsive behavior really typical of teenagers. Here’s a little bit of how Steinberg explained that to me.

Laurence Steinberg: The problem is that the prefrontal cortex, as I said, is still maturing then. That’s the part of the brain that would be important for putting the brakes on inclinations to do wild and exciting things. So the metaphor that we’ve often used that your readers will understand is, it’s a time when the accelerator is pressed down to the floor but there’s not a good braking system in place.

Melissa: At Dennis’ original sentencing in 1969, his age was not a factor in his punishment. A judge wasn’t required to consider how his immaturity or peer pressure might have influenced anything that he did. But in 2014, Florida reformed its juvenile sentencing laws and gave judges a new framework to follow. Now judges sentencing juveniles convicted of murder must hold what’s called an “individualized” hearing to consider the offender’s age, their home life and a whole range of developmental factors, including things like childhood trauma or their immaturity, drug use, that type of thing.

Dacia: For these older Miller defendants like Dennis Creamer, a judge can reduce their time, release them — if they’ve served at least 40 years — or send them back to prison for life. But only after holding a resentencing hearing, which Dennis underwent in May and June of 2017, which is some of the testimony we’ve been listening to.

Melissa: And no matter what sentence is given, every offender gets an automatic review of their sentence after serving 25 years. And at that point, a judge may decide to set them free.

For more about this episode, visit TCPalm.com/UncertainTerms to see videos and photos. Subscribe to episodes on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Play Music.

Dacia: We’re talking about why these minors who’ve committed murder are returning to court. Now, learning about all of this was a really big shock to the Rollings family, who we met and sat down with shortly after Thanksgiving in 2017. And they told us they had learned about Dennis’ resentencing from a letter sent from the state.

Melissa: And that letter is going out to a lot of families, they found out too. And as Vicki Reaves explained to us, they had some really strong feelings about getting that letter.

Vicki: I just couldn't believe it, why he should be resentenced. I didn't understand why, and then we found out, you know, that they changed the laws. It was crazy. It was just crazy nonsense.

Melissa: And Vicki’s husband, Danny Reaves, the pastor at a church in Fellsmere Florida, well, he was just heartsick for his wife. He told me he and Vicki started dating while her father was still alive.

Danny Reaves: I couldn't help her. She went through it again and again and again.

What the judge and the courts fail to understand is, there's no justice for these people. There's no compassion for them. There's no, 'We care about how you felt, how you've been affected.' It's all about that person who committed the crime. I mean, our kids — we have three — never met their grandpa.

Dacia: You know, this was one of several powerful statements we heard from this family. And we were there for about three hours talking to them, in Genie’s living room. And one thing I really noticed that they said over and over was, for them, this will never be over. And so this is a really big example of the victim impact that’s happening in a lot of these cases — especially this one.

Melissa: And, in fact, during the two days of testimony in May 2017, Judge [Jeffrey] Mahl, he really got an earful about this murder. He described it himself as being “senseless.”

Judge Jeffrey Mahl: The effect of the crime on the victim’s family and on the community — the community; this was big news in Brevard County — and the community, a vast amount of the community in Brevard County’s aware of it, followed it. The effect on the victim’s family was devastating to them. Something that was of such a magnitude to them that they can remember, feel — and those feelings that they had back then are still here. It is something that has consumed their family and that speaks to the nature of the crime, the circumstances and the fact that after all this time, you look out and see and hear from the family the effect — just a devastating effect.

Melissa: Judge Mahl, he heard a lot from this family. And the sisters, they talked to us about their dad and his killer. Diana told us that over the years, they really wanted to make sure that parole officials heard from them every single time Dennis came up for parole.

Diana: How would you feel if that had been your dad? You had to live from the time you were 16 without your dad. He was no longer there to protect you and keep you safe. He was gone; he was gone forever! Forever that boy killed our dad!

And now we have no dad. So no, nothing about it is right. It'll never be right. It'll never be over with. We live with it every day, or I do.

Melissa: I gotta tell ya, I’ve been covering legal affairs for probably like 20 years now, and this, by far, is one of the toughest interviews that I have ever done.

Dacia: It was hard, you know. It was a really intimate situation; there were seven of us sitting together in this living room. And not only could we hear their emotions, but we could really feel them.

Melissa: And we asked them, you listened to Dennis up there on the stand and you listened to him with his defense lawyer, and you listened to him on cross examination, and, you remember? They were really frank about what they thought of his testimony.

Vicki: And then, when Dennis got up there and said — because I don’t think it was in the letter, it might have been, um, — 'now I know what it feels like because both my mom and dad both died.' And I thought, 'No, no, you don’t know how it felt. You have no idea. For you, just for a parent to die because they’re old is completely different from waking up one day, or not going to sleep at all, and they come and get you from the office and say, 'Come to the office,' when you’ve never been in trouble before in your life at school … but, um, and, you know, that’s how you find out that your dad has been murdered. And then they didn’t know what had happened, they just knew daddy was dead.

