At dawn on August 9, 1976, truck driver Martin Durant was driving down Locke Road, a narrow, nearly abandoned dirt road in the rural stretch between Sumter and Florence, South Carolina. He stopped. There were two bodies lying at the roadside, a young man and a young woman, both shot three times from the same . 357 caliber pistol.

The fatal wounds were to the backs of their heads. Durant contacted Charles Graham, an employee of a nearby store. Graham called the police. When officers arrived, they found the victims lying close to one another, both dead.

The coroner, Robert Baker Jr. , later confirmed that each had been shot three times from the same . 357 pistol. The man had been hit three times in the upper chest.

The woman had been hit in the upper chest and through the neck. The lethal wounds for both were to the backs of their heads. Someone had shot them from behind. Perhaps their backs were turned to the killer.

Perhaps they were trying to run. Whatever had happened, they never had a chance. Two young people on a dirt road in an isolated area, shot from behind with a weapon powerful enough to tear through the human body, and no one knew who they were. That was what made this case different from almost any other murder in American criminal history.

In most mysterious cases, the police at least know the victim’s name. They know where the victim lived, what they did for work, who they knew. Here, they had nothing. No ID, no wallet, no car keys, no car, no phone.

Two young people had appeared on a road no one used, died without anyone recognizing them, and the police began the investigation from almost nothing. But the bodies told stories, and the man’s body told a great deal. At first, investigators estimated his age at 18 to 22, but a forensic dentist examined his teeth and said he was definitely over 27. He looked younger than his true age because of his clothes and build, but teeth don’t lie, and his teeth told a very specific story.

He had complex, expensive dental work, the kind you don’t find in an ordinary dental clinic. He had undergone a special type of root canal treatment and appeared to be in the middle of a full dental restoration. The forensic dentist believed this work may have been done abroad. That pointed to one thing: money, and a wealthy family.

He was white with an olive complexion, shoulder-length brown hair, brown eyes, and very thick, distinctive eyebrows, the kind you remember from a single glance. He was just over six feet tall, about 183 centimeters, and weighed roughly 150 pounds, 68 kilograms. On his back and shoulders he had multiple scars, the kind produced by regularly playing violent sports. On his abdomen there was an appendectomy scar about 10 centimeters long.

He wore faded Levi’s jeans and a red shirt. That shirt was an important clue. The front read “Coors America’s Light Beer. ” The back read “Camel Challenger GTC Sebring 75” with an image of Snoopy.

It was a promotional shirt from the 1975 Sebring race in Florida, sponsored by Coors beer. You couldn’t buy it in a store; you had to be there to get one. In his jeans pocket, he carried a book of matches from Grant’s Truck Stop, a chain of truck stop stations with branches in Idaho, Nebraska, and Arizona. That clue suggested he had traveled through the Midwest or western United States before reaching South Carolina.

But the two most important items he had were the watch and the ring. He wore a gold Bulova Accutron watch with a Twist-O-Flex band, serial number H918803. Investigators determined that Bulova made the watch in 1968. But when Bulova scaled down its operations in the early 1970s, it destroyed most of its records, meaning the watch’s distribution and point of sale could not be traced.

Another dead end. The ring was 14-carat gold set with a gray star sapphire with a Florentine finish. Inside, three letters were engraved: JPF. Both the watch and the ring were expensive.

Combined with the complex dental work, the picture was clear. This man belonged to a wealthy family, but no one knew who that family was. No one knew what JPF stood for. No one knew where he came from, where he was going, or why he was dead on a dirt road in South Carolina.

Every clue pointed to a specific person, but that specific person had no name. The woman was lying not far from the man. She was younger. At first, investigators estimated her age at 18 to 20, later revised to 18 to 25 when the file was entered into the NamUs system.

She was 5 feet 5 inches, about 165 centimeters, and weighed 100 to 105 pounds, 45 to 48 kilograms. She was thin, with an olive complexion very much like the man beside her. The similarity in appearance led many to guess they might be siblings. She had reddish-brown hair to her shoulders and gray-blue eyes, some sources say hazel.

