On the morning of August 9, 1976, truck driver Martin Durance was driving along Lochlair Road, a narrow, nearly deserted dirt track in Sumter County, South Carolina, when he spotted something on the shoulder. He stopped. There were two bodies lying on the ground, a young man and a young woman, both dead. The victims had been shot three times each from the same .
357-caliber pistol. The fatal wounds were to the backs of their heads, meaning they had been shot from behind, likely while fleeing or while their killer stood behind them. A reclusive man who lived near the road later told police he had heard a car, then gunshots, then the car driving away in the early morning hours. He had not called the authorities.
The man was clean and neatly dressed, with olive skin, shoulder-length brown hair, and thick, distinctive eyebrows. He wore a gold Bulova Accutron watch and a 14-karat gold ring engraved with three letters: JPF. His expensive dental work suggested he came from a wealthy family, including complex root canal treatment that a forensic dentist believed may have been performed overseas. His shirt was a promotional item from the 1975 Sebring race in Florida, sponsored by Coors beer.
In his pocket was a book of matches from Grants Truck Stop, a chain with locations in Idaho, Nebraska, and Arizona. The woman was also young and neatly groomed, with auburn hair, gray-blue eyes, and two distinctive moles on the left side of her mouth. She wore a white gauze blouse over a pink shirt, short jean shorts, and a patterned scarf tied as a belt. Her jewelry consisted of three handmade silver rings in Native American or Mexican style, the kind found in the American Southwest.
She had fillings in her molars and straight front teeth. She had never been pregnant. Neither carried identification. No wallet, no keys, no car.
The resemblance between the two led investigators to believe they might be siblings. The police distributed photographs and sketches nationwide. Dental records were sent out. Fingerprints were collected and compared.
Nothing matched. For a full year, the bodies were kept in a local funeral home in sealed transparent caskets so that anyone who came could view their faces. Parents of runaways from across America called, describing their children, asking if they were the ones. Every call ended in disappointment.
On August 14, 1977, exactly one year and five days after the bodies were found, they were buried at Bethel United Methodist Church cemetery in Oswego, South Carolina. Hundreds of strangers attended the funeral of two unnamed people. Their granite headstones read only: Unknown Male and Unknown Female. In 1977, a man named Lonnie George Henry was arrested in Latta, South Carolina for driving under the influence.
When police searched his car, they found a pistol. Ballistics testing confirmed it was the murder weapon, a perfect match to the bullets found in both victims. But prosecutors concluded there was insufficient evidence to charge Henry. Too much time had passed, and they could not prove he had owned the gun at the time of the killings.
No charges were ever filed. Henry died in 1982. In 1984, serial killer Henry Lee Lucas entered the picture. Lucas, who claimed to have killed over 600 people, confessed to the Lochlair Road murders.
But Lucas had a habit of claiming responsibility for any unsolved murder offered to him, and he could not provide verifiable details about the crime scene. His confession was dismissed as another lie in an endless series. He died in 2001. The most common theory was robbery.
Investigators believed the victims may have been driving on Interstate 95, picked up a hitchhiker or been stopped by someone, and had their car stolen. The attacker would have driven to the remote dirt road, forced them out, and shot them from behind. This would explain the absence of a car and any identification, which may have been in the vehicle. But without knowing who the victims were, the theory could not be proven.
One person never gave up. Sumter County Coroner Verna Moore pursued the case year after year. She distributed photos, took phone calls, and compared dental records against newly reported missing persons. She retired in 2009, more than three decades after the bodies were found, without an answer.
In 2007, Moore, then near retirement, made a final significant decision. She ordered the bodies exhumed to take DNA samples. In 1976, DNA technology did not exist in criminal investigations. By 2007, it was the most powerful tool available, but DNA is only useful when there is something to compare it to.
There were no matches in any database. The DNA did, however, settle one long-standing question: the two victims were not related by blood. They were not siblings, despite their similar appearance. The case returned to the cold files.
But outside law enforcement, the Sumter County Jane and John Does had not been forgotten. The case became one of the most famous mysteries in the true crime community. Unsolved Mysteries featured it on national television. The files were listed on the Doe Network and in NamUs.
True crime podcasts devoted entire episodes to the case. Internet forums analyzed every detail. One of those amateur investigators was Matt McDaniel, a Clemson University graduate living in South Carolina. He had followed the case for years, reading every article, studying every piece of evidence.
