Mystery couple murdered in South Carolina, 1976 - #6

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TedMac said:
Some have suggested that they may have been police informants and LE was covering up for them. As a former police officer I can attest that informants are not excused from murders.

MOO, I tend to believe that the killer may have been either Henry or the relative (or both), but they were able to avoid prosecution due to sloppy police work. Plus, they lost the gun later and now have no murder weapon.
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I live in the small town I grew up in. Everyone is related by blood or marriage (and sometimes both, it’s Appalachia). You would be surprised what can be and is covered up, if someone is connected. Even in a few cases, murder. I bet if you went down there to Sumter County and talked to people of the right age, they know who did it. Very few secrets exist in that kind of place.

Small towns aren’t Mayberry, but the police do outwardly seem to resemble Barney Fife on occasion. Look into things too carefully and you might lose your job, or worse.
If I was driving around with a weapon with altered or removed serial numbers, I’d expect to do some time. Henry didn’t, and they lost the murder weapon to boot. Do you REALLY believe that LE could be THAT inept?
 
I understand small town politics, I have lived around small towns all of my life. But, I really do not believe this is some grand cover-up. In 40+ years, if someone in LE knew who did it, it would have come to light-one way or another. Also, if the victims were someone the locals knew, their ID would have been uncovered. They were not from the area and perhaps not even from this country.

Possessing a firearm with no serial number, was not a crime in 1976. Yes, as I mentioned in my post, LE did lose the gun. It is certainly not the first piece of evidence that has gone missing from LE's possession. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. Not sure inept is the correct word-more like lack of experience in handling cases of this magnitude. If LE was protecting someone (Henry or the relative), they would have never tested the gun to begin with to see if it was the murder weapon. If they knew this already and wanted to cover up the crime, they would have tossed it away after the DUI arrest so no test could be done.
 
TedMac said:
I understand small town politics, I have lived around small towns all of my life. But, I really do not believe this is some grand cover-up. In 40+ years, if someone in LE knew who did it, it would have come to light-one way or another. Also, if the victims were someone the locals knew, their ID would have been uncovered. They were not from the area and perhaps not even from this country.

Possessing a firearm with no serial number, was not a crime in 1976. Yes, as I mentioned in my post, LE did lose the gun. It is certainly not the first piece of evidence that has gone missing from LE's possession. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. Not sure inept is the correct word-more like lack of experience in handling cases of this magnitude. If LE was protecting someone (Henry or the relative), they would have never tested the gun to begin with to see if it was the murder weapon. If they knew this already and wanted to cover up the crime, they would have tossed it away after the DUI arrest so no test could be done.
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It's most likely if there was a cover up in this case it would be on the family level. However, entertaining the possibility of something more, if LE were involved in a cover up I'm certain it wouldn't be to help out George Henry but would have been the other way around. It would have been him helping them to divert attention and forever blur up this case or maybe they just didn't like him anyway and saw an opportunity and just outright set him up. Anyway it's most likely just some members of this family doing the covering up. Just about all unsolved murders are a cover up to some degree.

You could contribute the fact that LE lost the murder weapon in this case to their inexperience but didn't they lose the male victims teeth? They gave them to some school to use for teaching purposes and when they went back to get them the school had already disposed of them. Now that would be pretty inept not to mention disrespectful.

By the way, I don't know how this got started up about Henry being a convicted felon. This is something new to me that I have just recently heard. LE said that he had only some minor brushes with the law. George Henry was not a convicted felon.
 
TedMac: I believe this couple was killed execution style....3 bullets each seems excessive and overkill for a random killing. They were not shot in the face..as to keep them identifiable to family , inner circle....send a message perhaps? Drug running? Your thoughts
 
Also, a car was seen leaving....must of been at least two killers...one to drive, and one to keep an eye on our victims. No sign of ligature marks....
 
TedMac said:
Possessing a firearm with no serial number, was not a crime in 1976. Yes, as I mentioned in my post, LE did lose the gun. It is certainly not the first piece of evidence that has gone missing from LE's possession. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. Not sure inept is the correct word-more like lack of experience in handling cases of this magnitude. If LE was protecting someone (Henry or the relative), they would have never tested the gun to begin with to see if it was the murder weapon. If they knew this already and wanted to cover up the crime, they would have tossed it away after the DUI arrest so no test could be done.
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Technically you are probably right about state law, I don’t know. However, under federal law (18 U.S.C. § 922(k)), if he had crossed a state line with altered or missing numbers, it would have been pretty serious. That became law in 1968.
How experienced do you have to be to just put the murder weapon in the evidence room with a tag and leave it there?
I don’t think it was a grand conspiracy, but perhaps someone wanted it to be quashed after they got wind of things. I’ve seen that happen, investigations are dropped without a word. Evidence goes missing, crippling a case. Everyone in the world did not have to be in on it. LE is not some monolithic entity.

Anyway, the killer will never be known with certainty, the evidence had too much of a minor league or willful mishandling. But the DNA is in the system, and we will know who they are, within a year I would think.
 