She had two very distinctive moles on the left side of her face near the mouth. The coroner noted an unusual detail: she had unusually long natural eyelashes. Both victims were very clean and well-groomed. They were not street people.

These were people who took care of themselves, people who had a place to shower, people who cared about their appearance. Medically, she had fillings in all her back molars and straight, even front teeth. She had no surgical scars on her body. She had never been pregnant.

Her legs were not shaved. Unlike the man beside her, no scars of any kind were found on her. The clothes she wore told more of the story. She wore a white natural gauze blouse over a pink shirt tied in the front.

Underneath, short Daisy Duke style denim shorts. Around her waist, she had tied a patterned scarf as a belt. She wore Stride Rite sandals with a raised sole, in pale purple and bright pink. Comfortable summer clothes, the kind a person wears on the road.

Not office clothes, not home clothes, but the clothes of someone traveling. But the most striking thing about her was the jewelry. She wore three rings, and each one told a story. The first had a black rectangular stone with small turquoise cuts embedded in it.

The second was a wavy feather design set with coral and turquoise. The third was simpler, a metal band set with red, white, and blue stones. All three were made of sterling silver. All three looked like genuine, handmade Native American or Mexican jewelry, the kind you find in the American Southwest: Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado.

Combined with the Grant’s Truck Stop matches in the man’s pocket, a chain with locations in Idaho, Nebraska, and Arizona, the picture began to come into focus. These two young people appeared to have moved across many places in the United States before reaching South Carolina. They were people on the road, but where they were going and where they came from, no one knew. There was one additional clue, and it came from a man who claimed he met the couple before they were killed.

This man said the male victim introduced himself as “Jock” and said he had left his family in Canada with his girlfriend. He said his father was a famous doctor. That supported the theory that his family was wealthy, consistent with the expensive watch, the gold ring, and the complex dental work. Perhaps the nickname “Jock” came from the French name “Jacques.

” The JPF letters engraved in the ring seemed to confirm that his name began with J. From then on, the male victim was called “Jock Doe” and the female “Jane Doe. ” Together they became the “Sumter County Does,” the most famous unidentified bodies in South Carolina criminal history. The police did everything they could with 1976 technology.

Photographs and sketches of the victims’ faces were distributed nationwide. Dental records were sent everywhere. Fingerprints were taken and compared. There were no results.

For a full year after they were found, the bodies were kept at a local funeral home in sealed transparent coffins. The idea was that anyone who came could see their faces. Perhaps a mother would recognize her daughter. Perhaps a friend would recognize someone who had lost contact.

Throughout that year, the phone rang constantly. Parents of runaways from all over America called, describing their children and asking if they were the ones. Every call was a hope. Every call ended in disappointment.

No one recognized them. When the bodies began to decompose badly and could no longer be kept, the decision was made. On August 14, 1977, exactly one year and five days after they were found, “Jock Doe” and “Jane Doe” were buried in Bethel United Methodist Church Cemetery in Oswego, South Carolina. Hundreds of people came to the funeral.

Hundreds of complete strangers came to say goodbye to two people they had never met and whose names they never knew. Law enforcement agencies had to gather a few hundred dollars to pay the funeral home costs. Their headstones were two granite slabs, no names, no birth dates, no farewells. Only “Unknown Male” and “Unknown Female.

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Two young people with family somewhere, with names, with their own stories, with people who once loved them, lay beneath the soil of a state they had perhaps only been passing through, and no one in the world knew they were there. No parents visiting the grave, no flowers, no birthday remembrances, only two stones that said “Unknown” and decades of silence. The investigation had begun with more evidence than most unidentified murder cases. The police had photos, fingerprints, detailed dental records, clothes with specific brand names, a watch with a serial number, a ring with engravings, and belongings bearing the name of a store chain.

