Willie Craine was sentenced to death by the State of Florida for the sexual assault and murder of a seven year old girl. According to court documents Willie Craine would kidnap, sexually assault and murder seven year old Amanda Brown. Willie Craine would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Willie Craine 2021 Information
| DC Number: | 096344 |
|---|---|
| Name: | CRAIN, WILLIE S JR. |
| Race: | WHITE |
| Sex: | MALE |
| Birth Date: | 04/23/1946 |
| Initial Receipt Date: | 09/14/2000 |
| Current Facility: | UNION C.I. |
| Current Custody: | MAXIMUM |
| Current Release Date: | DEATH SENTENCE |
Willie Craine More News
Some days, Kathryn Hartman is overwhelmed
by guilt and despair, imagining her 7-year-old daughter
floating dead in Old Tampa Bay near the crab traps and the
fishing boats.
“How could I be so stupid?” she says. “What was I thinking?
Why didn’t some sort of instinct kick in?”
Three weeks ago, Hartman let a man she had met two days
earlier into her bed, and when morning came, her daughter,
Amanda Brown, was gone.
The man, Willie Crain Jr., turned out to be a convicted
child molester. And now he stands charged with kidnapping
and murdering Amanda.
Amanda’s body has not been found. But police discovered
blood consistent with Amanda’s DNA along the toilet rim and
on tissue in the toilet at Crain’s trailer. They believe
Crain dumped her body, perhaps in Old Tampa Bay, where as a
commercial fisherman he set his crab traps.
Crain, 52, was jailed without bail. He has said he has
no idea what happened to Amanda.
“There is no comparison of what I am now to what I was 14
years ago,” he told the St. Petersburg Times before he was
charged Thursday. “I was bad back then. I was fighting the
world. Now, I am a human being.”
Hartman, a single mother, had met the crabber at a bar
where his daughter worked, and invited him to her home.
Detectives say he gave Valium tablets to Hartman, telling
her it would relieve her back pain, then crawled into bed
beside her and Amanda as the woman drifted off to sleep.
Hartman awoke to her blaring alarm clock at 6:12 a.m.
and discovered Crain and her little girl gone.
At the police station, she learned that Crain had served
more than six years in prison beginning in 1985 for raping
five girls, all roughly her daughter’s age.
“I didn’t know what kind of man he was,” she says,
crying.
“I blame her,” Amanda’s father, Roy Brown, says of
Hartman. “You bring a man you don’t even know into your
house and you’ve got a young girl there. Tell me you’re not
accountable.”
Hartman says she had dismissed a gut feeling that Crain
was a bit strange, instead believing his daughter, who
described him as a good man looking for the right woman.
She says she and her daughter had spent part of the
evening at Crain’s trailer, where, after getting off the
telephone, she realized Crain and Amanda were in his
bedroom with the door closed. She says she opened the door
and saw Amanda standing between Crain’s knees, his arms
wrapped around her as he showed her how to use the remote
control.
“It just didn’t look right,” Hartman says. She separated
the two and suggested it was time to head home. Crain
followed along back to her trailer, about a mile away in
the town of Seffner, just east of Tampa.
“He would not take a hint. Finally, I said, `Look, we’re
going to bed. You can lay down on the sofa if you need to
sober up,’ ” she recalls.
She says Crain instead followed them into the bedroom,
lying down fully clothed on the bed with her and Amanda.
Hartman, tired from the Valium, says she didn’t object.