For almost four decades, the murder of 20-year-old Melissa Taylor Ellison in Florida remained unsolved. The young mother was found dead in her bedroom in December 1987, while her 13-month-old daughter was found crying in the living room.

The case took a new turn on 8 July, when a 70-year-old man from Middleburg, Florida, contacted the Clay County Sheriff’s Office and said he wanted to give information about an old unsolved case.

According to CNN, Gary Glowacz reportedly told investigators he wanted to “set things straight” over Ellison’s death. According to his arrest report, he admitted to striking the 20-year-old with a piece of wood after breaking into her home in search of money.

The 70-year-old told detectives from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Unit that he had come across an article about the murder the previous March and realised, he claimed, that he was responsible for her death.

He has been charged with second-degree murder and armed burglary with assault or battery. He is being held without bond at Duval County Jail, with his next court appearance scheduled for Thursday.

The 1987 murder

Melissa Ellison, known to relatives and friends as Missy, was found dead in her bedroom on 28 December 1987 by two housemates.

A post-mortem examination found she had died of severe head trauma, and her death was classified as a homicide. Despite the investigation that followed, no arrest was made at the time.

According to what Glowacz reportedly told police, he had entered the house looking for money or items he could sell to buy drugs. He was living less than a kilometre from the young woman’s home at the time.

The confession

On the same day Ellison was found dead, Glowacz had also been arrested as a suspect in an unrelated burglary case.

The man, then 31, reportedly said he entered the house through a window and made his way to the bedroom, where he found Melissa lying on the bed with her young daughter, Casie.

As he told police, he picked up a piece of wood he found in the house and struck the 20-year-old once on the head. He then took the child from the bed, left her on the living-room sofa and returned to the bedroom to search for money under the mattress.

Investigators noted that during his statement, the 70-year-old described details of the crime scene that had not been made public and were not included in the article he had read.

Asked why he decided to confess so many years later, he reportedly replied that until he read the article, he had not known the woman had died from the blow.

Her daughter was just 13 months old

Casie Ellison, who was just 13 months old when her mother was murdered, was the first relative contacted by police following Glowacz’s arrest.

For years, she says, she tried to suppress what she felt about her mother’s murder. About 25 years after the crime, when her own daughter reached the age she had been when she lost her mother, she began to see what had happened differently.

“I realised this was little Casie. I was looking at myself,” she said.

Nearly four decades of searching for answers

The family continued for years to search for information about the case. Melissa’s parents passed on every possible lead they came across to the authorities, without any progress being made.

Her mother, Kathryn Taylor, died in 2019 without learning who had killed her daughter.

A year earlier, the case had been submitted to Project Cold Case, a non-profit organisation that supports the families of unsolved murder victims. The organisation created a dedicated page for the case, gathering the evidence the family had collected over the years.

In January 2026, about six months before Glowacz’s confession, the family took part in a press conference alongside Project Cold Case, issuing a public appeal for information.

“Someone knows exactly what happened that night. Someone remembers a detail that was never mentioned,” Casie said at the time.

The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office said the publicity the case received in January had helped the investigation, and that information which came in afterwards played a role in the arrest.

“We have an arrest, not justice”

Despite the arrest after almost 40 years, Melissa’s family say they do not yet feel the case is closed.

Her two sisters say they still think about Missy every day, and her memory also lives on through her daughter, who today has three children of her own.

The family had already been planning an event in Melissa’s memory before learning of the arrest. The event will go ahead as planned, with relatives saying they are still waiting for the judicial process to be completed.