In any other case, that amount of information would have been enough to identify the victims within a few weeks. But this was not an ordinary case. The JPF letters engraved on the ring became the lead that was pursued with all effort. They strengthened the theory that the male victim’s name began with J, perhaps Jack, as the nickname suggested, or perhaps an ordinary English name.

But three letters on a ring were not enough to find a single person in a country of 220 million people. The Grant’s Truck Stop matches opened another line of investigation. The chain had branches in Idaho, Nebraska, and Arizona. Police called every location.

The information was widely distributed, and one lead emerged. A mechanic in Nebraska said he might have repaired a car for a couple matching the victims’ descriptions. The car bore Oregon or Washington license plates. For the first time, the investigation seemed to be moving.

But the lead stopped there. The car was never found. No matching registration was ever found. There was no next step.

It was a dead end. Investigators pursued another angle as well. They went to Brunswick, Georgia after a tip about a missing girl resembling the Doe. The girl’s ex-boyfriend saw the sketch and told police the Doe resembled his former girlfriend.

Investigators met the girl’s parents and showed them the photographs. But the parents did not confirm it. Friends did not confirm it either. When dental records were compared, the two did not match.

Another dead end. Then, in 1977, something happened. Something that should have ended the case in any functioning justice system. A man named Lonnie George Henry was arrested in Latta, South Carolina for driving under the influence.

When police searched Henry’s car, they found a pistol. The same type of weapon that had killed the victims on Locke Road. The gun was sent for ballistics testing. The results were definitive and unambiguous.

The bullets fired from Henry’s gun matched the bullets found in the victims’ bodies perfectly. It was the murder weapon. Not likely, not similar, a perfect match. In most murder cases, this is the moment the handcuffs go on.

But there was a problem. The police could not prove Henry had owned the gun at the time of the murders. More than a year had passed before it was found in his car. Perhaps the weapon had passed through many hands.

Perhaps Henry bought it, was given it, or took it from someone without knowing its history. Nor could Henry’s alibi be disproven. Prosecutors reviewed all the evidence and reached a painful conclusion. There was not enough to charge him with murder.

They had found the murder weapon. They knew who was holding it. But they could not prove who pulled the trigger. Lonnie George Henry was never charged.

He died in 1982. The case lost the strongest suspect it ever had. That was the cruelest irony in the Sumter County Does case. The police found the murder weapon, but they didn’t know the names of the victims.

They had the pistol. They had the bullets. They had the man holding the pistol. But they didn’t know who had been killed.

A case that could be solved in reverse. You knew the weapon, you knew the suspect, but you didn’t know the victim. Almost nothing like it had happened in American criminal history. Then in 1984, a more famous name entered the case file: Henry Lee Lucas.

Lucas was one of America’s most notorious serial killers. And also one of the greatest liars in criminal history. He claimed to have killed more than 600 people. The real number may have been three, or perhaps 11.

No one knew for certain because Lucas had a peculiar habit. He would claim responsibility for any unsolved murder the police presented to him. He did it because it brought him attention, better treatment in prison, and a feeling of power. Police officers from all over America brought unsolved case files to Lucas, and he would nod his head and claim all of them.

It was mutually convenient. Lucas got attention. The police got a case closed in their records. Shortly before his death, Lucas told police he was in South Carolina on August 9, 1976.

He confessed to killing the victims on Locke Road. He also confessed to two other murders in Sumter County: an elderly woman in 1975 and a young man in 1983. But no one believed him. Lucas had claimed so many cases that he could not provide verifiable details.

He could not accurately describe the crime scene. He could not provide information only the real killer would know. His confession was treated as another lie in an endless series of lies. Henry Lee Lucas died in 2001 of heart failure.

He was never charged in the Sumter County Does case. And like every other lead in this case, his name led nowhere. The most common theory of what happened on Locke Road was car theft. Investigators believed the victims may have been driving on Highway 95, picked up someone, or been stopped by someone, and their car was stolen.