Diana: He was gone. Your dad is gone.

Vicki: And I said, 'Where did he go?'

Robin: That’s what I said, too.

Genie: Yep, that’s what we said.

Vicki: I said, 'What do you mean he’s gone?' And uh …

Diana: Then they tried to say it was suicide. We knew dad too well to know it wasn’t suicide. He did not kill himself.

Genie: He loved his family and life too much.

Diana: And our mom and that baby.

Vickie: You know, I don’t understand this thing about them saying, um, they’re just youth, they’re not responsible, they didn’t think clearly. Who, who thinks ...

Diana: Who comes up with that stuff?

Vicki: Well, who thinks that’s OK to take a gun and shoot somebody in the face? Who thinks that’s OK? Dad always had guns, and we knew.

Diana: You didn’t touch them ...

Vicki: You didn’t touch them. They weren’t for kids. You didn’t touch them.

Melissa: Now, Dennis’ hearing included two days of testimony from him, his brothers and sisters, he had a mental health expert get up there, he had a prison expert and his own lawyer. And then Dennis took the stand. Now, in a lot of these cases, you won’t see the killer getting up there and be willing to undergo cross-examination, but he did.

Dacia: And during this hearing and the two days of testimony, Dennis told his lawyer Mike Pirolo, why he deserved a second chance.

Pirolo: Why should you be released?

Dennis: Well sir, I feel I’ve been rehabilitated and I’m not the same person that committed that crime. I was a child at the time and I made a foolish mistake and brought a lot of agony and pain to the victim’s family. It’s something I can’t reverse and I brought agony and pain to my family. And I feel like I deserve a second chance, if it’s possible.

And I've done demonstrated rehabilitation and I’m mature now and I don’t think the way I thought. I’m not the same person who was a 15-year-old child. I’m not what they consider my worst mistake. And that’s what that was. That was the only regrettable thing I’ve ever done in my life that I can’t even forgive myself for.

Melissa: So Dacia, what happened to Dennis?

Dacia: He was freed. Mahl wiped out his life prison term and resentenced him to 56 years. And because he’d served 49, and was given time off for good behavior, Dennis’ new sentence meant he was going free.

Melissa: And shortly after that we learned that the Florida Department of Corrections freed him in June of 2017. He also got permission to move to South Carolina, where all of his family is now. He’s living on property owned by his sister and her husband. And as you’ll hear from Diana, watching Dennis be freed was probably as big a blow to the Rollings family as the day they learned that their father had been murdered.

Diana: And, you know, we're all Christians. We’re all, right here, we're all born-again Christians. So, yes, we do have faith in the Lord to get us through it. But there's some times it's not enough, especially when you hear a judge say, 'He's going, he's leaving, he got out.' What do you mean he got out? Is he going to kill somebody else's dad now?

Vicki: Yeah.

Diana: Is he going to put somebody else through this and take their dad away from them? Or some woman that just had two kids, or got four little kids that she's trying to support? Is he going to shoot that man? I mean, what's he going to do? There's nothing that proves that any of us — this is Diana speaking — nothing that proves that he's changed his life and he can do better at it. Nothing.

Dacia: Melissa, you spoke with Dennis; how did you even find him?

Melissa: I did. I located Dennis with the help of his South Carolina probation officer. We spoke on the phone a couple of times; he has an iPhone 7 that his sister got for him. I asked if he’d grant me an interview, but he turned me down.

Now, he later sent me an email that said that he believed that the Rollings family had forgiven him in court, which they said that they had. And that God had forgiven him for what he did, you know, he had converted to Christianity when he was at the Brevard County jail going through this resentencing.

He told me that, to him, that’s what was most important to him. And he felt it really wasn’t in the best interest of the Rollings family, or anyone else, to continue to bring their loved one back up. He also told me that he thinks it’s child abuse to send a kid to prison for life for any mistakes. Dennis wrote me that ‘we the children, whom our U.S. Supreme Court and Florida Supreme Court decided were unconstitutionally sentenced, still are.’

He says, ‘we are not our worst mistake we committed as a child. Science and law has finally recognized this,’ he said, and are now ‘lost in correction of the unconstitutional injustice to the children of America!’

You know, I also talked to Dennis again a year after his release. I was really curious to see if maybe he’d change his mind and talk to me. And he’s still with his family and he says he’s retired. And he’s invited us to come visit him in South Carolina, to meet his relatives and to see for ourselves how he’s adjusted to his new life.

Dacia: We’re still in contact with Dennis and working on those details. And if that happens, hopefully we can bring you that story on a future episode of Uncertain Terms.