Magnum P.E. said:
Technically you are probably right about state law, I don’t know. However, under federal law (18 U.S.C. § 922(k)), if he had crossed a state line with altered or missing numbers, it would have been pretty serious. That became law in 1968.
How experienced do you have to be to just put the murder weapon in the evidence room with a tag and leave it there?
I don’t think it was a grand conspiracy, but perhaps someone wanted it to be quashed after they got wind of things. I’ve seen that happen, investigations are dropped without a word. Evidence goes missing, crippling a case. Everyone in the world did not have to be in on it. LE is not some monolithic entity.

Anyway, the killer will never be known with certainty, the evidence had too much of a minor league or willful mishandling. But the DNA is in the system, and we will know who they are, within a year I would think.
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I agree with you that these people will be identified. The DDP is on it and I wish them speed and luck. I also agree that the perps will probably not be known but you never know what might happen when the victims are known. Answering this one question of who these people are could answer so many other questions or it could just raise more questions. Either way I'm ready to find out. There are some here that think when the DDP or some other organization gets involved in a case that everything else should just come to a screeching halt. I am not one of them and I hope people never stop talking about this case. Look at Jack the Ripper, probably the most infamous case of them all. People still like talking about it and always will. Now I'm not saying that this case is of that calibre but it's still one for the ages, there's a lot that can be learned from it and about it and I for one hope that people never stop talking about it.
 
I read it in a newspaper, I will send a link but it requires a subscription payment. I have clipped the story & saved so I do not know if you will be able to view it that way or not. I have also found his death certificate through genealogy contacts.
 
T rex said:
I agree with you that these people will be identified. The DDP is on it and I wish them speed and luck. I also agree that the perps will probably not be known but you never know what might happen when the victims are known. Answering this one question of who these people are could answer so many other questions or it could just raise more questions. Either way I'm ready to find out. There are some here that think when the DDP or some other organization gets involved in a case that everything else should just come to a screeching halt. I am not one of them and I hope people never stop talking about this case. Look at Jack the Ripper, probably the most infamous case of them all. People still like talking about it and always will. Now I'm not saying that this case is of that calibre but it's still one for the ages, there's a lot that can be learned from it and about it and I for one hope that people never stop talking about it.
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“Chain of Custody” evidence is also gone?
 
canteloupe said:
I don’t greater access to library databases at the moment, but there seems to be a strong possibility that Guy could be the child of Dr. Jules Carignan (deceased) of Trois-Rivières.

Dr. Carignan, interestingly, was a dentist listed in the directory of the Canadian dental society members (see attached).
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These were my thoughts as well. Glad to see we are on the same page.
 
IndieCindy said:
These were my thoughts as well. Glad to see we are on the same page.
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I think we might be in the minority...someone posted it to reddit and didn’t get any traction, either.

It’s super weird that these two don’t show up on the Quebec missing persons list??
 
T rex said:
According to this site it seems George Henry did have another child. He went by the same name and was born in 1946.
In Ancestry.com’s records, someone posted another son with death date also as 1973. But he did not have another son as far as I could find. You have to be careful when researching because sometimes people that post the info believe their information is correct when in fact, they only have bits and pieces. It appears you found the fathers information. And I have also seen the son’s information recorded as a “JR” (on Ancestry & in another newspaper story), but the death certificate is accurate. I believe DNA will prove who these people were.

Lonnie George Henry (1918-1982) • FamilySearch
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canteloupe said:
I think we might be in the minority...someone posted it to reddit and didn’t get any traction, either.

It’s super weird that these two don’t show up on the Quebec missing persons list??
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They do show up in Canada’s Database of missing persons. 1973. The photos I provided were from their 1973 records; they would be a few years older than shown in the “missing persons” photos. I believe these are the same persons as Jock and Jane Doe. But DNA will be the key.
 
Silentium said:
To me these two girls are not the same person... :cool:
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The photos of the Canada couple would be approximately three years younger than the Carolina couple. The shape of the mouth, chin, eyes and nose look the same to me. And the measurement from each point appears to line up. ‍♀️ But who knows. I hope the DNA can tell us more.
 
Thanks for the links, IndieCindy, I may try to put them over in our media thread sometime. We really should try to keep that thread up a little better. Most of the old links over there don't work anymore.


Yes, the son their referring to having died in 1973 is, of course, the same one we've been talking about that drowned at that same time but I am becoming convinced that Henry still had another son. This is two different ancestry sites giving pretty much the same information. His name was Lonnie George Henry (after his father) and it lists the mother as Doris Horne, who was indeed Henry's wife. It's true that one site could have taken information from the other but the fact that both sites are accurate on the rest of the family, both immediate and extended, gives me confidence that this information is accurate too.
 
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canteloupe said:
I think we might be in the minority...someone posted it to reddit and didn’t get any traction, either.

It’s super weird that these two don’t show up on the Quebec missing persons list??
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I considered it back when I made this post but I still think it's a long shot.


T rex said:
If you look right below Lucie Gelinas on this same site there is this man, Guy Carignan. He went missing from the same place less than a week later and had the same story of going to Vancouver with a friend.
Them being this couple may be a long shot but I wonder if they went missing together and if anyone else has ever noticed this. The friends could never be located in either case so maybe they are the friends to each other.

Canada's Missing | Case details
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