Our card this week is Marjorie "Christy" Luna, the 4 of Spades from Florida.From the outside, Greenacres seemed like a picture-perfect place to grow up, with a park, school, and corner store stocked with sugary sweets and arcade games all within walking distance.For Christy Luna and her friends, weekends were spent roaming the neighborhood and playing outside barefoot. But this storybook community had darkness lurking just under the surface, and it reared its ugly head one May night in 1984.More than 40 years later, Christy’s friends are peeling back the layers and piecing together memories from their childhood, finding that what actually lay beneath was much darker than they ever could’ve imagined.If you know anything about the disappearance of Marjorie “Christy” Luna in Greenacres, Florida, on May 27th, 1984, the Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend, please come forward. And if you had encounters with anyone named in the episode, or even similar encounters as described with men you didn’t know, detectives want to hear from you too. Perhaps you hold the missing piece to solving this mystery and putting a terrible person behind bars for whatever life they have left. You can remain anonymous by calling Crime Stoppers of Palm Beach County at 1-800-458-8477.Ways to contact the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office directly: Main Number: 561-688-3000Detective William Springer’s Email: [email protected] View source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/marjorie-christy-luna Let us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media.Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuckFacebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllcTo support Season of Justice and learn more, please visit seasonofjustice.org.The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers. Instagram: @ashleyflowersTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieTwitter: @Ash_FlowersFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AFText Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more!
Chapter 1: Who is Marjorie 'Christy' Luna?
Our card this week is Marjorie Christy Luna, the Four of Spades from Florida. From the outside, Green Acres seemed like a picture-perfect place to grow up. A park, a school, a corner store stocked with sugary sweets and arcade games, all within walking distance. For Christy and her friends, weekends were spent roaming the neighborhood and playing outside barefoot.
Chapter 2: What happened on May 27th, 1984?
But this storybook community had darkness lurking just under the surface, and it reared its ugly head one May evening in 1984. More than 40 years later, Christy's friends are peeling back the layers and piecing together memories from their childhood, finding that what actually lay beneath was much darker than they ever could have imagined. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck.
It was Memorial Day weekend, 1984, and Greenacre's small-town police department was probably preparing for a bit more action than usual. Hopefully nothing too bad, but it was possible that they would get a call to shut down some out-of-hand fireworks, bust a rowdy backyard barbecue maybe.
But on Sunday, May 27th, at around 10.15 p.m., police got a call for something far more serious, something I'm almost sure they didn't see coming in their close-knit community. A mother phoned to say that her eight-year-old daughter, Marjorie Luna, who went by Christy, hadn't come home that evening.
Detective William Springer with the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office recounts that Christy's mom, Jenny, told police that she, her boyfriend, and her two daughters had just returned home that afternoon from a weekend getaway.
They drove up to Titusville, came back, stopped at two parks, Jonathan Dickinson State Park, and then they stopped at the Duke Boys Park. Then they came home. It was early in the afternoon. They were tired because they traveled all night. Christy slept because she was a little slump. And they all went to bed, and Christy came in and said, you know, the cats are hungry. I'll go get cat food.
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Chapter 3: What led to Christy's disappearance?
And she got some change, and she went to the store, which is right around the corner.
Christy's older sister, Allison, had woken up their mom around 8.30 p.m. to tell her that Christy still hadn't come home since taking off sometime between 2 and 3 that afternoon. Now, before getting police involved, the family took to the neighborhood themselves to see if they could find Christy at any of her usual spots, like the store, the park, her friends' homes.
But after close to two hours of this, the freckled-faced, hazel-eyed little girl was nowhere to be found. So that's when they called the police. Law enforcement went on to do the same sweep the family had. And since they knew her plan was to pick up cat food, naturally, one of the first places they started at was the neighborhood store, Belk's.
Green Acres is just a small, sleepy little town with a store downtown that all the kids walked to because it was right there. It's not that big an area. And you could almost throw a rock from the house to the store. Everybody's kids walked to the store. And they came home.
Clerks at the store told police they remembered Christy coming in, buying cat food, and watching other kids play arcade games before leaving by herself. Based on all of our research, it sounds like Christy could have been there anytime between 2 and 5 p.m. Right after she left, there were witnesses who placed her outside by a house that was directly across the street within view of the store.
We don't have anybody that said they saw her getting into any type of car or anything. I talked to the people that lived in the house at that time, and they were young kids too. And they remembered Christy being there talking to them and watching the fireworks. And the one girl told me, yeah, I saw her walking back towards her house. And that's it.
In the days following Christie's disappearance, deputies scoured the surrounding areas with canine units and on mounted horses. They searched wooded areas and low-lying bodies of water in and around Green Acres, looking for any signs of Christie. But their findings were about as bleak as the weather that week.
It rained for nearly 10 days straight, which I assume made searching all the more difficult and may have also washed away potential evidence. Of course, like any other missing child's case, the parents had to be closely vetted. Detective Springer told us that Jenny and her live-in boyfriend at the time, Larry, cooperated fully.
