Justice for Mary Petersen: The 2002 Fort Caroline Killing Still Without Answers

On the morning of May 28, 2002, an 8-year-old boy in Jacksonville’s Fort Caroline neighborhood woke up hungry and went to wake his mother. Mary Futrill Petersen, 35, was not breathing.

What happened next, as documented in reporting on the case, reads like something out of a parent’s worst fear made real: the boy tried to call 911, but the phone was not working. So he dressed himself and his 5-year-old sister, walked to a neighbor’s house, and begged for help. Police arrived shortly after. It was too late to save Mary Petersen.

Three days earlier, on May 25, 2002, Mary had thrown a pony-themed birthday party for her daughter — the last birthday she would ever spend with her child. That detail, small and unbearable, is where the public record of this case always seems to start, because it is where the shape of the loss becomes impossible to look away from.

A woman people remember warmly

Mary worked 17 years at Brooks Rehabilitation, in corporate accounting. Freida McMillan, her coworker of all 17 of those years, put it plainly in the years that followed: “She didn’t have a lifestyle that would have positioned her to be murdered.”

Her mother, Fran Futrill, said the same thing in fewer words: “I don’t know of anyone who ever said an ill thing about Mary.”

That is the cruelest part of this case, and the part that should make Jacksonville pay attention. Mary Petersen was not living a high-risk life. She was a mother of two, a longtime employee, a woman remembered as bubbly and sweet by everyone who knew her. And on the morning of May 28, 2002, her son found her body in their home on the east side of Jacksonville — and her killer walked away with her life.

What the investigation established

The physical facts of the case, as publicly reported, are spare — and they have never added up to an arrest:

• The body bore no visible marks, but investigators determined the cause of death to be asphyxiation by strangulation.
• There was no sign of forced entry into the Fort Caroline home.
• Her car, a Dodge Intrepid, was found about a mile away from the home.

Mary was in the middle of a divorce from her husband, Donald, when she was killed. It was the second night she had stayed in the Fort Caroline home since filing; she and her children had previously been staying at her parents’ home in North Jacksonville. Her husband had been staying at a friend’s house nearby. For a story written in 2009, Donald Petersen told a reporter he had been watching television and fallen asleep in front of the TV that night — an account family members confirmed.

The case was reopened in 2005 for what the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office described as “retesting of possible or potential evidence.” Because of the case’s active status, JSO declined to share other details at the time. More than twenty years later, the public record holds no resolution: no arrests, no charges, no named suspect in custody.

Still fighting

Fran Futrill, Mary’s mother, has never stopped pushing for answers. The case has stayed in the public eye in part because of her — through cold-case spotlights, through the years of anniversaries, through the quiet persistence of a family that refuses to let a file number stand in for a person.

That persistence matters. Cold cases do not solve themselves. They solve because someone remembers something they were afraid to say, because a piece of evidence meets a better test, because a family keeps a name in front of investigators until the right piece of information surfaces. Mary’s case has the shape of one that could still move — the details are documented, the evidence was retested, the questions are on the record.

What we know, and what we don’t

This is the discipline this case demands: we know Mary Petersen was killed in her home on the morning of May 28, 2002. We know how she died. We know her son found her. We know the scene yielded no forced entry and a missing car. We know the case was reopened for evidence retesting in 2005.

What we do not know — and what no public reporting has established — is who killed her. Anyone with information should come forward. Speculation has no place in a case like this; the facts, spoken plainly, are enough to keep it moving.

If you know anything about the death of Mary Futrill Petersen, contact the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office at 904-630-0500 or First Coast Crime Stoppers at 1-866-845-TIPS. Calls to Crime Stoppers can remain anonymous.

Justice for Mary Petersen. Her son was eight years old when he found her. Her mother is still waiting. Jacksonville should not let this one go quiet.

— Deadly Duval. Verified facts only. Every claim in this post is drawn from the public record on the Mary Futrill Petersen case; nothing here is invented, and no suspect, cause of death, or legal outcome beyond what is publicly established has been stated.