lawsuit. She only knew Wishart as a coworker and knew nothing of her personal life.
âShe was a very pleasant woman,â Marsha Fottler told DeNiro. Fottler served with the victim on the cityâs arts council, and wrote the âShop Talkâ column for Sarasota Magazine, where she once plugged Wishartâs gallery.
Fottler got to know Wishart through working on committees with her, such as Smart Talk, the Sarasota Arts Council, and the Sarasota/Manatee Breast Cancer Committee.
âThe gallery was the joy of her life,â Fottler added. The thing that bothered Fottler the most was that the gallery became the place of Wishartâs worst and final agony. She died horribly in the place she loved the most.
DeNiro interviewed a Sarasota artist named Linda Salomon whose work was exhibited at the Provenance. She said she had a fifty-fifty deal with the gallery. Anything that sold, she got half, and Wishart got half. Sadly, she said, her opening was supposed to be that night (January 22).
A preview of Salomonâs show was in the December 2003 issue of Sarasota Magazine . There was a photo of Salomon and her animal dolls and a pull quote saying how Salomonâs friends teased her because she became attached to her dolls and didnât want to part with them.
Salomon told DeNiro that she last saw Wishart on January 8, and last received an e-mail from her on January 14. Sheâd always gotten along with Wishart, but she had heard verbal arguments between the victim and employees of the nearby A Step Above Gallery.
A Step Above Gallery was DeNiroâs next stop. No one there remembered an argument, but Lois Ross, the ownerâs wife, said she last saw Wishart on Friday afternoon, talking with a man outside the Provenance, a man dressed nicely but not in a suit. The sighting was either at one oâclock in the afternoon, when Ross was on her way to an appointment, or at four oâclock, when she was returning.
A woman named Margaret Pennington had gone into the Provenance around noon on the day of the murder to admire Linda Salomonâs animal dolls. Wishart was very pleasant and introduced herself. No sign of trouble. She couldnât remember what Wishart was wearing. âI was looking at her red hair most of the time,â Pennington said.
DeNiro made a list of all of the callers on Joyce Wishartâs caller ID, both home and at the gallery. One by one, he tracked them down, looking for suspects. He found the chapters of Joyce Wishartâs lifeâold friends, neighbors, her dentistâbut not a clue regarding her death.
On the victimâs caller ID was Elaine Fox, who knew Wishart in Ohio, where they worked together at Chemlawn, and in Florida after both moved to Sarasota. Fox and her husband were the first to move south. Wishart came to visit, loved it, and she migrated as well. Fox told police that the last boyfriend of Wishartâs she remembered was a guy from Denver. She didnât know his name, but she thought he worked for a government nonprofit group and had a daughter in St. Petersburg. Fox said she was under the impression that Wishart broke up with this man before she herself moved to Florida, maybe 1998. Fox said Wishart was the type of person who could make people angry, but not to the point of creating enemies. Wishart was kind of a âknow-it-all,â Fox said, and could degrade people âwithout even knowing it.â
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Michelle Andersen, a coworker of Vicki Kroneâs, had worked at Admiral Travel for thirteen years, a workplace with little turnover. Many of the employees had been there for that long, and longer. In comparison, Joyce Wishart had only been in Sarasota for a couple of years and was still a relative newcomer.
Andersen admitted to not being a close friend of the victimâs. Which wasnât to say that Andersen and Wishart werenât friendly. They greeted each other, âHi, how are ya?â
Of course, Palm
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