In June 2019, McDaniel emailed the Sumter County Sheriff’s Office with a simple suggestion: send the DNA samples to the DNA Doe Project. The DNA Doe Project is a nonprofit organization founded in 2017 by Colleen Fitzpatrick and Margaret Press. Instead of comparing a victim’s DNA to criminal databases, the organization uploads DNA to public genealogy platforms like GEDmatch and Family Tree DNA, where millions of ordinary people have voluntarily submitted their DNA to learn about their ancestry. If any relative of the victim, even a distant cousin, had uploaded their DNA, the system would find the link.
Genetic genealogists could then build a family tree backward until they found a match. Sheriff Anthony Dennis agreed. In June 2019, the stored DNA samples from the 2007 exhumation were sent to the DNA Doe Project. A total of $2,300 was raised through a public fundraising campaign to cover processing costs.
Astrea Forensics, a laboratory specializing in forensic DNA, successfully extracted usable DNA from the bone marrow of bodies that had been dead for more than forty years. The DNA was uploaded to two platforms, GEDmatch and Family Tree DNA. Volunteer genealogists began their work in September 2020. The answer came faster than anyone expected.
After 44 years of silence, the DNA revealed what no photograph or sketch or fingerprint could. In January 2021, the DNA Doe Project announced that both victims had been identified. On January 21, 2021, Sheriff Anthony Dennis held a press conference. After 44 years, 5 months, and 12 days, he spoke two names into cameras.
The man was James Paul Freund. He was 30 years old. The woman was Pamela Mae Buckley. She was 25 years old.
James Paul Freund was born on September 16, 1946, in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. He was the only son of Adam and Lolita Freund. The family moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where James graduated from McCaskey High School in 1964. In December 1965, he married his high school sweetheart.
They had a child in 1970, but Freund filed for divorce in 1971. His family last spoke to him on December 25, 1975, Christmas Eve. After that, silence. Remarkably, James Paul Freund was never reported missing.
No missing person file exists under his name in any database. No family member, friend, or former wife ever filed a report. A thirty-year-old man vanished from the face of the earth at Christmas 1975, and no one officially asked where he was. Pamela Mae Buckley was born on December 16, 1951, in Redwood County, Minnesota.
She grew up in the small town of Redwood Falls, and in 1970 she was crowned the town’s Snow Queen. After graduating high school, she left Minnesota for Colorado to pursue a music career. She became a prominent member of a folk band called Sun Landing. She married in Colorado, but the marriage did not last.
Her divorce was finalized 11 days after she was shot to death on Lochlair Road. Buckley was last seen in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in December 1975. Her family reported her missing. Someone was looking for her.
But in an era without 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. Freund and Buckley lived nearly 1,700 miles apart. There is no evidence they knew each other before they disappeared.
No shared friends, no shared workplaces, no shared schools. Yet both vanished in December 1975, were not seen for nearly eight months, and then appeared together, dead, on a dirt road in South Carolina thousands of miles from either of their homes. The eight months between their disappearances and their deaths remain the largest gap in the case. Where did they meet?
Under what circumstances? Those questions cannot be answered by DNA. At the press conference, Sheriff Dennis said both families had been notified and had requested privacy. He said he would reopen the murder investigation and pursue a person of interest.
But the harsh reality is that Lonnie George Henry, the strongest suspect, died in 1982. Henry Lee Lucas died in 2001. Both suspects in the case file are dead. What was solved was identification.
After 44 years, the John and Jane Doe had names. But the question of who pulled the trigger on that August morning in 1976 remains unanswered. The murder is still an open, active case. The case stands as proof of the power of forensic genetic genealogy, a field that barely existed a decade before its use here.
The DNA Doe Project, run by unpaid volunteers, identified more than 150 unknown bodies since its founding in 2017. And it stands as proof of the role of citizen investigators, ordinary people with patience and research skills, who refuse to let cases be forgotten. Verna Moore, the coroner who kept the case alive for more than thirty years, did the final act that made resolution possible. Her decision to exhume the bodies in 2007 provided the DNA that solved the mystery 14 years later.
In the cemetery in Oswego, South Carolina, the granite markers that read only Unknown Male and Unknown Female now bear the names of James Paul Freund, born September 16, 1946, and Pamela Mae Buckley, born December 16, 1951. They are no longer unknown.