Jury selection opened Monday at the Hernando County Courthouse in Brooksville and jurors were already looking at photographs of a bracelet, a sock, and half of a broken best-friend necklace pulled from the body of 12-year-old Jennifer Odom yesterday. The items belonged to a girl who vanished in 1993 after stepping off her school bus roughly 200 yards from her rural Dade City home, and more than three decades later, the man accused of kidnapping and killing her is finally on trial.
Jeffrey Norman Crum Sr. is accused of kidnapping and murdering Odom, according to Fox 13 Tampa Bay. The trial, which began Tuesday, comes after a Hernando County grand jury indicted Crum in July 2023 on charges of first-degree murder, kidnapping, and sexual battery, with 5th Judicial Circuit State Attorney Bill Gladson announcing at the time that prosecutors would seek the death penalty, according to WUSF.
On the first day of testimony, prosecutors called Michelle Sample, Odom's best friend, who was 13 years old the last time she saw Odom alive. Sample testified about watching Odom step off their school bus as a faded blue truck pulled in behind her, and she wore the matching half of the best-friend necklace found on Odom's body, according to WTSP.
A Six-Day Search Across Two Counties
Odom disappeared on February 19, 1993, prompting a search across 60 square miles that involved hundreds of volunteers and bloodhounds before her body was found six days later in an abandoned Hernando County orange grove, per the same station's earlier reporting. The case stretched across county lines from the start: Odom lived in Pasco County, but her body turned up in neighboring Hernando County, where the trial is now taking place.
Nearly two years after the murder, on January 5, 1995, a couple searching for scrap metal in Spring Hill discovered Odom's missing teal backpack and clarinet case discarded in a trash pile 12 miles west of where her body had been found. A textbook inside the backpack still had her name written on the cover, though her clothing has never been recovered, the station's report notes.
Familial DNA Cracked a 30-Year Cold Case
Crum, now 61, was already serving two concurrent life sentences at the time of his 2023 indictment for a 2015 Pasco County conviction tied to the January 1992 beating and sexual assault of a 17-year-old girl, who was attacked after stepping off a school bus just 13 months before Odom disappeared. That victim survived severe head injuries, and her preserved DNA later provided the lead that broke the case open, according to Forensic Magazine.
Investigators secured that breakthrough through familial DNA searching, as Florida Department of Law Enforcement forensic analysts matched crime-scene evidence from the 1992 assault to Crum's son in a database, eventually leading to Crum's 2015 arrest and, years later, a forensic match to Odom's case, per Court TV. The Florida Sheriffs Association's Cold Case Advisory Commission also provided specialized personnel and technical support to help the Hernando County Sheriff's Office re-evaluate and re-test more than 75,000 items of evidence collected over three decades, according to the association.
The Truck at the Center of the Case
Court records reviewed by the Tampa Bay Times show Crum owned a blue pickup truck in 1993, and his son told investigators Crum later painted the vehicle gray, replaced the truck bed with flat wood, and traded it in that same year. The faded blue truck reportedly seen pulling in behind Odom as she walked home was the primary lead detectives pursued for 30 years.
Hernando County Sheriff Al Nienhuis said in July 2023 that because of Crum's violent history and the 13-month gap between the two school-bus attacks, law enforcement suspects he may be responsible for additional unresolved crimes in Florida, according to CBS News. Authorities have encouraged the public to submit tips on other unsolved cases from the 1990s, though whether Crum will be tied to any additional crimes remains an open question as the trial proceeds in Brooksville.
