Investigators determined that the vehicle is a van. There must have been footprints. In 2008, investigators released the fact that "they stepped from the back of a van on a secluded dirt road."
A van with back doors makes me think of a delivery type van rather than a passenger van with trunk space. If it was their van, maybe they were living a nomadic van life - a bit like Lucas Fowler and China Deese in BC 2019, or Esther Dingley and Dan Colgate 2014-2020
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This is a going to be a long post.
Here's a link to a whole bunch of vans that were popular in the 1970s. Some are pretty rad! If the van belonged to James and Pamela I presume it didn't look like these particular models since the paint jobs would have been remembered. They could have had some kind of sleeping space in the back, maybe removing a couple of bench seats, or they may have just used the van for traveling rather than living in, staying in motels and campgrounds.
Raddest Factory Custom and Small-Batch Production Vans of the 1970s
So I think there may be several scenarios regarding the victims leaving through the back doors of the van, as stated in the newspaper article in 2008. I'm going to voice my skepticism regarding the vehicle being a van and question the veracity of that statement, but for the sake of speculation I will assume they did exit a vehicle through the back doors.
The first scenario is that they
didn't own the van and were picked up as hitchhikers, hence why they were in the back of the van.
The first scenario is they were picked up as hitchhikers, got in the back and there were no seats other than the front seats. Maybe a mattress was back there that they had to sit on. Eventually the driver took Locklair Rd, pulled over, pulled a gun and demanded their belongings so they scrambled through the back doors to escape but the driver got out of the vehicle walked to the rear and shot them.
The second scenario is they got picked up and sat on bench seats behind the driver with their belongings either in the back cargo area or at their feet and on the seat. This scenario doesn't make sense to me because it would have been problematic to go out through the back doors when the sliding side door would have been how they entered the van. To make this scenario work the driver would have had to pull over and walk around the back of the vehicle, open the door and get P and J to hop over the back seat out the rear doors, ignoring their own belongings and standing at the side of the road where they were were shot.
Third one is that there were more than two people in the van when they got picked up: driver and passenger, and either one or two people already sitting on the bench seat, leaving the only place for them to sit was the back cargo area. We don't know anything about the tire impressions, whether they tell us of the wheel base of the vehicle to see whether there could be another row of seats. I discard this scenario just because there are too many players involved. I don't think you could rely on anyone other than yourself not to let it slip you were privy to a double murder.
The alternate scenario is that the vehicle belonged to Pamela and James, that it was a van and they picked up one or more hitchhikers, either strangers on the road or someone they may have met while attending some event on or before August 9th. If this is a viable scenario we'd have to understand the significance of them ending up on Locklair Road. If they were traveling north to attend another racing event then the only reason they would end up getting off the I-95 in that location is because they were dropping off a ride rather than stopping for gas or food since the area is pretty remote. Also the time of night that the murders occurred would make it less likely to get off the highway for gas or food. If 24 hour gas stations were around back in '76 they'd be on the I-95 not in some little place off the beaten track. So they got off the highway to let their passenger(s) out. The passenger(s) got out of the back of the vehicle and walked around to the driver's side door and instead of saying, hey man, thanks for the ride, pulled a gun on them, told them to get out of the vehicle and shot them at the side of the road.
Any of these scenarios require the killer(s) to be outside of the vehicle to deliver the third shot to each victim. So if LE were able to take impressions of tire tracks, they should have impressions of shoe prints as well, both the victims and the perp. Unless the scene was completely obliterated by all the people that appear in the photographs milling about the scene.
I checked the weather report in Sumter county on Aug 8 and 9th. It was dry on Aug 8 but it rained quite a bit on the 9th. The Almanac weather history site says 0.94 inches.
Weather History for Sumter, SC
That's a lot of rain so I wonder how well the tire impressions worked. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of faith in the impressions to say what type of vehicle was used in the crime.
There is a lot of science behind forensic investigations of tire impressions. Here's an incredibly exhaustive report that shows just how sophisticated this science is. It has probably been refined exponentially since 1976. So many variables can affect the castings; the weight of the vehicle, whether the tires were original equipment or after market products, the weather, the road surface, the expertise of the person taking the castings, and last but not least the professionalism of LE who were first to arrive to preserve the integrity of the scene to avoid contamination.
https://mantracking.files.wordpress...s-of-criminal-and-forensic-investigations.pdf