The attacker or attackers then drove to Locke Road, a remote dirt road perfect for not being seen, forced the victims out of the car, and shot them from behind. This theory explains why no car was found at the scene. It explains why no documents were found. Perhaps they were in the car.

It explains the back wounds. They were shot with their backs to the killer, perhaps as they were getting out of the car, or perhaps as they tried to flee. But the theory remains just a theory when no one knows who the victims were, what car they were driving, or where they came from. Through all those years, one person never gave up.

Verna Moore, the Sumter County coroner, kept pursuing the case year after year. She distributed photos and information. She took the phone calls. She compared dental records against newly reported missing persons.

She didn’t do it because anyone forced her; she did it because she believed these two young people deserved to have their identities known. She retired in 2009, more than 30 years after the bodies were found. When she left her post, John Doe and Jane Doe were still unidentified. Thirty-three years of persistence, and the case remained unsolved.

In 2007, more than 30 years after the victims were found, a final important decision was made. Verna Moore, the coroner who had followed the case from the beginning and was to retire two years later, ordered the bodies exhumed from the Bethel United Methodist Church Cemetery in Oswego. The purpose was specific: to take DNA samples. In 1976, when the victims were found, DNA technology did not really exist in criminal investigations.

By 2007, it had become the most powerful tool in the police arsenal, but DNA is only useful when you have something to compare it to. You need a database, a relative who has provided a sample, or a missing persons file containing compatible DNA. In the case of the Sumter County victims, none of that existed. DNA samples were extracted, preserved, and entered into federal databases.

The first results came back with an important answer, though not the answer anyone wanted to hear. John Doe and Jane Doe were not blood relatives. They were not siblings. The theory that had prevailed for more than 30 years, that these two young people looked so similar they must be brother and sister, was completely disproven by science.

They looked alike. They were similar in skin tone, body type, and way of dressing. But they did not share a single drop of blood. That opened more questions than it answered.

If they weren’t siblings, what was their relationship? Lovers? Traveling companions? Two strangers who happened to be in the same car?

And if they weren’t siblings, why did they look so similar? But beyond eliminating an old theory, the 2007 DNA analyses led nowhere. There were no matches in any database. No relative had provided a DNA sample the system could link to them.

The 2007 technology could tell you that two people were not related. But it was not powerful enough to tell you who they were. The case went cold again, but outside law enforcement, something else was happening. The Sumter County victims were not forgotten, at least not by everyone.

Over the years, the case became one of the most famous mysteries in the true crime community. “Unsolved Mysteries” covered the case, showing the faces of Jock Doe and Jane Doe on national television. Their files were posted on the Doe Network, a website dedicated to unidentified bodies and missing persons never found. The files were also entered into NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.

True crime podcasts devoted entire episodes to the case: “The Trail Went Cold,” “Trace Evidence,” and “True Crime All The Time Unsolved. ” On internet forums, amateur investigators, called citizen detectives or armchair detectives, analyzed every detail: the Coors Sebring 75 shirt, the JPF ring, the handmade jewelry, the Grant’s truck stop matches. They proposed theories, compared missing persons files, and kept the case alive in public consciousness long after the justice system had abandoned it. One of those citizen detectives was Matt McDaniel.

McDaniel was a resident of Clemson, South Carolina, the same state where the murders occurred, but hundreds of miles from Sumter County. He was not a police officer, not a lawyer, not a journalist. He was a Clemson University graduate who had followed the Sumter County Does case for years, read every article, studied every piece of evidence, and built his own list of potential suspects. In June 2019, McDaniel did something simple that changed everything.

He contacted the Sumter County Sheriff’s Office and proposed an idea: send the DNA samples to the DNA Doe Project. The DNA Doe Project is a nonprofit founded in 2017 by Colleen M. Fitzpatrick and Margaret Press. The organization specializes in identifying unidentified bodies using a relatively new method: forensic genetic genealogy.

