A Florida sheriff’s deputy got away with murder for 45 years, and even after law enforcement connected him to the crime, they determined he “would never be well enough to stand trial” after finding him bedridden in a care facility in Tennessee.

John Greer reportedly told Charlotte County investigators that he shot Adele Easterly, 25, in cold blood at the Farm Store where she worked on November 5, 1979. He further said that he shot his wife three months earlier, when he claimed Jackie Greer had shot herself. When investigators spoke with him before his death earlier this year, they could not confirm if Jackie Greer’s shooting was accidental or murder, the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office said.

Greer reported finding Easterly’s body, but in 1986 one of her friends told a detective that Easterly had told her she was a Charlotte County deputy but tried to break up with him when she learned he was married. The friend said she had been afraid to come forward with the information.

Greer was a deputy with the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office but resigned in October 1980 while reportedly under investigation for the death of another woman, who was found dead in her car more than week after she was reported missing.

Investigators say that woman left behind a suicide note that appeared legitimate, but her husband told detectives that “Greer had been following his wife around and was coming to their house while on duty and attempting to have sexual relations with her.”

A month after Easterly’s friend spoke with investigators, detectives asked a crime splatter specialist to look at evidence from Jackie Greer’s death scene. While that investigators could not determine if the death was suicide or homicide, he did say that she could not have died in the way her husband claimed.

But in neither 1979 nor 1986, investigators were unable to patch together enough information to confirm their suspicions that Greer was involved.

In 2016, cold case detectives tried again, posting a renewed attempt for information. This time, a former Sheriff’s Office Explorer came forward and told detectives that Greer had raped her multiple times and threatened to kill her. At one point, he told her to ““ask them dead b****** like Adele Easterly what happens when they say no to me.”

She also said she was working dispatch the night Greer “found” Easterly’s body and saw him come in carrying a long gun and looking disheveled.

Eventually, the detectives obtained probable cause to arrest Greer. But they found him in April 2023 “bedridden” and only able to “give short answers to questions.”

“He appeared to understand questions but could not carry on long conversations,” the sheriff’s office said. “When asked directly if he shot Adele Easterly and his wife, Jackie, Greer admitted to shooting them. Cold Case detectives could not confirm with Greer if he shot his wife Jackie intentionally, or if it was an accident as he previously told Adele Easterly.”

After leaving the Charlotte County sheriff’s office, the killer deputy worked in a few police and sheriff’s offices, mostly near Florida’s west coast, before moving to Kingsport, Tennessee, where he “held a variety of pilot and aircraft-related positions.”

He died in March of this year at 77, never charged and never held accountable for his actions.