Identified! Mystery couple murdered in South Carolina, 1976 - #7 Pam Buckley & James P Freund

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AliceInPain said:
I don't understand this discussion.
The families will have no say in whether the murders are investigated or not.
They likely won't even get to decide whether their identities should be released or not.
These kids didn't die by their own hand and it wasn't an accident, it's up to LE how to go about investigating this and what to release.
Also, if the families would be against an investigation, wouldn't that be suspicious af.
What am I missing.
?
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You're not missing anything. Family members don't get to decide whether murder charges are a viable option. When people are murdered the justice department takes over because all victims are society's victims.
 
They did have a car, The matches they were carrying came from my state of Nebraska and their pictures were recognized at the truck stop although they had no information on the couple.

Things really were different in the 60's & 70's. Just look at the case of Reet Jurvetson - she went missing and her family never filed a missing persons report on her. Young people were joining cults, communes and just dropping out of site.

It doesn't surprise me that no one recognized them. They were found in a remote part of South Carolina. John & Jane Doe's and even murder victims, missing people just weren't publicized outside their location. I only heard about them because I used to read a lot of Detective Magazine back in the day and they were in the magazine. There weren't a lot of true crime books, no internet. Crime wasn't really covered on national news and local news had enough of their own. Even though the matches came from Nebraska, it was in the Western part and I don't think it even made the news here in Omaha.

By the time publicity really came around, a lot of their relatives may have already been dead, and if you were looking for them, where would you start? Since they were traveling around the country, they could have been anywhere. They may have been able to report the car, but since the police didn't know exactly what kind of car they had, that would have been almost useless.

I think DNA will solve this. Just watched the Jane Doe Murders on Oxygen, and like a lot of recent cases, they have a lot less information than this case and have amazing results.
 
Dragonfyree said:
They did have a car, The matches they were carrying came from my state of Nebraska and their pictures were recognized at the truck stop although they had no information on the couple.

Things really were different in the 60's & 70's. Just look at the case of Reet Jurvetson - she went missing and her family never filed a missing persons report on her. Young people were joining cults, communes and just dropping out of site.


It doesn't surprise me that no one recognized them. They were found in a remote part of South Carolina. John & Jane Doe's and even murder victims, missing people just weren't publicized outside their location. I only heard about them because I used to read a lot of Detective Magazine back in the day and they were in the magazine. There weren't a lot of true crime books, no internet. Crime wasn't really covered on national news and local news had enough of their own. Even though the matches came from Nebraska, it was in the Western part and I don't think it even made the news here in Omaha.

By the time publicity really came around, a lot of their relatives may have already been dead, and if you were looking for them, where would you start? Since they were traveling around the country, they could have been anywhere. They may have been able to report the car, but since the police didn't know exactly what kind of car they had, that would have been almost useless.

I think DNA will solve this. Just watched the Jane Doe Murders on Oxygen, and like a lot of recent cases, they have a lot less information than this case and have amazing results.
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I've known about this case for at least 25 years. And I live in Canada! I think the mystery moved beyond the border because 1) there was a suggestion they may have been French Canadian or a least resided in Quebec and 2) it has all the earmarks of a great mystery.

And to be fair to the parents and/or family members of missing persons back in the 60s and 70s, there was really no way to register a missing person. I mean, the logistics of when they went missing matters. People traveled, a lot, during that time, sporadically getting in touch with family members through postcards and collect calls. So just because the last time you spoke or got a postcard from your child in Wisconsin doesn't mean that's where they went missing.

It used to be a joke that, so a parent wouldn't have to pay for a collect call from, let's say California or England, they'd give a code name so that when the operator asked if you'd accept a collect call from Maggie Muggs or some other fake name, they wouldn't accept the call but were assured that their child had arrived at their destination.

Also, having matches from a truck stop doesn't mean they had a vehicle. It just might mean that's where they were dropped off by someone who picked them up hitchhiking.
 
branmuffin said:
I've known about this case for at least 25 years. And I live in Canada! I think the mystery moved beyond the border because 1) there was a suggestion they may have been French Canadian or a least resided in Quebec and 2) it has all the earmarks of a great mystery.

And to be fair to the parents and/or family members of missing persons back in the 60s and 70s, there was really no way to register a missing person. I mean, the logistics of when they went missing matters. People traveled, a lot, during that time, sporadically getting in touch with family members through postcards and collect calls. So just because the last time you spoke or got a postcard from your child in Wisconsin doesn't mean that's where they went missing.

It used to be a joke that, so a parent wouldn't have to pay for a collect call from, let's say California or England, they'd give a code name so that when the operator asked if you'd accept a collect call from Maggie Muggs or some other fake name, they wouldn't accept the call but were assured that their child had arrived at their destination.

