Hairs pulled from a man’s head almost four decades ago convinced a jury to convict a Mississippi man for the 1987 killing of an 82-year-old woman in Pinellas County.
Michael Lapniewski, 58, was found guilty Thursday of beating and strangling Opal Weil after breaking into her home in Lealman. Prosecutors argued Lapniewski cut the home’s telephone wire, broke in, rummaged through drawers and pulled Weil’s wedding ring off her finger before murdering her.
Police collected 64 strands of brown hair, some individual and some in clumps, spread across the bedroom where Weil’s sister-in-law found her dead. Many hairs had degraded over time, but others contained intact DNA that analysts with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement tested years later.
“Back in 1987, we didn’t have the techniques and technology that we do now, which is why it took that long to figure it out,” Assistant State Attorney Alexandra Spadaro told the jury.
Over the three-day trial, prosecutors showed how DNA extracted from 12 hairs linked Lapniewski to the scene.
It took the jury an hour and a half to unanimously convict Lapniewski of first-degree murder.
Lapniewski looked up at the ceiling and closed his eyes as he awaited the verdict. His head swung down upon the announcement.
Circuit Judge Keith Meyer asked Lapniewski if he would like to address the court.
“I don’t even know what to say,” Lapniewski said. He mumbled. “I’m sorry guys, I don’t have a good statement.”
Meyer sentenced Lapniewski to life in prison. Lapniewski said he plans to appeal the decision.
Traci Crawford, Weil’s great-niece, made a trip from her home in Maryland to testify. She felt relief, she told the Tampa Bay Times after the trial, but not closure.
“He’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison where he can’t hurt anyone else,” Crawford said.
Lapniewski denies involvement
Police arrested Lapniewski at his home in Waveland, Mississippi, on Jan. 26, 2023. Six months earlier, officers had surreptitiously collected his saliva from a spoon, a fork and two coffee straws to compare his DNA to the hairs collected from the crime scene.
Before they arrested him, Detective Ron Chalmers of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office and another officer showed up to Lapniewski’s home under the guise of gathering more information about the case.
Lapniewski was 19 at the time of Weil’s murder. His parents lived 10 houses down from Weil. He lived a half-mile away.
In their initial interview, which was played for jurors, Lapniewski said he had no knowledge of any murders in his neighborhood.
He also described a tumultuous childhood, one where adults drank, partied and paraded in and out of the house. Lapniewski rarely attended school, and he said he feared his father planned to shoot him.
“We were the losers,” he can be heard telling officers in the recording. “There was no future at that house. Nobody was going to go anywhere. Dad didn’t care. Mom didn’t care.”
Later that day, Chalmers returned to arrest Lapniewski. While in custody, Lapniewski spoke with officers for more than three hours, often rambling but maintaining his innocence.
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but nobody’s died because of my mistakes,” he said.
“Well, Michael, I beg to differ,” Chalmers said.
Several murders shook the neighborhood
Weil’s killing was one of several that rattled her quiet, middle-class neighborhood, according to newspaper reports from the time.
Four days after Weil was killed, 84-year-old Eleanor Swift was found suffocated to death in her Seminole home.
Both killings involved older women who lived alone in single-story homes. In both cases, the attacker broke in through a window or door in the back of the house, according to Times reporting from 1997.
On Feb. 22, 1987, 75-year-old Maria Elz survived an attack in her Pinellas Park home.
In all three cases, each woman’s wedding ring was stolen.
The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office warned older women to lock their doors, the Times reported a week after Weil’s death. Deputies created a special phone line people could call for advice on home security or to provide information related to the killings. Police upped patrols in the areas where the women lived.
Sara Ledbetter lived a block away from Weil. The summer after Weil’s death, Ledbetter and her friends, many of them older women, organized a neighborhood watch program in Holdcroft Heights, the Times reported four months after the killing.
Security lights were installed behind houses. Floodlights brightened yards. Neighbors burned porch lights throughout the night.
“I’ve got my house lit up like a Christmas tree at night,” Ledbetter told the Times in 1987.
A cold case is revived
Every summer for at least a decade, Weil’s niece, Rita Smith, visited the sheriff’s office to read the unsolved murder file, the Times reported in 1997.
“I can’t rest until I know who did it and why,” she said at the time.
She met with detectives on the anniversary of Weil’s death to discuss the case and find new leads, Smith’s daughter, Traci Crawford, told the Times in an interview Tuesday.
When Smith died in 2023, Crawford picked up the mantle.
“I became the bearer of the case,” Crawford said. She credits Chalmers for giving the case new life.
“He bulldogged every lead,” she said.
The veteran detective from Reno joined the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office in 2018, first as a court bailiff, then as a cold case detective, Chalmers told the jury Wednesday. He has worked more than 100 homicide investigations, including 50 as a lead investigator.
Still, cold cases in Pinellas presented a new challenge.
“I’m obviously looking at a needle in a haystack that no one else has found,” he said in court Wednesday.
He began with the facts: photos and other evidence still available from the scene. He avoided detective reports until he figured out what questions he wanted answered based on the evidence.
Chalmers’ investigation led him to genetic genealogy testing — something he said is usually a tool of last resort.
Who was Opal Weil?
When Weil passed Marlyn Graham’s house on her regular morning and evening walks, she usually stopped to chat.
“She always looked beautiful,” Graham told a Times reporter the day after Weil was found dead. “She was as lovely on the inside as she was on the outside.”
Born in Georgia in 1904, Weil was one of 13 children, according to Crawford, her great-niece.
Weil worked as a buyer at Rich’s, a department store in Atlanta. Her first husband, Camp Skinner, played baseball for the Yankees, Crawford said.
She later married Conrad Weil, who died in 1976. A year after her second husband’s death, Weil moved to Florida, where she lived a few houses down from her baby brother, Walter Wayne Giles, and his wife, Freida.
The family celebrated holidays together and frequently gathered for dinners with the Giles’ daughter, Rita Smith, and Smith’s daughter, Traci Crawford.
Crawford was 22 when Weil was killed.
She remembers her great-aunt walked with grace and spoke softly. Weil kept her snow-white hair coiffed to match her polished appearance.
She likewise kept her house meticulously clean. Every night, she set out the clothes she would wear the next day.
The night she died, Crawford said, Weil left out her clothes, including the clear plastic belt police found next to her body. Crawford believes Lapniewski used the belt to suffocate her great-aunt.
To this day, before she goes to bed, Crawford sets out her outfit for the following day. But among the clothes, Crawford never sets out a belt.
