Who Killed Lynette Campbell? Florida Mom Vanished Nearly 30 Years Ago — Then Her Body Was Found in a River By Christine Pelisek

Lynette Campbell was a 35-year-old single mother when she vanished on May 31, 1996.

The Salvation Army clerk was last seen at the Bridge Lounge in Tarpon Springs, a city on central Florida’s Gulf Coast known for fishing and sponge diving.

A few days after she walked out of the home she shared with her mother and 10-year-old daughter, her mother reported her missing. She told police she last saw her daughter around 11 p.m. on May 31, before she left to meet up with a guy named “Mark.”

Witnesses said they saw Campbell at the popular local bar with a different man she was dating.

That man, says Paul Novack, a Florida attorney investigating the cold case, was “5’10” with a dark complexion and clean-shaven.”  

However, the man left before Lynette did, he says.

Eight days later, Lynette’s 1978 Oldsmobile was discovered in the woods near the Anclote River — less than a mile from the bar.

“The car had been ditched, and it had been ransacked,” Novack tells PEOPLE. “Everything was strewn all over the place, possibly by vandals or homeless people that had an opportunity to take whatever they could.”  

Lynette’s sister, Karin Miller, says when she learned that police found her sister’s car she drove with her mother and daughter to the site. There, she says, she found the Little Mermaid children’s blanket Lynette had bought for her daughter in a pile of trash. She also found her sister’s shoes.

“I walked around the pile over towards the fence, and there were her shoes sitting right there as if they were placed there,” she tells PEOPLE. Karin says somebody had also torn the license tag off the car’s license plate, dug a hole behind the car and buried the tag.

It wasn’t long afterwards that Lynette’s decomposing body was found near the Anclote River bridge — not far from where a homeless man told police he saw two people rolling around or struggling on the ground next to a car around 2:15 a.m. that morning.

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“He couldn’t tell whether they were rolling around affectionately or having a fight,” says Novack. “And he continued on his way.” 

Karin says her sister was establishing a new path forward after her divorce from her husband, who she started dating when she was a teenager. Lynette, she says, once was a homebody who didn’t work much while she was married. After the divorce, she got her driver’s license and started answering personal ads, going to bars and hanging out with friends.  

Strangely, Lynette, who liked reading Tarot cards, seemed to predict her own death.

“For two years before she died, she used to tell me, she told other people too,” says Karin. “She said, ‘it’s like a dream, but it’s not a dream. They punch me in the stomach, they choke me, and they throw me in the water.’”

Over the years, the case has garnered multiple theories about what happened to the woman.

“It was a serial killer, it was a fisherman, it was a sponge diver,” Novack says. “And those types of people would be coming in and out of Tarpon Springs. Somebody might’ve been there for the night, gone the next day. You’re never going to find them, that kind of theory. Then of course there was always who is Mark?”

The investigation eventually stalled, and no arrests have ever been made.

Karin hopes that changes with the help of Novack, who began investigating four months ago after a podcaster asked him to take a look at the case after he and some friends helped solve the Danny Goldman murder in collaboration with the Miami-Dade Police Department.

“I’m very grateful,” Karin says about Novack’s involvement. “I was responsible for her ever since we were kids. I feel like if I was there with her, this would’ve never happened.”

Anyone with information about Lynette’s murder is being asked to contact Paul Novack at [email protected]. Additionally, anonymous tips can be submitted to Crime Stoppers of Pinellas County.

The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office confirmed to PEOPLE that Campbell’s murder is “still an open and active investigation assigned to our Cold Case detectives.”