VA military markers are not always metal. The VA provides markers for veterans free of charge. There are upright and flat markers, and they can be granite or marble. My father, who died in 2019, has an upright marble VA headstone. There are also stones with applied bronze markers. James Freund should be eligible.Honestly the military marker is metal, very small, and is easily overgrown as it lays flat on the ground. (My late FIL has one)
The stone marker he currently has is much nicer. I wonder if a skilled person could.somehow.modify it?
This configuration of the band toured but appears to have never released an album, two of the members (Anthony Matthews and Pamela Buckley) passing away at the young ages of 32 and 24, respectively, in 1975 and 1976. Matthews died in a hanggliding accident outside of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, while Buckley was recently identified as a longstanding shooting victim Jane Doe in Sumter County, South Carolina.
I was giving a good look at Steamboat Springs a couple of years back because I feel like there's a decent possibility that Pam and James could have met there. The remnants of the Sunlending band seemed to end up there and Matthews died there in 1975, so I'm wondering if there could have been some kind of memorial for him around the time Pam went missing. Of course she wouldn't need that for a reason, it wouldn't be far fetched to think she could have been there anyway.
Now James would be harder to place there. I did find one person from the Lancaster PA area that lived and died there, he was a ski instructor. I was never really able to make a solid connection but I felt like I was all around it. There was one person in particular I thought could be that connection but he is still living and I just can't find much of anything on him.
We know James was stationed in Germany and iirc so was Matthews. The ski instructor was also apparently there. According to his obit he was on the Garmisch Ski Patrol. I don't know if that means anything or not but it could be a point of interest.
Anyway it's been a while since I chimed in here so I thought I would bump this thread up.
Good find on the sale of the demo tape.
Great work finding someone from Lancaster who moved to CO. I wonder if there are friends of Jims from Lancaster who remember where he went and with whom?
ETA: It seems more likely James and Pam met when she was in CO vs Pam traveling out on her own from CO to PA.
I just about guarantee you there's people out there that know things about this case but it doesn't look like they're gonna tell us about it. Maybe they have told investigators.
It doesn't take much work to find people that moved between these areas. For instance, I just go to the public member trees at Ancestry, fill in the birth field, fill in the death field, leave the rest blank and hit the search button. You'll have more names than you bargained for. I mostly focused on the one that went to Steamboat Springs but if anyone wants to try Colorado Springs there's some good potential stuff there.
I thought about it being the Bicentennial and someone traveling to Philadelphia with all the history but I have to agree with you, it's much more likely that they met somewhere out west.