We’ve talked about victim’s family impact. But in this case, rehabilitation was also important.

Melissa: In watching Judge Mahl on the bench, you could really see that he took time to discuss Creamer’s rehabilitation efforts that came out during his testimony. And Mahl talked about whether or not he thought Dennis had expressed any remorse for his killing.

Mahl: To the court, there is the remorse shown, as you start from about 2010 on. The change in his testimony here in this hearing, compared to where he was, uh, when he denied even doing it back at the time of the incident, and went on that way for a long time. How sustained, how sincere? I tell you that there is remorse. There is this whole idea of some rehabilitation, some knowledge that what he did was wrong, and he’s starting to take responsibility for it.

Dacia: The Rollings family, of course, disagreed with the judge’s conclusions, and so did prosecutor Bill Respess when we went and met with him at his office. He told us exactly why he thought Dennis should have remained locked up.

Respess: He got in trouble repeatedly while he was in prison and then in the last five to 10 years, appeared to, uh, have less problems. But it continued throughout. It was apparent that he has become institutionalized, which is one of the reasons that I recommended that he remain in ... that I do not think he’s going to, uh, be able to be in our community without committing crimes. And so that’s why I recommended to the judge that he needed to stay in for life, because he had not — at least from the evidence that I saw — demonstrated that he had rehabilitated himself.

Dacia: We asked the sisters if they had a message for Creamer, and they did.

Diana: I just want to say, being forgiven for something that you did, as big as you did, you act like it was like you just broke my chalk and I couldn't jump rope or I couldn't hop-scotch anymore. You took a man's life. Why are you free? He's not free.

Vicki: We're not free.

Diana: No, we'll never be free. We were talking last week; this is never going to be over for a family that's going through this.

Vicki: Uh huh.

Diana: Every day it's the same thing. Every week it's the same thing. Every holiday, we don't even hardly do holidays anymore. Mom's gone. Dad's gone. Why do you need a holiday?

Vicki: And people say, 'Well, at least we have closure now.'

Robin: And it’s not. There's never any closure.

Cross talk: There’s never closure.

Genie: I don't think there's ever any closure.

Robin: There's no justice and there's no closure.

Vicki: It's never over. Ever. I lay in bed at night and cry just because I miss my dad.

Melissa: Dennis is expected to stay on probation for the rest of his life, unless he wins an appeal he filed and a judge drops that condition.

In the meantime, the Rollings will carry their grief and carry on as they have for the last 50 years.

But they’re not alone. In Florida, about 600 juvenile offenders serving life for murder are eligible for a sentencing do-over, like Dennis.

And some of these killers will go free, and others will be kept locked up for life. But all of these cases returning to court take an emotional toll on the victim’s families, which we learned first-hand from the Rollings.

And it sure has legal experts and child psychologists debating the impact of these changing laws, and how much advances in neuroscience should influence how harshly the courts are punishing minors who murder.

Now, the child advocates and the juvenile defense lawyers that I’ve talked to who represent these Miller defendants, absolutely, they say yes. These cases are some of the most important that they’ve ever worked on. And they tell me that ignoring these advances in brain science would be just as tragic as ignoring advances in DNA or blood or fiber analysis.

And that the laws are finally catching up with science. That kids are finally being treated as an evolving juvenile, and not as a mini adult.

Dacia: Join us for another episode of Uncertain Terms. I’m TCPalm producer Dacia Johnson.

Melissa: And I’m TCPalm legal affairs reporter Melissa Holsman. Our next story features a 14-year-old boy who killed a 4-year-old girl in 1979 in a case that terrified a tiny Vero Beach neighborhood. Nearly four decades later, Brooks Bellay, now in his 50s, returns to court to ask a judge to go free.

Here’s a little bit of that little girl’s mother speaking, Sandy Gillman.

Sandy Gillman: The policeman came and it was just gettin' — the sun had, you know, had gone down — it was just gettin' dusky. And he was writing down Angel’s descriptions and he couldn’t hold his flashlight and everything, and someone behind me was holding the flashlight.

I turned around and I’m like this, and it’s Brooks! His hair’s wet. He done changed his clothes from what he had on earlier in the day. He had on a white shirt, like a Polo. He had on a white-and-red striped shirt with a white collar on it, and he was holding that flashlight for that policeman.

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"Uncertain Terms" was written by Melissa Holsman and produced by Dacia Johnson. It’s brought to you by TCPalm, a part of the USA TODAY NETWORK, with editors Cheryl Smith and Tim Thorsen, and special thanks to WQCS - NPR for the Treasure Coast.

You can find more online at TCPalm.com.UncertainTerms. Email us at UncertainTerms@TCPalm.com. And follow us on Twitter @UncertainTerms.