The principle is simple but very powerful. Instead of comparing a victim’s DNA to a criminal database, the organization uploads the DNA to public genealogy platforms like GEDmatch and Family Tree DNA, places where millions of ordinary people have voluntarily submitted their DNA to learn about their ancestry. If a distant relative of the victim, a second, third, or even fourth cousin, had submitted their DNA to these platforms, the system would find the link. From there, genealogical researchers build the family tree backwards, narrowing the search until they find a matching candidate.

Since its founding, the DNA Doe Project had successfully identified more than 150 unidentified bodies across the United States. The method was revolutionizing cold case resolution and victim identification. Now it was aimed at the Sumter County Does. Sumter County Sheriff Anthony Dennis agreed to McDaniel’s proposal.

The stored DNA samples from the 2007 exhumation were sent to the DNA Doe Project in June 2019. A total of $2,300 was raised from the public through a fundraising campaign to cover the costs of DNA extraction. Astrea Forensics, a laboratory specializing in forensic DNA, performed specialized extraction, recovering usable DNA from the bone marrow of victims who had been dead for more than 40 years. That was not a simple task.

DNA degrades over time. The bodies had lain in the ground for more than 30 years before exhumation, and the samples had been stored for another 12 years. But Astrea Forensics succeeded. The DNA was extracted and uploaded to two platforms: GEDmatch and Family Tree DNA.

In July 2020, additional samples were sent to laboratories in California and Alabama for further extraction and comparison. Then the DNA Doe Project volunteers began their work. They were volunteer genealogists, unpaid, not part of any government agency, just ordinary people with genealogy research skills who wanted to help. They began analyzing the results, identifying relatives by genetic connection, and building the family tree backward.

In September 2020, the DNA had been successfully extracted and the official search began. In October 2020, the DNA Doe Project released the genealogical test results for the two victims, the first step in identification. Then the answer came much faster than anyone expected. As team member Jenny Likens later noted, “Both cases were solved quickly after the release of the genetic family tree results to the research teams.

After 44 years of silence, DNA said what no photograph, sketch, fingerprint, or book of matches could say. ” It told them the names. On January 19, 2021, the DNA Doe Project officially announced that the victims had been identified. The organization said it was withholding detailed information, including the names of the deceased, in order to coordinate with law enforcement.

Two days later, on January 21, 2021, Sumter County Sheriff Anthony Dennis held a press conference at the sheriff’s office. Forty-four years, five months, and twelve days after Martin Durant found two bodies on Locke Road, Dennis stood before the cameras and spoke two names no one had known for nearly half a century. The man was James Paul Freund, 30 years old at the time of his death. The woman was Pamela Mae Buckley, 25 years old at her death.

John Doe had a name. Jane Doe had a name. Those two names revealed two lives no one expected. James Paul Freund was born on September 16, 1946 in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.

He was the only son of Adam and Lula Etta Freund. The family later moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where James grew up and finished school. In 1964, he graduated from McCaskey High School. In the yearbook photo, he appears as a thin young man with short hair and thick eyebrows, the same eyebrows the coroner noted as highly distinctive on the body 12 years later.

In December 1965, Freund married his high school sweetheart. In 1970, they had a child. But in 1971, Freund filed for divorce. The marriage ended, but the legal proceedings dragged on.

What happened in Freund’s life between the 1971 divorce filing and his death in 1976 remains a great mystery. His relatives spoke to him for the last time on December 25, 1975, Christmas Eve. After that, silence. Here is a detail that makes the case even more painful.

James Paul Freund was apparently never reported missing. There is no missing persons file under his name in any database. No one, not family, not friends, not his ex-wife, ever filed a report that he was gone. A thirty-year-old man vanished from the face of the earth after Christmas 1975 and no one officially looked for him.

Think about that. For 44 years, perhaps the greatest reason Freund was never identified was simply that no one reported him missing. No one told the police he was gone. A system cannot find a person no one asks it to look for.

Pamela Mae Buckley had a different story, no less painful, but different. She was born on December 16, 1951 in Redwood County, Minnesota, a rural area about 45 miles south of Willmar. She grew up in the small town of Redwood Falls and was not unknown there. In 1970, Pamela Mae Buckley was crowned the Redwood JC Snow Queen.