Police questioned them both, and they also agreed to polygraphs, which Springer said they passed. Investigators also looked into Christie's father, but he'd been living in Atlanta at the time, and they confirmed that he'd been there, hundreds of miles away at the time of the disappearance. In addition, investigators talked to Christy's neighbors and schoolmates, including her best friend.
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Chapter 4: Who were the Rambo brothers?
Both Rambo brothers lived in Green Acres on the same street as Christy, about a block away. There was Charles, then 31, who went by Chuck, and Willis, who was 26 at the time. Now, it doesn't seem like the little girl police spoke to indicated that she had direct knowledge that Christy had also been sexually assaulted by the Rambo brothers or that they had anything to do with her going missing.
From what we can gather, no one police spoke to described Christy acting differently or distant leading up to her disappearance. The kind of signs that might have been a clue that she too was being abused. But still, these men would have had access to Christy. Detective Springer said that Christy's friend was often over at the Rambo house because their sister was her babysitter.
So Christy would come by to visit and play. This made investigators theorize that maybe Christy had wanted to see her friend after stopping for cat food. Her friend wasn't home at the time, so maybe Christy had popped by the Rambo residence to see if she was there instead. And there was someone else in Green Acres who connected Christy to one of the Rambos, too.
An article in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel stated that Ellen Belk, a clerk at Belk's General Store, told police that she had seen Chuck Rambo giving Christy money at the store on one occasion in the past.
Detective Springer thought that both Rambo brothers said that they'd been home at least at some point the day Christy went missing, meaning that they would have been nearby since they lived in the neighborhood. But it sounds like no one police spoke with back then could actually place either of them together with her. Still, they had enough to arrest Chuck, and then pretty soon thereafter, Willis.
Chuck actually confessed to sexually assaulting Christy's friend during an early taped interview with police. And although both men ultimately pleaded guilty to lewd assault in that case, for one reason or another, neither of them served any jail time, just 10 years probation apiece. Both Chuck and Willis denied ever assaulting Christy or having anything to do with her going missing.
We searched the house. We kept the house the whole weekend. I mean, we went through that house, top to bottom, everywhere. We couldn't find anything that would indicate that Christy was murdered there.
But that didn't mean they weren't still suspects. In an attempt to follow up on every single lead, police conducted several searches for Christy at locations associated with the Rambo brothers.
Willis worked at a retirement place with a golf course, and the rumors were that he put Christy down a well. We went and we dug deep. They had to build a ramp for the front loader to get down in to dig deeper, but we never found anything.
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Chapter 5: What were the allegations against Victor Wanetti?
Sure enough, there's little girls in that bedroom that he's looking in. So they followed him for almost a month. He never tried to pick anybody out. He had a couple of locations he was looking through windows. So anyway, when he started trying to get in through the front door one night, they arrested him.
When they put him in jail, there was a group of inmates that said that Victor would sit in a chair and watch little girls on TV, you know, like Sesame Street. And then he would make statements like, well, they'll never find them. And I mean, he more or less was admitting that he killed both of them and they'll never find him.
And these inmates are just having a field day, throwing Victor under the bus. I interviewed him, and he swore him down. He never had anything to do with Christy or Tammy. He said he wasn't even in the same cell blocks, same part of the jail, as these people that were talking and giving him up for all this stuff.
This could have been encouraging, should have been encouraging for a detective like Springer. If these other inmates were telling the truth, it might help in the case against Victor. But Springer remembers that his gut questioned it because of his years watching how convicted predators behave in prison.
In my experience over the years, the child molesters, they don't go to prison and talk about their crimes because they know that the inmates don't like that. So I could not believe that Victor is sitting in a local jail telling everybody how he killed these girls and nobody did anything to him. I just found that a little bit unbelievable.
I thought, I'm going to find out if this is the truth, if what they're saying is the truth. So I found one inmate. I interviewed him. And he said, oh, yeah, he told us all this stuff. So I said, would you be willing to take a polygraph? And he says, yeah. We polygraphed him. He failed. I asked him, why did you lie? He said, we wanted to give her mother some closure.
So he admitted it was all fabricated. And then I tracked down another one and talked to him on the phone. And he said, yeah, we made all this stuff up.
Even though he somewhat saw this coming, it was disappointing nonetheless. Way down the line, Victor eventually got out of prison and ended up passing away shortly thereafter without ever being charged with anything related to Christy or the other missing girl from New Hampshire, Tammy.
And even though those two inmates admitted to Detective Springer that they'd lied about his alleged confession, he doesn't think that we should count Victor out when it comes to Christy's case.
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Chapter 6: What new leads emerged years after Christy's disappearance?
See, back in May of 1984, this family lived directly behind Christy along the same path that she may have taken through her neighborhood that day. And the wife said that she would often be out late with the kids on Sundays, giving her husband ample space and time to commit a potential crime. And now she had discovered that he may have had the M.O. too.
He would have never came on the radar until he got arrested. He got arrested up in Virginia for molesting his grandkids and I think another kid. And of course, his wife really, really was upset. And as soon as he got arrested, she called us up and said, we need to look at him.
