NC NC - Christine Boone, 45, Rocky Mount, 25 Aug 2006

Search team aids task force
Sheriff confirms sixth case in probe

By Mike Hixenbaugh
Rocky Mount Telegram

Wednesday, September 09, 2009

A search team from Johnston County helped canvass swampy and wooded fields in rural Edgecombe County on Wednesday, joining a task force investigation into the murders of at least six black Rocky Mount women who have been found dead along the same rural stretch since 2003.

Investigators have been searching for three other missing Rocky Mount women whose profiles are similar to the victims.

A spokeswoman from the Johnston County Sheriff’s Office confirmed a 13-member search and rescue team had been dispatched to assist the Edgecombe County Sheriff’s Office in searching areas off Seven Bridges Road, a couple miles outside Rocky Mount.

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Police are searching for at least three missing women – Yolanda “Snap” Lancaster, 37, Joyce Renee Durham, 46, and Christine Boone, 43 – in connection with the investigation.
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Skeletal remains found a week ago in a wooded area in Scotland Neck have been identified as a Rocky Mount woman missing for nearly four years.

Christine Marie Boone, 43, was last seen Aug. 25, 2006, in Rocky Mount by a family member. Law enforcement officials recovered her remains in a wooded area behind a vacant mobile home at 98 Nasturtium Lane, Scotland Neck, and her identity was confirmed by the Greenville medical examiner.

Antwan Maurice Pittman lived in that mobile home in 2006, according to a Rocky Mount Police Department news release. But, on Friday, Pittman had not been charged with Boone's death.

Pittman is currently being held at the Edgecombe County jail, arrested in September and charged with the strangulation death of Taraha Shenice Nicholson, 28, one of six homicides dating back to 2005. Boone is the seventh.

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Christine had been from a hardworking, deeply religious family. It often fell to one of her ten siblings, Minnie Jones, to fetch her crack-ravaged younger sister from the streets of the Neighborhood — until one day in the summer of 2006, when Minnie went looking and Christine was not to be found.

The older sister reported Christine missing to the authorities. Their disinterest was astounding. "People walk away from their lives all the time," a man with a badge told her.

And Minnie never heard from the police after that—not until nearly four years later, on March 12, 2010, when a call came to inform her that, as it turned out, Christine Boone had not walked away from her life. Instead, her life had been taken from her. And what was left of Christine had been discovered one week earlier in an advanced state of decomposition out in the woods, thirty-seven miles northeast of Rocky Mount, near a trailer that had once been occupied by Antwan Pittman.

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