By Fallan Patterson

Staff Writer

A family's persistence, new technology and the professionalism of a small city police department helped solve the 31-year-old murder of a reverend's wife.

Kay Myers drove throughout the night from her home in Nashville, Tenn., Dec. 30 to thank the St. Cloud Police Department for solving the cold case murder of her sister, Norma Page.

Page, 28, was killed on the first day of summer in 1979 in her children's bedroom after giving a stranger a drink of water.

“Norma said (St. Cloud) was the best place in the world to raise a family, it’s so safe,” Myers said tearfully at a Dec. 30 press conference at St. Cloud City Hall. “The Bible speaks about, 'Just give him a cup of water in my name,' and she did that and it cost her her life."

The stranger, Steve Herman Bronson Jr., 62, confessed to Page's murder Dec. 29 after speaking with detectives for several hours. He was arrested and charged with first-degree murder that afternoon. He is being held without bond at the Osceola County Jail after a brief stint at Osceola Regional Medical Center, complaining of chest pains on the way to the jail.  

Bronson is also known as Nancy Sue Bronson after legally changing his name, according to detectives. Bronson was booked into the jail under Nancy Sue after officers were unable to determine if he had legally changed his name back.

His driver license, which was issued in 1997 and expired in 2004, according to Sgt. Denise Roberts of the St. Cloud Police Department, listed Nancy Sue Bronson.

The department reopened the case in August 2009 after Myers, with the support of her and Page's two other sisters and a cousin, wrote a letter to detectives urging them to take another look at the evidence. Myers said she had taken “copious” notes throughout the years, including newspaper clippings, and delivered notebooks full of information to various law enforcement agencies, including the St. Cloud Police Department.

“This case would have been reopened regardless whether we got that letter,” department Capt. Bret Dunn said. “Since it had been so long we figured this was our last chance we would ever have to solve it.”

And it was the last time her husband, the Rev. Jim Page, was willing to relive it all again.

The Pages had been married for nine years before Norma's murder and they had lived in St. Cloud for four years prior to the crime.

Rev. Page was attending a teenage summer church camp in Leesburg as a counselor at the time of the homicide. Although he and his sons never went back to the home, they lived in an apartment in St. Cloud to help with the investigation, but in the end, it became overwhelming and he resigned from the church.

“Time has a way of healing but when it would come up, it would be like it happened yesterday,” the reverend said in a Jan. 3 telephone interview. “It was absolutely the nightmare of all nightmares. This was the last time for me.”

Page, who now leads the Church of the Nazarene in Apopka, did not attend the press conference but said he planned to drive to St. Cloud this week to meet with investigators.

“There's a relief in knowing. It's the best case scenario for us to have an arrest and then for him to confess,” he said. “You can let this define your life or you can let God define it. You can't let it just cripple you.”

On June 21, 1979, Norma Page was outside the Church of the Nazarene's parsonage, 1015 Tennessee Ave. — her husband’s first church. She was hanging clothes on a clothesline and watering her lawn when Bronson told detectives he was walking by and asked her for a drink of water.

It was then, according to accounts in the St. Cloud News, one of the Osceola News-Gazette's predecessors, Bronson forced the woman to drive to the Sun Bank in St. Cloud to cash one of her husband's checks.

Once they returned to the home, according to the arrest affidavit released Dec. 30, Page's two sons were locked inside their parents' bedroom while Page was taken into her sons' room.

“They were present (during their mother’s death),” St. Cloud Police Chief Pete Gauntlett said at the press conference. “They were with the perpetrator for quite a length of time.”

At some point, the boys were able to escape the home and notified a neighbor, Tommy Ivester, that “someone beat up my mom,” according to the arrest affidavit.

Ivester took the boys home and entered the residence, discovering Page's body. He then found three police officers at Ross E. Jeffries Elementary School at 12th Street and California Avenue. He told them what he had discovered.

By the time police arrived, the suspect had already fled.

Page was found nude from the waist down on a bed in her children's room with her feet tied together, her hands bound behind her back and her head wrapped in a towel or blanket, according to the arrest affidavit.

Page was struck in the head multiple times with a glass Del Monte ketchup bottle until it shattered. She was stabbed 34 times, according to the autopsy performed by Dr. Thomas F. Hegert, including four times in the left lung, which caused extensive hemorrhaging.

The cause of death was extensive blood loss secondary to the multiple stab wounds of her neck and chest.

Detectives saved several pieces of blood-covered clothing and materials in their evidence section at the police department, items that were later discovered to have a man's blood on them.

Bronson's DNA was found on the inside of a white and blue bathing suit top left in a bathroom sink, on a toddler's T-shirt found near the boys' beds and on a hand towel found in the patio area outside the Page home.

“Just because we have a cold case doesn't mean we have any DNA,” Sgt. Denise Roberts, of the St. Cloud Police Department, said. “In her case, thank goodness, we had sufficient DNA evidence.”

Bronson's DNA had been on file with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement since 1989 and it was the database those samples are kept in that allowed DNA Labs International, based in Deerfield Beach, to make the match in October.

St. Cloud police used more than $20,000 in forfeiture funds to pay for the DNA testing. If the department had used Florida Department of Law Enforcement DNA testing labs, which are often backlogged and lack the latest technology available, according to Dunn, the results could have taken months longer to attain. Dunn also said FDLE recommended the lab to his department.  

“It is rare that evidence was packaged and preserved and maintained the way it was where we could get an analysis,” Gauntlett said.

Although Bronson's DNA sat within the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's database for 21 years before it linked him to the Page murder, Rev. Page said the DNA testing procedures may not have been sophisticated enough to pin Bronson before.

“I think the technology had to catch up,” he said.

In a St. Cloud News column written by Sgt. Glenn L. Walton seven days after the murder he explained the crime kicked off “one of the most extensive and time-consuming investigations ever known to St. Cloud.”

St. Cloud police obtained an arrest warrant for Bronson on Dec. 28 and detectives met with Bronson the following day. Bronson was cooperative and officers arrested him at Avante at St. Cloud, a nursing home, where he had lived for five years and was receiving treatment for a series of strokes he suffered in recent years.

“I think this has haunted him for many years. The comments that he made were he essentially just 'lost it' and, for whatever reason, decided to do this,” Gauntlett said. “But keep in mind, the man today is a very different person than the monster he was many years ago.”

However, Myers, who said her family called the murderer the "mean man" for 31 years, does not believe Bronson is a different person.

"He's killed our family. Although the (chief) here said he's a different man, I still see an animal," she said. "Det. (Christian) Anderson's (lead investigator on the case currently) words were, 'You're right; he is an animal, but we have now caged him.'"

Bronson was never considered a suspect in the case prior to his DNA matching to evidence at the crime scene.

"Mr. Bronson was never on the radar screen," Gauntlett said. "For 31 years, he was not on anybody's radar and no one knew of his existence in regards to this case."

Police are currently investigating the possibility of a second person’s involvement in the crime and are seeking information on a Lester J. Bass, better know as “Jay” Bass, who lives out of state. Police are seeking information about Bronson's relationship to Bass around the time of the 1979 murder.

Anyone with additional information on the crime is urged to contact the St. Cloud Police Department Criminal Investigation Unit at 407-891-6765 or 407-891-6752.