Also, having matches from a truck stop doesn't mean they had a vehicle. It just might mean that's where they were dropped off by someone who picked them up hitchhiking.
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No witness in this case was able to positively identify these victims as the people they encountered. What I don't understand about this one is how can a mechanic remember something about the people and about the tags on the vehicle but nothing about the vehicle itself? You would think that's what a mechanic would remember the most. What kind of service was done on it? Was it routine maintenance or something more? Was it the kind of vehicle that might leave them stranded somewhere? I don't know about it.
 
The mechanic was in York, NE, population today 8,000. Maybe didn't get a lot of strangers passing through and therefore remember them. I don't think it was that long between their murders and the interview with him. Details on some aspects of the case are very hard to find. I've never really heard what the circumstances were around the meeting.

Did anyone at the camping site they stayed at for several days verify if they showed up with a car or not?

I think the airing of this case in 1995 on Unsolved Mysteries is what really spread this story wide, but by then they had already been deceased for almost 20 years.

We also have to be aware that back in the day most police offices wouldn't take missing persons reports on adults unless foul play was suspected. And even then, the use of "They probably ran away" was widely used for teenagers and adults, no matter what the circumstances were, so even if the families were looking for them, they might not have had any luck in reporting them.

I really think these two are going to be identified soon. I'm just wondering if they're using the same techniques to identify the Boy In The Box from the 1950's.
 
Dragonfyree said:
The mechanic was in York, NE, population today 8,000. Maybe didn't get a lot of strangers passing through and therefore remember them. I don't think it was that long between their murders and the interview with him. Details on some aspects of the case are very hard to find. I've never really heard what the circumstances were around the meeting.

Did anyone at the camping site they stayed at for several days verify if they showed up with a car or not?

I think the airing of this case in 1995 on Unsolved Mysteries is what really spread this story wide, but by then they had already been deceased for almost 20 years.

We also have to be aware that back in the day most police offices wouldn't take missing persons reports on adults unless foul play was suspected. And even then, the use of "They probably ran away" was widely used for teenagers and adults, no matter what the circumstances were, so even if the families were looking for them, they might not have had any luck in reporting them.

I really think these two are going to be identified soon. I'm just wondering if they're using the same techniques to identify the Boy In The Box from the 1950's.
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I agree with you regarding the reluctance of LE to create a missing person's report. It can be difficult to do today so you can multiply that difficulty by ten back in the day.

I think people may have remembered them because the girl was so pretty and imo, didn't look like the usual hippie/flower child woman during that era. She didn't have the ultra long hair, wearing a peasant blouse and a long skirt.
 
branmuffin said:
I've known about this case for at least 25 years. And I live in Canada! I think the mystery moved beyond the border because 1) there was a suggestion they may have been French Canadian or a least resided in Quebec and 2) it has all the earmarks of a great mystery.

And to be fair to the parents and/or family members of missing persons back in the 60s and 70s, there was really no way to register a missing person. I mean, the logistics of when they went missing matters. People traveled, a lot, during that time, sporadically getting in touch with family members through postcards and collect calls. So just because the last time you spoke or got a postcard from your child in Wisconsin doesn't mean that's where they went missing.

It used to be a joke that, so a parent wouldn't have to pay for a collect call from, let's say California or England, they'd give a code name so that when the operator asked if you'd accept a collect call from Maggie Muggs or some other fake name, they wouldn't accept the call but were assured that their child had arrived at their destination.

Also, having matches from a truck stop doesn't mean they had a vehicle. It just might mean that's where they were dropped off by someone who picked them up hitchhiking.
Click to expand...

Thanks for sharing this. I wasn't born yet, so there are times when I forget that things were much different back then.

As for the matchbooks, when I was a child people had all sorts of matchbooks because they were also given away as promotional items with the company logos on them. People had them even if they weren't smokers.
 
I don’t understand all this ancestry DNA stuff but this is great news!!! I really hope we can find out who they are. This is one of the first cases I followed many years ago. And the Grateful Doe, that was solved after many years!! I feel it won’t be long now.
 
I'm wondering if the delay with the matching of DNA has anything to do with them possibly being foreign. I know privacy laws in other countries are very strict and I'm not sure if there is as much access to their DNA data bases as in the USA.
 
Dragonfyree said:
I'm wondering if the delay with the matching of DNA has anything to do with them possibly being foreign. I know privacy laws in other countries are very strict and I'm not sure if there is as much access to their DNA data bases as in the USA.
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I'm not sure there's a delay relative to other cases. These cases always seem to move pretty slowly.
 
ntt1 said:
Jane now has a top match of 204.8 and Jock 232.8 with the change of the GEDMatch TOS - both in the 2nd cousin or 1st cousin once removed range (per Shared cM Project 4.0 Tool v4 with relationship probabilities). Things are looking very, very promising for an ID now.
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Cool! I can tell you about cousins of mine in this range that I haven't seen in decades. Might not hear of their death, really.

This is great news!

jmho ymmv lrr
 
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