A hammer and a can of hairspray. Those were the only weapons Bernice Allen, 66, kept by her front door after a suspicious death at the Blue Skies Mobile Home Park in Florida where she lived.

Bernice was “fearless,” remembers her daughter-in-law, Mona Allen of Bowling Green.

“She wasn’t afraid of anything,” Mona said. “She would tackle the world.”

The Logan County native and former Bowling Green resident lived in Florida for more than a decade when her neighbor was discovered dead in his trailer in the fall of 1982. While no foul play was ever determined in that case, there was no doubt about what killed Bernice just weeks later – a vicious blow to the head from a blunt object.

For the past 26 years, Mona Allen has devoutly prayed that her mother-in-law’s killer would be brought to justice.

Thanks to a determined police officer, a deck of cards and advances in technology, her prayers may finally be answered.

“She was a very outgoing person. She never met a stranger,” Mona said of Bernice, who lived most of her adult life in Bowling Green. Bernice worked at auto parts manufacturer Holley and sold cosmetics on the side.

A marriage ended in divorce, but not before producing a son, Kenneth. Mona, who also worked at Holley, met Kenneth in 1958 through a friend. They married three years later, and moved into a house about a block from Bernice’s home.

In the late 1960s, Bernice told her family she decided to move to Florida to be near her sister, Vechel McCullen, who managed a motel in Daytona Beach, Fla.

She moved into a trailer at the Blue Skies Mobile Home Park – a small U-shaped cluster of homes in South Daytona, Fla., along the Halifax River. Mona, Kenneth and their daughter, Sharon, then 5, visited Bernice in 1969 for what would become an annual trip. During the visits, Bernice doted on her only grandchild and took the family on cross-state excursions.

“She was a sun worshipper,” Mona said. “She loved the outdoors and she took us to parts of Florida we had never seen before.”

The summer trip in 1982 included the usual array of beach activities, sightseeing and “just being lazy,” Mona recalled.

The next time they visited Florida, however, was to gather Bernice’s belongings and arrange her funeral. On Sept. 22 of that year – a Wednesday – Bernice had been out for her usual bingo night. She won $5.

The next morning, she didn’t show up for her job at Signorelli’s Elderly Care center. Her employer, Mario Signorelli, went to the mobile home park, thinking Bernice might be sick. After getting no answer to his knocks on her trailer door, he peered through a window and saw Bernice face-down in a pool of blood.

“She still had rollers in her hair, and her nightgown was up around her neck,” Sandra Marasigan, one of Mario Signorelli’s daughters, told the Daytona News-Journal.

Bernice had been raped and killed.

South Daytona Police called Mona to inform her that her mother-in-law was dead – disbelief led her to think it might have been a prank call.

“So I called back, and a policeman answered at her trailer,” Mona said. “It was such a shock.”

The Allens immediately embarked on the 750-mile trip to Florida.

“We drove all night to get there; we didn’t stop,” Mona remembers.

As the family prepared to bring Bernice’s body back to Bowling Green for the funeral, police told the Allens they had few leads.

Bernice Allen was buried at Bowling Green’s Fairview Cemetery a week after her death. The funeral was attended by hundreds of her family members and friends, Mona said. Florida investigators, meanwhile, were hitting nothing but dead ends in the investigation into Bernice’s murder.

The Allens and Bill Hall first crossed paths at the Blue Skies Mobile Home Park after Bernice’s death. He had been a police officer for only about four years and was a junior investigator, “riding the right seat with a senior investigator,” he recalled, when he was given the Bernice Allen murder case.

There was little evidence to go on: A sliding glass door that may have been left open, a small stain that may have been left by the killer, no witnesses, and no obvious motive – just a rape that had escalated to murder. Nothing had been taken from the trailer.

“We tracked down as many people as we could. We followed leads as you do, but we didn’t have the technology we do today,” Hall said. “Most of it was done with old-fashioned leg work.”