And she said that Ferris had made the statement one time to her that one of these days, one of those girls is going to go missing. And then after Christy went missing, he said, well, they'll never find her. She's down on Alligator Alley. So I went up to Virginia, and I interviewed him, and he denied knowing Christy. He never admitted anything.
He said he didn't know Christy, and he never said those things. And his attorney was going to get him off that he was guilty of this crime.
Well, that didn't happen. Williams since passed away, but he ended up serving life in prison in Virginia on those other charges. And Detective Springer even tried taking another crack at him post-conviction, thinking maybe now that he seemingly had so little left to lose, he'd be more open this time around.
I went up to talk to him. If you ever interview a sex offender, especially a child molester, it's never their fault. It is never their fault. If you listen to some of these people, I mean, they would make you sick, really sick. That's why I never liked working child molestation cases. The sexual barriers were bad enough. The child molestations were really bad.
It's hard for an investigator to hear about, but it's even harder for the children, now adults, of Green Acres who lived it. Our reporting team met up with two of Christy's old friends, Brenda and Jennifer.
They sat down together for their interview, supporting each other through a difficult conversation as they told us how Christy's disappearance had a major impact on the kids that she left behind. Here's Brenda. Brenda.
Anybody from our childhood, anybody from our era who was born in the 70s and the early 80s and you were growing up in Greenacres, when someone mentions to them, what do you think of when you think of Greenacres? Kristi Luna. That's it. It's Kristi Luna every time.
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Chapter 7: How did Christy's friends cope with her disappearance?
And I don't know what she said, but she was bouncing up and down. And I told her I was waiting for the man to finish in the bathroom because he came up, he came up and he said, did you leave change in the bathroom? And I said, yes. And he said, you can get it when I get out. And I said, okay.
So to recap, Jennifer told us a man had approached her at the park asking if she'd left change behind in the bathroom. While she hadn't actually dropped any change, the little girl said yes, excited about the prospect of being able to buy herself a treat at Belk's store. Jennifer remembered Brenda also being present there at the park during that first part.
But then the man went into the bathroom and Jennifer did what he'd asked, waited for him to come back outside so she could go in and collect the change. But he never did.
And I just remember waiting and waiting and waiting. And Christy knew I was waiting for him to get out of the bathroom. So she took off. I'm assuming as I think back, she probably went to the store because she knew that's where I was going next. And I went up to eventually I went up to the stalls and I peek in and I just see Christy. Sorry, go slow.
I peeked in the door and I just see this change scattered all across the floor. It was just, it wasn't pennies. It was quarters and dimes. And I mean, it was like, it was like a treasure chest, you know? And I just remember seeing that and I didn't see him anywhere in there. And I went in and I got on my, I was on my knees and I'm scooting across the floor and I was just gathering the change.
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Chapter 8: What impact did Christy's case have on her community?
I could distinctly remember that there was this
drain I just remember this drain in the middle of the floor I was like right smack in the middle of the bathroom collecting the change and I hear this sound behind me and I turned and that's when I saw him standing there he wasn't wearing anything and like within like a a nanosecond within like a flash he he grabbed me tossed me to the side I think I must have hit my head at first I thought he maybe he hit me in the head with something or or whatever I don't know but I'm
I smacked my head on the bathroom floor, and he got on top of me, and he was trying to get my underwear off. And the next thing I remember is I hear Christy coming in. What are you doing to my friend? What are you doing to my friend? I hear a loud thud, and I don't remember anything after that. And the next thing I do remember is clank, clank, clank on the door. Someone saying, wrap it up.
Park's closing. I... Come to wake up, whatever. And I recollect the change. I get up my hand. I walk out of the bathroom, out of the men's room. And right outside of the men's room, there is a police officer and another man talking by. They had these like half sheds. And the police officer's back was towards me and the park, I want to say it was a park attendant, I don't know.
And I just remember thinking, I'm going to get in trouble, I'm going to get in trouble. And I walked up to him with the change in my hand and I said, this man left this in the bathroom. He patted me on the back and he said, I guess it's your lucky day, kid. And that was, that was, I was scared. I was scared to leave. I went over to the slide.
I went up on the slide and I put the, I just remember putting the coins down on the top of the slide. And it was one of the slides that had like a cover over, over top. And I was putting the, the, the chain, sorry. I was putting the change in, like, order. You know, quarters, dimes, nickels, and that was it. That was it. And I never said anything. I never said anything. I never said anything.
After Jennifer came forward to Christy's mom, the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office got on board, and everything evolved from there. Because Jennifer had recalled Brenda being at the park when the man came up asking about the change, Detective Springer tracked her down.
And as it turned out, Brenda did remember an unsettling event involving a strange man and pocket change taking place at the park. But in her recollection, Christy wasn't there, and she and Jennifer got away unharmed. Eventually, Jennifer came to the realization that both incidents had occurred.
She'd just been merging bits and pieces from two separate memories together, likely due to the trauma she endured. The time when Brenda and Jennifer were together happened about a year or so prior to Christy's disappearance, and it went like this. A man came up to them at the park and tried luring both girls into the bathroom using the same ruse with the change.
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