NC NC - Brittany Locklear, 5, Hoke County, 7 Jan 1998

I think I remember hearing about it on the news when it happened, but have not heard anything since. It was one of the first child murders I had heard of where the child was abducted while waiting for the school bus.

My heart goes out to the family who still has no answers.
 
That is so sad. She was a very beautiful little girl. I do hope this case can be solved so that her family can have some closure.
 
She might be a little rebellious. What teenager wouldn't be? She probably would wear her brown hair loose around her face, might run with her sister through the trees around the family homestead.

Brittany Locklear absolutely would have the same smile, the one full of kindness and light. Angelic, almost.

At least, that's what her mother, Connie Locklear-Chavis, thinks. Brittany would have turned 13 last week had she not been kidnapped from the end of her driveway and killed, her torn, drowned body found in a drainage ditch three miles from her home.

Any hope of answering those questions ended the morning of Jan. 7, 1998. Any hope of a family not overshadowed by the homicide ended that day, too.

Neighbors who lived about 500 feet away said they saw the kidnapping. A man in a pickup stopped in front of the driveway. Maybe he was white, maybe Indian, or maybe a light-skinned black man. The truck might have been brown, maybe tan. Maybe it had lights on the roof.

He took Brittany, they said. She didn't fight him.

Hundreds of people came out to search for the girl. County, state and federal lawmen set up roadblocks.

Then Hoke County Sheriff Wayne Byrd issued a warning: Anyone with a brown truck would be stopped and questioned. Residents from across the region flooded the office with tips, which started to pile up.

They jotted notes on paper forms and tried to keep computer spreadsheets of all the leads, but some tips slipped through. Three months later, the FBI gave detectives on Brittany's case a computer program designed to manage crime tips.

By that time, though, the calls had tapered off.

"We know there was info that came in that we didn't follow up on," Tilley said in an interview earlier this month. "We were not prepared."
http://www.wral.com/news/6339647/detail.html
 
Brittany, 5, was last seen alive on January 7, 1998, as she waited in front of her house on Gainey Road in Hoke County, North Carolina for the school bus to pick her up. When her mother relaized she hadn't gotten on the bus, a search was launched. Brittany's clothes were found about three hours later in the woods a few miles away. The next day, her nude body was found in a drainage ditch on a farm road about three miles from her home. She had been raped and thrown into the ditch to drown.
Brittany was a kindergartener at the time of her murder. She was Native American, of the Lumbee tribe. She enjoyed wearing colorful clothes and watching the TV show "Barney;" she even named her dog after Barney. As of April 2004, her murder remains unsolved.
http://www.free-webspace.biz/thevictims/locklear_brittany.html
 
Thanks PT! Missed those when I did my search.:confused:
 
I remember this case and regret that it is another one that has never been solved. I am thinking it could have been someone in the area who saw the opportunity and took her. But if this was his modus operandi, there must be others. Not just little Brittany. I am amazed at how many unsolved cases there are.
 
Beautiful angel :( ...I wish she is with angels and god now ....If at all there is a supreme force , may that killer come to justice...he took the most innocent of us ...may the beautiful angel brittney lynn locklear rest in peace...
I hope for a closure in this case with murderer bought to justice
 
I have searched a few times and cannot find anywhere a follow story was done. Did the DNA testing turn out to confirm the suspect committed the crime?
 
Neighbors who lived about 500 feet away said they saw the kidnapping.
That is about 200 steps. How long would it take someone to cover that distance, a minute or two? That would be an awfully fast kidnapping, with no hesitation, no glancing around to see if a parent or someone was watching or coming out, etc. And even if the neighbors were elderly, in a state of shock or otherwise unable to dash outside (I'm assuming they were seeing it through the window) a distance of 500 feet would mean they would have gotten a pretty good look at the kidnapper. Why was the description so vague?

Had Mom ever seen a truck and person fitting the description driving past? Had she ever gone back into the house for any reason in the past and left Brittany waiting alone? Otherwise, IMO it seems awfully coincidental that the one time Mom went back inside for a moment was the one time someone came by and immediately grabbed the child. Of course, anything can happen, but that would be an amazingly bad bit of ill luck.
 
It still hurts to think of this child. dumped in a ditch. I have hope it will still be solved!
 
Here is another report about the case;

“It’s hard,” the 49-year-old Locklear-Chavis said earlier this month. “You never can get no justice until whoever done it is brought to trial. Before I die, I hope it does (go to trial).”

She said she thinks about her daughter “every day, all the time.”

• • •

The neighbors who witnessed Brittany’s abduction about 7 a.m. reported that the child did not resist her kidnapper.

By 8:30 that morning, every deputy in Hoke County was on the road searching for the child, published accounts said. Her backpack, overalls and shoes were found 2 miles away later that day on Ryan McBryde Road.

“I’m scared somebody killed her,” her mother said to a Fayetteville Observer reporter as she waited at the Sheriff’s Office at the time. “You always hear it in the news, and you never think it’ll hit home but it has.”

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-st...residents-still-remember-unsolved-murder-case
 

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