Re-post from previous threads (2007/2008)
Unfortunately, without link or found on the net.
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"I don't know if you've already seen this article, it's pretty interesting."
Dead end?
By Brian Ray
Staff Writer
Photo by Jim Shine
SUMTER ' It will be 28 years Monday since a young man and woman were found shot to death beside a dirt road in Sumter County.
The couple lie side by side now in plain graves at a country church in Oswego.
Their headstones read simply, 'Female Unknown' and 'Male Unknown.'
No parents have come to pay their respects. No killer has been convicted ' though authorities once had a prime suspect. Their murder remains a mystery that piques minds and touches hearts.
'They were somebody's kids,' says Patricia Riddle of Oswego. 'You just don't want to believe their parents don't care.'
Like others in the community, Riddle is drawn to the graves when she comes into the churchyard at Bethel United Methodist Church. The graves are well kept, and visitors ' she is not sure who or when ' sometimes bring flowers.
The two young people were buried Aug. 14, 1977, but their story begins a year earlier.
The crime
On Aug. 9, 1976, a man living in the sticks between Sumter and Florence heard a car scuttling down a narrow frontage road connecting Interstate 95 to S.C. 341. Someone climbed out. Gunshots echoed in the early morning, then the car raced back onto the highway.
As the sun rose, a truck driver pulled off to rest and found the bodies.
They were riddled with bullet holes, the girl's green eyes still wide with shock, her mouth open as if giving a final cry for help. She was in her late teens; her companion was in his mid-20s.
Sumter County Sheriff I. Byrd Parnell and his deputies arrived minutes later. Crouching over the corpses, they noticed a pair of tire tracks. There was nothing else.
The investigation
After making a plaster cast of the tire tracks and scouring for evidence, Parnell shipped the bodies to the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston for an autopsy, which turned up little more than the obvious.
As weeks passed, the sheriff made phone calls and wrote letters to law enforcement agencies from Florida to New Mexico in an effort to identify the bodies. Nothing turned up.
A forensic dentist in Spartanburg charted the young man's mouth and the American Dental Association published his findings, hoping a dentist somewhere would recognize the work. The dead man had undergone extensive dental work, including fillings, root canals and crowns. No dentist ever came forward.
A funeral home displayed the bodies for a year in airtight, see-through caskets.
Relatives of missing persons traveled from as far away as New Jersey, but all left with unanswered prayers.
After a year, the bodies had decayed and hardly seemed human any longer. So the young man and woman were laid to rest at the Methodist Church in Oswego.
More than 100 people attended the ceremony.
Sole suspect
About four months after the murders, police in the Darlington County town of Latta arrested Lonnie George Henry for drunk driving. Under the seat of his car they found a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson with the serial number filed off.
Police sent the gun to the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division's forensic lab for tests and later concluded that Henry's revolver had killed the mystery couple. Bullets taken from the bodies matched with the weapon.
When officers asked Henry point blank if he was the killer, his polygraph said he was telling the truth. No, he hadn't pulled the trigger. But several other lie detector tests implied he was lying about something, at least, maybe covering up for somebody. Investigators wondered if someone had stolen his gun and whether a relative or friend of Henry's had killed the couple in Sumter.
But case files say Henry did lie about how he'd obtained the gun, first telling officers that he'd bought it from a truck driver. Days after the purchase, Henry told investigators, he discovered the serial number had been filed off. By then, it was too late to return the item for a refund.
SLED recovered the serial number and investigators tracked the gun from its manufacturer to Henry's brother, who said he gave it to Henry as a Christmas present four or five years earlier.
The gun had been bought, stolen and resold several times before falling into the hands of Henry's brother. But he said the serial number was still there on Christmas Eve.
When confronted with the new information, Henry confessed to filing the serial numbers off himself.
It remains unclear why Henry lied if he was innocent. And it also remains unclear if he really was. Case files say Henry was a recovering alcoholic and had also gotten in trouble with the law for a slew of minor offenses.
At the time, his son had recently drowned in the Pee Dee River. He'd also accidentally killed one of his co-workers, by backing a dump truck over him.
Investigative psychologists even wondered if he'd killed the Sumter couple and simply couldn't remember doing it.
But despite his incriminating profile, Henry had an alibi. 'I can prove where I was at on the dates that you said this happened,' Henry told investigators. He said he was at a hospital in Monroe, N.C., where his wife was staying. 'I suppose you will take my word.'
'Mr. Henry,' replied one of the officers, according to the files. 'Right now I don't believe I would take your word for anything.'
In an effort to corroborate his alibi, cops timed the drive from the hospital to the crime scene and concluded there was no way Henry could have raced back in time to see his wife. Even with knowledge of his mental health and lying twice about the gun, they set him free.
Now dead, Henry will never have the chance to erase the suspicion or to confess.
Passing through
Evidence says the young couple weren't from South Carolina.
'If they were from around here we would have found them by now,' says Sumter County Coroner Verna Moore. In 1976, she was deputy coroner and also worked for the local paper, The Sumter Daily Item.
Moore persuaded 'Unsolved Mysteries' and Court TV to run specials on the case, but still no one came forward. For the past year she's been working with a cold case investigator in Virginia to sift through evidence for new leads.
She hasn't given up yet. 'Somewhere out there they've got family still looking for them,' she says, 'and hitting all the wrong places.'......... "
Mystery couple murdered in South Carolina, 1976 - #5
Mystery couple murdered in South Carolina, 1976 - #5
