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Family mystery may never be solved

Clifford Webber’s badly decomposed body was discovered on Tuesday morning in an abandoned home on Clovis’ West 14th Street. Police soon arrested his girlfriend and charged her with stabbing him in the chest.

But Webber’s death is not the only one on his family members’ minds today. It has sparked memories of another personal tragedy — the violent death of Webber’s mother in 1983.

They believe Sandra Glover was also a victim of homicide, which young Clifford may have witnessed.

Police said they have no plans to revisit the 26-year-old Glover case because time and the deaths of all the key witnesses would make it impossible to solve.

But the police incident report detailing Glover’s death does raise multiple questions about how she died.

Sandra Glover’s death

On the afternoon of March 18, 1983, an ambulance crew rushed Sandra Glover’s lifeless body to Clovis’ High Plains Hospital, where emergency room staff were unable to revive her.

Her live-in boyfriend told police she was having a seizure when “he left and went upstairs to fix an air vent,” in their home at 1200 Ash Street. When the boyfriend returned, Glover had fallen to the floor and wasn’t breathing, the police report said.

An autopsy determined Glover, 32, had suffered trauma to the brain from blows to the top of the head. Her boyfriend denied any connection to the death, then hired an attorney, refusing to talk further with police.

The incident report notes the autopsy findings, which includes the coroner’s inability to determine whether blows to the head were “inflicted by other persons.” The case was listed as “exceptionally cleared” and concludes there was “no evidence to indicate foul play.”

The report lists then-detectives Bill Carey and Jay Longley as officers who handled the investigation.

Carey, who retired as police chief in 2006, said he doesn’t remember the case, but that any suspicious deaths he worked were always “looked into pretty hard.”

 
 
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