When the federal environmental crew finally cleared the debris from the mouth of Harman Mine No. 2 in September 2024, they expected to assess structural risks. The abandoned coal mine in McDowell County, West Virginia, had been sealed for over sixty years, a forgotten scar on a hillside that had long been reclaimed by kudzu and wild vines. No one had been inside since the company shut it down in 1963 after the ore vein ran dry and operations moved twelve miles south toward deeper seams.
The wooden barrier at the entrance had rotted decades ago, and the hillside had slowly been swallowing the whole site ever since. What the crew found on that September day, roughly eighteen feet into the dark tunnel, would finally answer a question that had haunted McDowell County for half a century. The mine had been closed in 1963 after the vein was exhausted, and the company shifted its operations south toward deeper coal seams. By 1974, rain and decay had warped the entrance barrier, and vegetation was steadily reclaiming the site.
Nobody went up to that hill anymore. There was nothing worth the climb. But in the late spring of 1974, someone did climb it, carrying something, and came back down without it. Margaret Sims, nineteen years old, vanished on an evening in May 1974 from the mining town of Welch.
For fifty years, the answer to where she went was always the same in cases like hers: she was in the place where she was not, missing from where she should have been. In September 2024, a federal environmental remediation team assigned to evaluate the structural safety of abandoned mines in McDowell County removed the debris from the entrance of Harman Mine No. 2. In the darkness of the sealed coal tunnel, they found what that hillside had been hiding.
Margaret Sims was there. She had been there for fifty years. May in McDowell County in 1974 smelled of coal dust and honeysuckle. The coal dust came from the trucks on county roads and the processing facility still running shifts in the southern part of the county.
The honeysuckle filled every ditch and slope. Together, on those warm May evenings, they made air that was heavy, sweet, and unique to that place. Welch was the county seat of McDowell County, a town with the crowded vertical character of communities built in narrow river valleys, everything packed between hillsides, houses climbing the slopes in irregular layers. Though the boom years had passed, mining was still active in 1974.
Men worked in mines where their fathers had worked, and most expected their sons would do the same. Family identity and occupation were two words for one thing. Margaret Sims was nineteen and had lived in Welch all her life. Her father, Thomas Sims, worked in maintenance at the processing facility.
Her mother, Estelle, worked part-time at a dry goods store. Margaret was the second of five children and, since graduating from the local high school the previous spring, had been working the lunch shift at a restaurant on McDowell Street while considering her next step. She told her younger sister Loretta she wanted to attend nursing school in Charleston, had written to two programs, and was waiting for replies. She kept the letters in a box under her bed.
She was practical and quick to laugh, with her father’s habit of noticing anything unusual in a room before anyone else spoke. Her mother said Margaret could walk into the kitchen and know within thirty seconds if something was wrong. She read the room, Estelle said. She always knew.
On the evening of May 16, 1974, Margaret told her mother she was walking to a friend’s house three blocks away on the other side of the creek. It was a Thursday evening. Dinner was over. It was warm.
She put on her jacket, a pale yellow one Estelle had given her for her birthday in February, and said she would be home by nine. She closed the screen door behind her. Estelle called out to tell her to look for the porch light as a signal to come home. The porch light was turned on at nine.
Margaret was not on the street. She was not anywhere. At 9:22 p. m.
, Estelle called the friend’s house across the creek. Margaret had never arrived. The friend, a girl named Darlene Webb, said she had heard nothing from Margaret since the restaurant that day. Estelle called her husband at the facility.
Thomas returned home within twenty minutes. By ten o’clock, they had walked the three-block route twice and knocked on four doors along the way. No one had seen Margaret pass. At 10:47, they called the McDowell County Sheriff’s Department.
A deputy arrived before midnight. He noted that Margaret had last been seen leaving the family home at around 7:40 p. m. by a neighbor sitting on his porch across the street.
She waved at him. He waved back. She was walking south. The restaurant where Margaret worked was north.
The friend’s house was east. Walking south was not part of any logical route. By the next morning, Thomas Sims had organized a neighborhood search. Twelve people walked the streets of lower Welch and the creek banks.
They found nothing. Over fifty years of investigation, the pale yellow jacket was never recovered. On May 18, two days after the disappearance, a twelve-year-old boy named Wesley Prater was cutting across the hill above the entrance to Harman Mine No. 2, taking a back route to a friend’s house that his mother had told him not to use.
On the leaf-covered slope, about thirty yards from the sealed mine entrance, he found a single woman’s shoe. Low heel, dark brown, size seven. He picked it up, looked at it, put it down, and continued to his friend’s house. He mentioned it to his mother that evening, almost as an afterthought.
