Identified! NC - Edgecombe Co., UID remains off Seven Bridges Rd, Mar'10 - Roberta Williams

On March 27, six days after Christine was laid to rest, a man riding his four-wheeler through a wooded area abutting Seven Bridges Road happened upon a skeleton that had apparently gone unnoticed in previous searches of the area. The body was that of Roberta Williams, a 40-year-old black woman convicted of prostitution in 2006. Roberta used to do cleaning work at the taxi station. The cabbie had watched her go quietly to pieces. The last time he saw her, she was walking the streets of the Neighborhood. She told him she was HIV-positive. That had been over a year ago. Friends and family members had reported Roberta's disappearance. The authorities claimed to have no record of it.

On April 6, 2010, North Carolina governor Bev Perdue dispatched a hundred National Guard troops to scour Seven Bridges Road and elsewhere around Rocky Mount for more bodies. They found nothing. For now, the numbers hold at nine dead, two missing.

Are there others? Will there be others, even with Pittman locked up? Over and over, I heard horror stories from daily life in the Neighborhood: a knife to the throat, a blow to the head, flung from a car at high speed, death threats, rape. The assailants went by names other than Antwan. They drove vehicles other than Pittman's Pontiac Bonneville.

No one, in any event, has been charged for these crimes. Almost certainly no one will be. Destitute black women in a hopeless pocket of America meeting violence and rape and murder with no one to stop it — it is an infuriating constant.

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