The community’s snow queen, an honor for the town’s most prominent young woman. She was expected to become the Redwood Falls beauty queen the following year. But Buckley had other plans. After graduating from high school, she left Minnesota and moved to Colorado to pursue a career in music.

She became a prominent member of a folk band called Sun Landing. The snow queen from a small Minnesota town chose music. A path that took her far from everything familiar. In Colorado, Buckley married.

But the marriage did not last. Here is one of the most bitter details of the case. Pamela Mae Buckley’s divorce was finalized just 11 days after she was shot to death on Locke Road. Eleven days.

The justice system completed its paperwork on its own schedule, without knowing that the woman named in those papers was already underground in South Carolina under a stone that said “Unknown Female. ” Buckley was last seen in Colorado Springs, Colorado in December 1975. Her family reported her missing. Unlike Freund, someone was looking for her.

Someone asked where she was. But in an era before a unified national database, a missing woman in Colorado and an unidentified body in South Carolina existed in two completely separate systems. No one connected the two cases. Here the case poses its biggest unanswered question.

James Paul Freund lived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Pamela Mae Buckley lived in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Two cities nearly 1,700 miles apart. There is no evidence they knew each other before they disappeared.

No one from either family recognized the other’s name. There is no obvious connection, no shared friends, no shared workplace, no shared school. Freund had no connection to Sun Landing. Buckley had no connection to Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Yet both disappeared at the same time. December 1975. Neither was seen for almost 8 months. Then on August 9, 1976, they appeared together on a dirt road in South Carolina, thousands of miles from either of their homes, dead next to each other.

Why? Where did they meet? When? Under what circumstances?

Those eight months between disappearance and murder. Where were they? What were they doing? Who were they with?

These are questions even DNA cannot answer. DNA can tell you a person’s identity. It cannot tell you how they lived their final months. At the press conference, Sheriff Dennis said the victims’ families had been notified of the identification.

He described it as a very high confidence identification, and said the families had requested privacy. Dennis said it was a great pleasure to bring comfort to the families after all these years. But he also said something else, the thing everyone following the case had been waiting to hear. He said he would reopen the murder investigation and pursue a person of interest.

Matt McDaniel, the ordinary citizen in Clemson who had restarted everything with an email in 2019, had also shared his research and his list of potential suspects with police. He said he was very glad the 44-year-old identity mystery was over. But the story wasn’t over, because knowing the victims’ names is half the truth. Knowing who killed them is the other half.

And that other half is still pending. The Locke Road murder has not been fully solved yet. To be clear, what was solved is the identification. After 44 years, John and Jane Doe finally had names.

But the question of who pulled the trigger of that . 357 pistol on the morning of August 9, 1976 remains unanswered. At the 2021 press conference, Sheriff Anthony Dennis said his office still had persons of interest in the case. He said he would reopen the murder investigation and pursue every new lead the identification of the victims might open.

His hope was specific: now that the world knew who Freund and Buckley were, and now that their yearbook photos were on every news channel, someone might remember something. Perhaps someone met them during the eight months they were missing. Perhaps someone saw them on the road. Perhaps someone knows who traveled with them to South Carolina.

But the hard truth is that the strongest suspect in the case, Lonnie George Henry, had died in 1982. The gun found in Henry’s car in 1977 was confirmed as the murder weapon. The bullets matched perfectly. But the evidence was not enough to charge him while he was alive, and he has been underground for more than 40 years.

You cannot put a dead man on trial. The second suspect, Henry Lee Lucas, also died, in 2001, and his confession was never considered reliable. That means both suspects recorded in the case file are dead. If one of them truly was the killer, then justice in its traditional sense, a trial, a jury, a verdict, will never be achieved.

