A Bag of Candy and a Bite Mark: The Disappearance of Andrea Gail Parsons

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

July 11, 2026

Andrea Gail Parsons was ten years old in the summer of 1993, living in Port Salerno, a small waterfront community in Martin County, Florida, with her mother Linda, who worked night shifts to support the two of them. She stood not quite five feet tall, weighed around eighty pounds, had brown hair and hazel eyes, and had recently had her ears pierced, the kind of small, ordinary detail that shows up in a missing child poster precisely because everything else about a ten year old's life is so unremarkable that investigators have to grasp for whatever distinguishing marks they can find. On the evening of July 11, 1993, with her mother off at work, Andrea asked her mother's boyfriend for permission to walk to a friend's house and stop at a nearby grocery store along the way. He said yes. She never came back.

Candy, Soda, and a Wave to a Passing Car

Witnesses placed Andrea walking the short distance, about two blocks, toward the store that evening around six o'clock. An employee inside later confirmed she had come in and bought candy and a soda, ordinary purchases for a kid on a summer evening. Some accounts of the case describe her waving and honking, in the sense of getting the attention of a local couple, as they drove past her on the street sometime after she left the store, suggesting she was still moving through the neighborhood in good spirits after her purchase. Other reports place her afterward near the intersection of Commerce Avenue and Seward Avenue, possibly collecting empty soda cans, a small errand within an errand that many kids did in that era for a little extra pocket change. Whatever she was doing in those last minutes, she never made it to her friend's house. Her friend told investigators Andrea simply never arrived. Her mother returned home from her shift and realized her daughter was missing at 10:10 that night, and called police roughly fifty minutes later, just before 11 p.m.

A Neighbor Across the Street

The investigation moved slowly at first, the way cases involving a seemingly voluntary disappearance sometimes do, before shifting hard toward something much darker. Months after Andrea vanished, in November 1993, a Port Salerno resident named Claude Davis came forward with information about that night. Davis was not a stranger to law enforcement. He had a prior conviction for child molestation in an unrelated case, and, in one of the more unsettling details of the entire investigation, lived directly across the street from the Parsons family the entire time.

Davis's account of what happened to Andrea shifted more than once. He initially told investigators he had witnessed four or five Hispanic men forcing Andrea into a maroon Oldsmobile, a version of events that, if true, would have pointed investigators toward strangers entirely disconnected from the neighborhood. He later abandoned that story and offered something far more incriminating and far closer to home, describing an encounter in which a man grabbed Andrea, placed her in a vehicle, and attempted to kiss her, only for her to bite down hard enough on his thumb to draw blood as she tried to escape. In this version, Davis claimed Andrea then died, whether from an accidental fall or some other cause depending on which telling investigators were working from, and that he panicked afterward and disposed of her body in a dumpster rather than report what had happened. Police arrested Davis on charges of false imprisonment based on his own shifting statements, but ultimately released him when he refused to take a polygraph test and prosecutors determined they didn't have sufficient evidence to hold him. He continued living across the street from Andrea's mother for years afterward, never formally charged in connection with her death.

A Name From Alabama

The case sat unresolved for nearly two decades before investigators in 2012 connected an unrelated assault charge in Alabama to a man named Chester Duane Price, then forty two years old. Questioning Price in connection with that separate matter eventually led investigators back to Andrea Parsons, and in November 2012 he was charged with her kidnapping and murder. The case against Price leaned heavily on testimony Claude Davis had given to a grand jury years earlier, describing how the two of them had together forced Andrea into a vehicle after she had asked for a ride, and how Andrea's bite to Price's hand during her attempt to escape had preceded her death at Price's hands specifically, rather than through any accident. Davis himself could never be prosecuted for his own alleged role in what happened that night, since by the time Price was charged, pursuing charges against Davis directly would have violated his constitutional right to a speedy trial given how much time had elapsed since investigators first knew what he'd told them. Davis died in 2013, still never formally convicted of anything connected to Andrea's death, taking with him whatever additional details he might have eventually been persuaded to share.

A Plea, Not a Trial

With Davis gone and Andrea's body never having been recovered anywhere in the twenty years since her disappearance, prosecutors faced a genuinely difficult case to bring in front of a jury, built as it was on the secondhand testimony of a man who was no longer alive to be cross examined and who had changed his own account of events more than once while he was. In early 2014, Chester Price accepted a plea deal, entering a plea of no contest to charges of aggravated manslaughter of a child and kidnapping with aggravated child abuse. Circuit Judge Elizabeth Metzger sentenced him to ten years, with credit for time he had already served in county jail, and ordered that his sentences on the two charges run concurrently rather than one after another, meaning the practical time he still owed the system was considerably shorter than the ten year figure alone might suggest. Prosecutors were candid about why the case had ended this way rather than at trial, pointing to the twenty year gap since the crime, the death of their key witness, and the simple, enduring fact that Andrea's remains had never been found anywhere for anyone to examine.

Linda Parsons, Andrea's mother, addressed the court in a letter that captured, in plain and devastating language, exactly what that plea deal felt like from where she was sitting after two decades of waiting. The court system worked in your favor, she wrote, directing her words at the man who had just avoided a trial for killing her daughter. In a perfect world, she continued, you should have gotten the death penalty. It was not a sentence handed down by a judge that closed the book on Andrea's case in any way that felt like justice to the one person who had spent twenty years living with her absence. It was a plea bargain shaped entirely by the practical limitations of building a case around a body that was never recovered and a witness who died before he could ever be made to answer for his own part in what happened.

Released, Still Without a Body

Chester Price served three years and five months at Dade Correctional Facility following his sentencing, and was ultimately released to the Florida Civil Commitment Center in Arcadia, a facility focused on counseling and reintegration support rather than continued incarceration in the traditional sense. Andrea Gail Parsons has never been found. No location has ever been confirmed for whatever remains of her might still exist, whether in the dumpster Claude Davis once described disposing of her in or somewhere else entirely that neither man now living, and neither man since dead, ever chose to reveal. More than thirty years after a ten year old girl walked two blocks to buy candy and soda on a summer evening in Port Salerno, her mother has a plea agreement, a ten year sentence already served, and a letter she once wrote to a courtroom telling a killer plainly what she believed he actually deserved. What she does not have, and what the case's entire resolution was ultimately built around the absence of, is her daughter.

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