1794
In 1794 the South Carolina General Assembly appropriated $2,000 to build a wagon road from Greenville into the Blue Ridge Mountains.
about 0:06:17The story
In May 1987 Patsy Diane Vineyard was twenty years old and living at the Shipyard Apartments on Monroe Street in Sackett's Harbor, New York, while her husband, Michael Vineyard, served at Fort Drum. The couple had married about a year after meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee, and had moved north when Michael enlisted because he could not find work. In May 1987 he left for two weeks of specialised field training, and Patsy stayed behind in apartment 506.
She was last seen sunbathing outside the apartments on 15 or 16 May. Michael came home on 21 May to find the doors locked, a light on, her car parked outside and all her clothes in the closet. Stamped envelopes containing cheques she had written on 14 May were still on the counter. He reported her missing; the state police circulated a description of a five-foot, 115-pound woman with brown eyes, brown hair and a scar below her right knee.
On 8 June 1987 a resident of a summer cottage looking for firewood found a badly decomposed female body floating in Black River Bay off Storrs Harbor Road in the town of Houndsfield, about nine at night. The body was identified as Patsy within days. The death was classified as a sexual homicide, though decomposition was too advanced for the medical examiner to establish the cause; drowning or strangulation seemed most likely. Her purse, bank cards, driving licence and jewellery were missing. A state trooper, Dick Ledoux, led the inquiry and admitted after hundreds of hours that the investigation was at square one.
He was twenty, born in Candler, North Carolina, on 15 October 1967, the son of a violent alcoholic father and an overwhelmed mother. He had been in trouble since childhood: fighting at school, rape threats mailed to girls at fourteen, burglary, vandalism, and in October 1982, at fifteen, he broke into a neighbour's house, tied Betty Presley up in her basement at gunpoint and shot a friend of hers who came looking for her. A counsellor there, Jamie Hurley, believed in him, gave him books and her telephone number, and told him to stay in touch. He was assigned to the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum and married Tracy Bradshaw; they had a son, Joshua, in January 1988.
The Patsy Vineyard case went cold. He spent the summer in New York City on crack cocaine, then returned to the Carolinas, trained as a truck driver and worked for Amcan Transport out of Anderson, South Carolina, from May to September 1989.
On the night of 25 August 1989 Velma Faye Gray sang with her band, the Reflections, at the Elks Club in Asheville, North Carolina. She was forty-two, a typesetter at Furman University, divorced, with two teenage children, and she left the club at about 1.15 a.m. because she wanted to get home to send her son off to college the next day. Somewhere on White Horse Extension Road, five to ten miles from her home in Traveler's Rest, she wrecked her 1985 Mazda RX-7. Several witnesses saw an eighteen-wheeler stop and its driver walk towards her; assuming she was being helped, they drove on.
At 7.10 a.m. on 27 August two fishermen found her body floating face down under the Highway 9 bridge, about thirty yards off the south shore of Lake Bowen. Her hands were tied behind her back with shoelaces, she had been beaten in the face and sexually assaulted, and she died of asphyxiation by strangulation. Her car was found days later in a remote part of Greenville County, damaged on the driver's side, with the passenger window down, the fuel cap open and the plate missing. The family offered a reward, raised from $3,000 to $5,000.
He denied stopping in South Carolina that night, but the truck belonged to Amcan. Asheville police contacted the Spartanburg sheriff because of his links there, and he became the focus of the inquiry.
On 25 May 1990 Jamie Hurley disappeared from her home in Asheville. She was thirty-nine, a psychology graduate who had worked at the Juvenile Evaluation Center from 1976 to 1988 and had cooked holiday dinners for troubled teenagers. Her car was in the driveway, the lights were on, the doors were locked and her cats were inside. She had been last seen at a grocery store. On 28 May police searched his 1968 Chevrolet van and found her purse. He told them they had been partying, that she overdosed and that he panicked and dumped her body in the French Broad River.
On 18 July his younger brother, Leron, told police that he had helped bury Jamie Hurley's body in Pisgah National Forest. Police dug a shallow grave 210 feet from the paved road and found her, naked, covered with rocks and a large engine part.
He signed a written statement at 12.09 a.m. admitting to eight murders, including four the police could verify: Patsy Vineyard, Velma Faye Gray, Jamie Hurley and Katherine Johnson.
Katherine Noelle Johnson, known as Kat, was twenty-one, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who worked in the Radisson gift shop in High Point. At about 11.30 p.m. she got on the back of his Vulcan 750 motorcycle. He returned alone about an hour later, left the bike and drove off in her car. He told Terry he had left Kat in a motel room with a wake-up call.
He later admitted taking her to an abandoned soccer field, raping her and strangling her with her own bra, then putting her body in the boot of her own grey Renault Alliance and parking it on the second floor of the downtown High Point parking garage next to the Radisson. Police found her there; his fingerprints matched the car, and her shoes were found at the soccer field. She had been strangled, and was identified by dental records.