And if the real killer is someone else, someone who was within the police’s circle of interest, more than 49 years have passed since the crime. Anyone who committed it in 1976 would be in their seventies or eighties or older now, if still alive. Time is the greatest enemy of justice in cold cases, not just because evidence disappears, though it often does, but because people die. Witnesses die, suspects die, and when they die, their secrets die with them.

Then there are the questions that neither DNA, nor the police, nor anyone can answer at this point. Questions about Freund and Buckley’s lives in their final months. James Paul Freund in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Pamela Mae Buckley in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

No evidence that they knew each other. No clear connection between those two lives. Yet in December 1975, both disappeared. And 8 months later, they appeared together, dead beside each other on a dirt road in South Carolina.

Those eight months from December 1975 to August 1976 are the biggest gap in the case. Where did they meet? On the road? At a truck stop?

Through mutual acquaintances no one knew about? Were they lovers, travel companions, or strangers who happened to share a car across America? The Coors Sebring 75 shirt Freund wore suggests he had been in Florida in 1975. The Southwestern-style jewelry Buckley wore suggests she had been in Arizona or New Mexico.

The matches from Grant’s truck stop suggest one of them at least had passed through Idaho, Nebraska, or Arizona. Small pieces scattered across a map of the United States, not enough to form a complete picture. Why was Freund never reported missing? He had a family, parents, an ex-wife, a child, yet no one filed a missing person report.

No one officially asked where he was. A thirty-year-old man spoke his last words to his family on Christmas Eve 1975, and then vanished, and the world kept turning without him. That is a kind of loneliness you don’t read about in a criminal file. It lives in the gap between the numbers, in the silence between the lines of a police report.

At least Buckley had a family looking for her. But in the pre-internet era, before a national database, a missing woman in Colorado and an unidentified body in South Carolina lived in two parallel worlds that never met. The system failed not for lack of effort, but for lack of interconnection. What the Sumter County case leaves the world is much bigger than the unanswered questions.

This case is living proof of the power of forensic genetic genealogy, a field barely in existence 10 years before the case was solved. The DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit run by volunteers, proved you don’t need a multi-million dollar budget or the newest laboratories to give the dead back their names. You need $2,300 raised from the public, a group of volunteers with genealogy skills, and the will not to give up. Since its founding in 2017, the organization has identified more than 150 unidentified bodies.

150 people who got their names back. 150 families who got the answer they waited years, sometimes decades, to hear. The case is also proof of the growing role of citizen detectives: ordinary citizens, not police, not lawyers, but people with passion, patience, and research skills. Matt McDaniel had no badge.

He had an internet connection, persistence, and an email sent to the right person at the right time. That was all it took to reopen a 43-year-old case. And Verna Moore, the coroner who followed the case from 1976 until her retirement in 2009, deserves to be named again. For more than 30 years, she kept the file, distributed the photos, took the phone calls, compared dental records, and never closed the case.

She did not live long enough to see the answer, but her decision in 2007 to exhume the bodies, her last decision before retiring, was the decision that provided the DNA sample that solved the mystery 14 years later. Without the 2007 exhumation, there would have been no DNA to send to the DNA Doe Project in 2019. Everything is connected. Anyone with information about the deaths of James Paul Freund and Pamela Mae Buckley can contact the Sumter County Sheriff’s Office at 803-436-2000.

The murder case remains open, remains active, and is waiting for a phone call that could change everything. Back to Locke Road, in the early morning of August 9, 1976. A dirt road in a cutoff place, two bodies at the roadside, nameless, familyless, no one to claim them. For 45 years, they were “Unknown Male” and “Unknown Female.

” For 45 years, two granite headstones in Oswego, South Carolina carried no names. Now they carry names. James Paul Freund, born September 16, 1946 in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, son of Adam and Lula Etta, graduate of McCaskey High School, class of 1964. Pamela Mae Buckley, born December 16, 1951 in Redwood County, Minnesota, Snow Queen of Redwood Falls in 1970, member of the folk band Sun Landing.

They are no longer unknown. The identity of a 45-year-old cold case has been restored. Justice for the murder is still pending.