56: A Pinellas County Sheriff's Office Podcast

If you’ve been with 56 from the beginning you know cold case detective Corporal Ron Chalmers well – he was our very first guest. In this, our 30th episode, we catch up with him after the trial of one of his most notorious cases, the homicide of Opal Weil. The suspect had spent nearly 40 years thinking he’d gotten away with it, but when he received his life sentence he found out that no one gets away with crime when Chalmers is on the case. We talk with him about some of the other cases on his desk right now, such as the 1985 homicide of Shirley Badger Trenner who was killed at the computer store where she worked. Was it a random act of violence, a targeted robbery, or a scheme by illicit lovers to get an inconvenient wife out of the way? Thanks to genetic genealogy, Chalmers may soon have answers. With cold cases, sometimes a tiny detail noticed years later can provide new insight. Find out how reading a random article about a murder suspect in Ohio led him to a person of interest in a 2018 missing persons case. Do you have the clue that might solve one of our cold cases? Listen to this episode of 56 and find out.

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Looking for a meaningful job? We’re a lot more than just uniformed deputies on the road! In this episode of 56, we talk with our three HR recruiters about the almost endless possibilities here at the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. Your hosts Ricky, Ashley, and Laura love working here, and we think you would too. Whether you’re fresh out of school and just starting out, or mid-career and needing a change, we have a job you’ll love. Does your corporate IT job feel meaningless? Use your skills to help keep your county safe. Are you an admin with boring coworkers? Come work with deputies and detectives. Want to be in the middle of the action without being in personal danger? You might have a future as a dispatcher.
You’ll also learn about what it takes to become a deputy, whether in the jail, on the road, or in the courthouse. Already certified? If you’re listening from the frozen north, or from a community that doesn’t support its law enforcement, you’ll find that Pinellas County offers a welcoming climate in more ways than one.
You’ve had hours of fun listening to PCSO members on this podcast. Wouldn’t you like to have a career alongside us? PinellasSheriff.gov/Careers.
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Corporal Jim Lancia is (to the best of our knowledge) the only 56 guest to have been ambushed with a Tommy gun. He has so many tales of adventure and danger that he said getting stabbed under his vest during a domestic wasn’t even a big deal compared to all the times he’s been shot at. After years as a law enforcement officer in Pennsylvania, plus a stint training K-9s for Navy SEALs, he came to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. (He passed up on an offer from NASA SWAT, which means working at our agency is cooler than… er, fighting aliens? Or is that Space Force? We’re really not sure.) While here, he’s worked on the beaches and in the Marine Unit for a welcome change from snow and slush in the concrete jungle. Right now he’s in the Training Division, keeping PCSO on the forefront of the most innovative technology, including our groundbreaking use of Virtual Reality. Hear about how he was first on scene at a mass shooting, how he put his life on the line for $5.25 an hour, and why he loved working with the beautiful chaos that is a Belgian Malinois. He says he’s been shot at so many times that he shouldn’t be here talking to us now, but his career shows that in police work, luck’s not a tactic, but it’s a very real thing.

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Deputies can’t walk to calls – gone are the days of the beat cop on foot patrol – so the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office depends on Michael Vecchione, manager of the Fleet Services Division. His career took him from BMWs to firetrucks to PCSO’s Tahoes, armored vehicles, the command bus, and more. On this episode of 56, find out how you take a basic Tahoe and upfit it to a state-of-the-art police vehicle with lights, sirens, a push bar, and an interior that’s somewhere between an office and an arsenal. There’s science behind all those flashing lights too, and innovations have fine tuned them to keep deputies safer on the road. From the travails of finding parts for a military vehicle that’s still top secret, to how emergency vehicles handle hurricanes, we talk with the guy who literally keeps the sheriff’s office running.

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Some forensic scientists train for years in the classroom, only to discover on their first real crime scene that they don’t have the stomach for the job. Not so for Forensic Science Supervisor Lisa Murphy. When she pulled up to her first dead body – a shotgun suicide – and said, “Wow, there’s a piece of skull!” she realized this was the perfect job for her. Since then she’s worked some of the grisliest crime scenes, labored for hours in houses full of decomp and no air conditioning, and never thrown up… although she’ll tell you about the times when she came close. Now she’s a blood pattern recognition expert who can reconstruct a homicide based on the blood evidence on the walls and floors. On this episode of 56, hear about the most disgusting, dangerous, and heart-wrenching cases she’s worked, and find out why she was the 2024 Forensic Science Specialist of the year.

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