One Month Before Graduation: The Disappearance of Kelly Rothwell

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

March 16, 2026

Kelly Lundy Rothwell was thirty five years old in March 2011, living in Indian Rocks Beach, Florida, and closing in on a genuine career milestone. She was a police academy cadet at the St. Petersburg Police Academy, set to graduate with her spring class on April 13, a goal that represented a significant new chapter she had been working toward. She stood five foot one, weighed around a hundred ten pounds, and had a small butterfly tattoo on her ankle. For roughly three years, she had been in a live-in relationship with a man named David Robert Perry, a forty six year old retired corrections officer who had moved into her home within just weeks of the two of them meeting, a whirlwind pace that friends and family would later describe, in hindsight, as an early sign of the volatility that came to define the relationship.

A Lunch Where She Finally Said It Out Loud

On the afternoon of March 12, 2011, Kelly met a friend for lunch at a Chili's restaurant in Clearwater. She left around 3:38 that afternoon, and during that lunch she had told her friend something she had apparently been building toward for a while: she was finally going to end her relationship with Perry. It was the kind of quiet, determined admission that friends often hear right before someone actually follows through, and in Kelly's case, it would turn out to be one of the last things she ever told anyone.

Neighbors near the condo Kelly shared with Perry later reported hearing her vehicle pull into the area that same afternoon. What followed, according to those same neighbors, was considerably more troubling: several loud thumps, followed by the sound of vacuuming, occurring sometime between 4:30 and 5:30 that evening. Kelly never showed up to meet friends later that night as planned.

A Car on a Causeway and a Condo That Smelled of Disinfectant

The following day, authorities located Kelly's green 2007 Subaru Outback abandoned on a causeway roughly a mile or more from her residence, with her purse and wallet nowhere to be found, either in the vehicle or anywhere else investigators searched. When investigators examined the condo Kelly shared with Perry, they found it in an unusual state for an ordinary Saturday, unusually clean, with a distinct odor of disinfectant lingering in the air, the kind of detail that, paired with the neighbors' account of vacuuming sounds heard hours earlier, suggested to investigators that someone might have been trying to erase something from that specific space.

David Perry, meanwhile, was already gone. He left the condo that same night and began driving toward Elmira, New York, his hometown, a trip of roughly twenty hours by car, undertaken on the very night his live-in girlfriend of three years had vanished without a trace and just hours after neighbors reported hearing suspicious sounds coming from their shared home.

A Pattern Investigators Couldn't Ignore

As detectives dug further into the weeks leading up to Kelly's disappearance, additional details emerged that only deepened their suspicion of Perry. He had canceled his gym membership shortly before Kelly vanished, and had told acquaintances at that gym that he and Kelly were planning to relocate to Hawaii together, a plan Kelly herself had apparently never mentioned to any of her own family or friends. After her disappearance, Perry began dating someone new, a woman who would go on to relocate to Hawaii, an echo of the very plan he had described to his gym acquaintances before Kelly vanished, just with an entirely different partner attached to it. Perry's ex-wife separately came forward describing a documented history of domestic violence and threats during their own marriage, adding further weight to the picture investigators were building of a man with an established pattern of controlling, volatile behavior toward the women in his life.

When detectives eventually traveled to New York to pursue leads directly, they found a family and social circle around Perry that was largely unwilling to cooperate. Some associates refused to speak with investigators entirely, and at least one relative requested an attorney before agreeing to answer any questions at all. Perry himself proved even less cooperative. When detectives asked him to come to an Elmira police station on June 6, 2011, simply to sign paperwork releasing his vehicle from police custody, Perry instead bolted, running out the front door and into the parking lot rather than engage with law enforcement in any capacity, an episode that read, to investigators, as anything but the behavior of an innocent, grieving boyfriend.

A Suspect Who Quickly Remarried

By August 2011, investigators had moved Perry from person of interest to formally named suspect in Kelly's disappearance, citing the accumulated circumstantial evidence, his own erratic behavior, and the documented history of volatility in his relationship with Kelly. He was never charged in connection with her case specifically. He was, however, arrested in New York in May 2011, on charges entirely unrelated to Kelly's disappearance, accused of insurance fraud connected to a workplace injury he had allegedly fabricated back in 2003, along with a separate grand larceny charge tied to retirement benefits he had collected as a result of that same fabricated injury. He was ultimately convicted on those fraud related charges, and was separately convicted of assault after an altercation with a fellow inmate while incarcerated, though across all of his combined sentences connected to those unrelated crimes, he ultimately served less than two years behind bars. Perry also moved quickly to remarry in the aftermath of Kelly's disappearance, marrying a woman from Hawaii not long after Kelly vanished, a detail that struck investigators and Kelly's own family as strikingly fast given the circumstances surrounding his previous relationship's abrupt and unexplained end.

A Cold Case Marked Every Anniversary

Kelly Rothwell has never been found, and the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office has continued marking the anniversary of her disappearance publicly in the years since, using each milestone as an opportunity to renew requests for information from anyone who might still hold a piece of what actually happened that March afternoon. On the ninth anniversary of her disappearance in 2020, detectives again asked the public for help, acknowledging that despite years of investigation, the case remained unsolved and Kelly remained missing.

More than fifteen years after Kelly Rothwell left a Clearwater restaurant with the quiet intention of finally ending a relationship she had described as volatile, she has never been located, no charges have ever been filed in connection with her presumed death, and David Perry, the man investigators have long considered their primary suspect, has since served time only for crimes entirely unrelated to the woman whose disappearance first brought him under scrutiny.

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