That work failed to produce any substantial leads. But Mona Allen didn’t lose faith, and kept in touch with Hall despite the decreasing odds of a murder charge as the years passed.

“We drove down there one time to see if they knew anything, and it took them 30 minutes just to find her file,” Mona said.

Yet she continued to believe in Hall.

“He just never gave up,” Mona said.

Fifteen years passed, and nothing new was found. Then, in 1997, Hall, who was by then a captain with South Daytona Police, was reading a newspaper account of the arrest of Thomas Morris Franklin, 42, a Florida resident with a criminal record who was being investigated as a possible serial rapist of elderly women.

Franklin was first connected to the rape cases after he was arrested for loitering outside an elderly woman’s house in Ormond-by-the-Sea, about 12 miles north of South Daytona.

Hall realized the crimes of which Franklin was accused of fit the Allen case perfectly: An elderly woman, living alone in the Daytona Beach area, had been attacked and raped.

“It was exactly his M-O,” Hall said.

Franklin was also known to have once lived in South Daytona.

Hall called Mona, saying they had a potential break in Bernice’s murder case.

“I said, ‘Please don’t play with our emotions,’ ” Mona recalled; Hall assured her that he wasn’t.

As Franklin was being questioned by police about the rapes, “I asked investigators to follow up with him on the Allen case,” Hall said. “But he denied any knowledge of killing her. He said he didn’t know anything about her.”

A blood sample from Franklin linked him to the other assaults, and he eventually confessed to raping five Florida women between the ages of 66 and 90.

There was evidence in the Allen case that might have linked Franklin to the murder: a DNA sample from Bernice’s trailer. But there was a catch: The sample was very small, and testing it would likely destroy the sample – the strongest piece of evidence that linked Bernice to her killer.

“At the encouragement of the crime lab, we decided not to test it,” Hall said.

Franklin was eventually sentenced to life in prison for the confessed rapes and incarcerated at the Santa Rosa Correctional Institution in Milton, Fla. Meanwhile, the murder of Bernice Allen remained unsolved.

A decade later, however, a dramatic break in the case was spurred by a deck of cards.

CrimeStoppers organizations across the country use a variety of tools to get information about unsolved crimes to the public. A 2007 effort undertaken by CrimeStoppers of Northeast Florida involved producing a deck of playing cards, with information about the area’s unsolved murders on the backs of the cards. After getting information from the area’s largest police departments, however, they only had 40 cases.

“They needed 12 more cases, and contacted some of the smaller departments, including us,” said Hall, who had by then been promoted to police chief. South Daytona had two unsolved murders, including the Allen case.

“The case has always been in the back of my mind,” he said. “This put it back (in the forefront).”

Hall conferred with police department investigative assistant Nancy Lee about the Allen case. Lee told Hall that advances in DNA testing could mean the sample found in Bernice’s trailer could now be tested with sufficient results to find a match – and without destroying it.

They decided it was worth trying.

So, in November, Lee sent two samples of Franklin’s DNA to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement Crime Lab in Orlando, Fla. Two weeks ago, they got the results: Franklin’s DNA matched that found in Bernice’s trailer.

On Thursday, Franklin, now 53, was formally charged with the 1982 murder of Bernice Unsolved Allen.

Hall believes Franklin entered Bernice’s trailer with the intent to rape her, but that she fought back against her attacker.

“With (Franklin), violence would beget violence,” he said. “Most rapes don’t escalate to murder, but she probably resisted.”

The murder charge against Franklin is expected to be heard by a Florida grand jury within three weeks.

Hall said it’s hard to express the emotions that came with being able to finally charge the man police believe killed Bernice Allen.

“Police never want to leave homicide cases unsolved,” Hall said. “But satisfied isn’t the word for it. In a murder case, you want to bring closure, not only for family, but for police – these things don’t just get filed away.”

Mona says she broke down and cried when Hall called her with the news.

“I prayed that God would answer my prayers, and he did,” she said. “I never gave up hope.”