NC NC - Judy Boyle, 21, Rockingham, 2 April 1980

‘It’s a shame that nobody cares’
1980 murder still unsolved
April 02, 2015 3:41PM

Today is a dark anniversary for the family of Judy Lynn Boyle, who was shot dead while working alone in a shop on U.S. 74 East between Rockingham and Hamlet in 1980 at the age of 21.

But it’s all the darker for the fact that no one was ever arrested or brought to trial for her murder.

Boyle’s two sisters, Lorri Boyle and Frances Milligan, and her brother Edward Boyle visited their sister’s gravesite in the Marks Creek Presbyterian Church Cemetery Tuesday and recalled the anguish Judy’s death brought into the family on that fateful day 35 years ago.

According to an article published in the Richmond County Daily Journal on the day after the murder, the shooting took place shortly after 3 p.m. at Alternatives — a store commonly known as a “head shop” in those days.

“They sold paraphernalia,” said Edward Boyle, Judy’s brother. “But they sold all kinds of other things.”

Boyle and the shop’s owner, Wayne Gilmer, had been dating for about five years as Lorri Boyle remembers it. Gilmer, like Boyle’s sisters, brother and parents, was devastated by her death and offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to the killer’s arrest and conviction.

It was a reward that would be matched by the governor of North Carolina. But no one ever came forward.

Click to expand...

Really moving article!

Judy Lynn Boyle
BIRTH 27 Dec 1958
DEATH 2 Apr 1980 (aged 21)
BURIAL
Marks Creek Presbyterian Cemetery
Hamlet, Richmond County, North Carolina, USA

LINK:
Judy Lynn Boyle (1958-1980) - Find A Grave...

luckyseven said:

‘It’s a shame that nobody cares’
1980 murder still unsolved
April 02, 2015 3:41PM

Really moving article!

Click to expand...

Couldn’t get the original link to work so I looked it up again. It certainly sounds like a revenge killing but for what? What was going on with the drug culture at the time? Robbery wasn’t the motive.

‘It’s a shame that nobody cares’ | Richmond County Daily Journal
Snips:
According to an article published in the Richmond County Daily Journal on the day after the murder, the shooting took place shortly after 3 p.m. at Alternatives — a store commonly known as a “head shop” in those days.

“They sold paraphernalia,” said Edward Boyle, Judy’s brother. “But they sold all kinds of other things.”

Boyle and the shop’s owner, Wayne Gilmer, had been dating for about five years as Lorri Boyle remembers it. Gilmer, like Boyle’s sisters, brother and parents, was devastated by her death and offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to the killer’s arrest and conviction.

It was a reward that would be matched by the governor of North Carolina. But no one ever came forward.

Milligan and Edward Boyle believe whoever killed their sister did it to hurt Gilmer, who was trying to detach himself from connections with the drug subculture. They said Gilmer had been threatened in the hours leading up to the murder by someone who told him they would either “get his mother or his girlfriend.”

The siblings said she was shot twice in the back of the head while lying face-down on the basement floor, but a conflicting account by the late Chief Deputy Earl Dunn, as published in the Daily Journal, indicated she was shot once in the back of the head and once in the torso.

The newspaper also reported “there was some evidence that Boyle’s body had been dragged down to the basement of the building after she was shot,” but said Dunn declined to comment on that.

Bumping