The deputy who went to the hill found the shoe in roughly the spot the boy described. It was bagged and logged as evidence. The deputies looked at the mine entrance from the hill. The wooden barrier was intact.
They did not remove it. The shoe was shown to Estelle Sims on May 19. She looked at it for a long time. She asked if she could hold it.
They let her. She said she was not sure. She thought it might be Margaret’s, but couldn’t say for certain. The family did not own many shoes.
Margaret took care of what she had. The deputy wrote “identity inconclusive. ” The shoe went into the evidence box. The lead investigator on Margaret Sims’s disappearance was a deputy named Harold Vance, who had worked for the McDowell County Sheriff’s Department for seven years.
Vance was a precise man, according to those who worked with him, and he took the case seriously at a time when young Black women disappearing from small towns did not always receive that level of attention. His notes from the first two weeks totaled forty-three pages. He interviewed forty-one people. He identified three men who had shown what he described as unwanted attention toward Margaret at the restaurant in the months before May.
One was a regular customer named Dawson Hewitt, who had an alibi for the night of May 16 confirmed by his wife and two neighbors. The second was a delivery worker who served the restaurant on Thursdays and had been seen lingering near Margaret’s section on several occasions. His account of May 16 was neither confirmed nor denied. The third man, Earl Purcell, had grown up in McDowell County and worked intermittently at the now-closed Harman Mine in the early 1960s.
He had a record of harassment complaints from women in the Welch community. Interviewed in June 1974, his alibi for the night of May 16 was weak. He said he had been home alone. Vance noted this clearly, and also noted that Purcell knew the location of Harman Mine No.
2. He had worked there for two seasons in 1961 and 1962. Vance sought a warrant to search the mine entrance in July 1974. The county judge told him that a single shoe found thirty yards from the entrance to a sealed mine did not constitute probable cause to permit removal of the entrance barrier, which was federal property under abandoned mine laws.
The warrant was denied. The mine entrance remained sealed. Harold Vance wrote in his case notes: “If she went in there, we may never get her back. ”
Thomas and Estelle Sims conducted their own parallel investigation.
Thomas took unpaid leave from work to drive every road in McDowell County. Estelle wrote to the West Virginia State Police, to the NAACP branch in Charleston, and to two newspapers. The Charleston paper ran a brief item in July 1974 and placed it on page nine. By October 1974, Harold Vance had not closed the file on any person of interest.
He also had made no arrest. Earl Purcell had moved to Logan County at some point during the summer. When Vance followed up, he found that Purcell had vacated his Welch apartment in late June, about six weeks after the disappearance, and left without a forwarding address. Vance wrote in his file: “Subject left the area after interview.
Interesting pattern. ” He submitted a request to locate Purcell and was told it had low priority. By 1980, six years had passed. Thomas had returned to work.
The family remained in Welch. Estelle still cooked five nights a week and set five plates. She had added a sixth plate for one year, then quietly returned it to the back of the cupboard, not because she had given up hope, but because she could not explain the plate to the younger children. Harold Vance retired in 1988.
When he moved to a smaller house in 1992, his wife discovered he had kept a copy of the Sims case file in a cardboard box in the garage. Earl Purcell appeared in Logan County records in 1979, worked there until the early 1980s, and died of a heart attack in 1997. He was sixty-one. He was never charged with anything.
By the year 2000, Loretta Sims, Margaret’s younger sister, who had been twelve years old at the time of the disappearance, had become the keeper of the file. She was forty-three, living in Charleston, working as a hospital administrator. She had a file more organized than anything the sheriff’s office kept. She found Harold Vance in retirement and spoke with him twice.
He told her about the denied warrant, about Earl Purcell, about the shoe. By 2015, Thomas had died. Estelle died the following year. They passed within eight months of each other.
Loretta kept the file, adding to it from her office in Charleston. She contacted the Environmental Protection Agency’s abandoned mine program once in 2018 to ask whether Harman No. 2 was on any remediation schedule. She was told it was listed.
The EPA’s Abandoned Mine Lands program in West Virginia had been working through a backlog of old coal sites for decades. Harman No. 2 appeared on the list in 2019, scheduled for a structural safety assessment to ensure the sealed shaft did not collapse onto the county road running forty yards below it. The crew arrived in September 2024.
Five people. Equipment for clearing dense vegetation, and a structural engineer to assess the shaft. The site had not been accessed since its closure in 1963. The wooden barrier had long since been reinforced with a metal plate by the county.
Decades of vine growth covered most of the entrance. The crew cleared the entrance during the morning. The structural engineer assessed the wooden supports. One crew member, while clearing debris inside the first twenty feet of the tunnel, found the remains about eighteen feet from the entrance, near the base of the right support wall.
He called to the crew chief, who called the McDowell County Sheriff’s Department before saying anything else. The forensic team arrived that evening and began a recovery that took three days. The conditions inside the shaft had acted as an unexpected preservative: constant temperature, sealed air, packed stone walls. The remains were extensive.
The pale yellow jacket was not among them, but the other shoe, matching the one found on the hillside in May 1974, was there. McDowell County Sheriff’s Department called Loretta Sims on the fourth day. She was sixty-seven years old, in her office in Charleston. She asked the deputy to repeat the location.
“I know that mine,” she said. “My sister walked past that road her whole life. My father walked past it for twenty years without knowing. ” She asked if there was a shoe.
DNA analysis confirmed the identity within six weeks. Forensic investigators, matching evidence with Harold Vance’s forty-three pages of notes and county records now digitized from 1974, directed their inquiry toward Earl Purcell’s documented knowledge of the mine’s interior and the specific access required to enter Harman No. 2 in the weeks after closure, before the county reinforced the entrance in late 1974. What they found in Purcell’s records, combined with a deathbed testimony from a man who had been his closest associate in 1974, formed the basis of the case.
A man named Raymond Good, Purcell’s drinking companion, died in 2021 in a care facility outside Charleston. His daughter, while organizing his belongings, found a sealed letter addressed to the McDowell County Sheriff’s Department, with instructions not to open it until after his death. It had been held in the facility’s safe since 2019. The facility had a two-year backlog of unsent correspondence from deceased residents.
The letter reached the sheriff’s department in 2022 and was added to the cold case file without immediate investigative action. When the remediation crew found the remains in September 2024, the investigator pulled everything from the file, including Good’s letter, which she read for the first time. Raymond Good had written seven pages describing a conversation he had with Earl Purcell in the fall of 1974, months after Margaret’s disappearance, in a bar in Logan County, where they had both moved that summer. Purcell told Good what had happened on the evening of May 16, 1974.
It was not a full confession, but a fragmented, self-justifying account from a man who had confided in someone he trusted to keep silent, a silence purchased with loyalty and companionship over the following years. Good kept the secret but wrote it down and never managed to dispose of the letter. Earl Purcell was dead. There would be no trial; no arrest.
But the McDowell County prosecutor reviewed the evidence in full: the physical recovery of the body from the mine, Vance’s original notes identifying Purcell as a person of interest, documented knowledge of the mine, the departure from Welch in June 1974, and Good’s letter. In December 2024, an official finding was issued naming Earl Purcell responsible for the death of Margaret Sims. Loretta Sims read the finding at her kitchen table in Charleston, surrounded by her father’s old papers she had kept when she cleared out his house in 2015. Among them was a photocopy of the original deputy’s report dated May 17, 1974.
She found the line Harold Vance had written about the mine. She had read it before. She folded the papers carefully and put them away. She made a cup of tea and sat by the window watching the street outside for a long time.
There is a photograph of Margaret Sims taken at her high school graduation in May 1973, exactly one year before she disappeared. She wears the white cap and gown, holds her diploma, and looks directly at the camera. Her sister Loretta describes it as the face Margaret made when she was trying not to show how happy she was. A face brimming with suppressed joy.
A face of someone who had accomplished something and knew it and chose not to make a big thing of it. She had written to nursing programs in Charleston. She was waiting for replies. She was nineteen and her plans were ahead of her.
Loretta Sims delivered the eulogy at Margaret’s memorial service in January 2025. She said the thing she most wanted people to know about her sister, the thing lost in fifty years of case files and evidence records, was that Margaret was funny. Not funny in a gentle way. Funny with a sharp wit.
The kind of funny that made you feel like you shared a secret. That was the quality the case files could not contain. That was what the coal tunnel could not touch. Harman Mine No.
2 was permanently sealed and marked after the investigation was completed. The site was listed in the EPA remediation registry as Harman Two McDowell. The case file reference in the county’s cold case archives now reads: identity confirmed 2024, case closed. Harold Vance’s 1974 request for permission to search the mine was denied on technical grounds.
Fifty years later, an environmental cleanup crew found what a judge would not allow an investigator to look for. Margaret Sims’s case has become part of the continuing discussion about prioritizing abandoned industrial sites, closed mines, and derelict facilities in cold case investigations involving missing persons in communities where such sites are widespread. Justice for Margaret Sims arrived after fifty years.