Sumter County Does (Pamela Buckley & James Freund)

Case background and investigation

Early on the morning of August 9, 1976, a truck driver discovered the bodies of a man and a woman beside Locklair Road, an isolated dirt road between Interstate 95 and S.C. Highway 341 in rural Sumter County, South Carolina. A resident of the area had reported hearing gunshots overnight. Both victims had been shot multiple times — the man three times in the upper chest, the woman in the upper chest and through the neck — with what investigators believed was a .357 caliber revolver. The pair were well dressed but carried no identification and no money, leading early investigators to theorize they might have been affluent travelers, possibly foreign nationals, targeted in a robbery or carjacking. Because the two resembled each other, detectives initially thought they might be brother and sister, a theory later disproven by DNA testing.

Despite the nationwide distribution of descriptions, facial sketches, dental records, and fingerprints, the victims went unidentified for decades and became known as the Sumter County Does — "Jock Doe" and "Jane Doe." In 1977 they were buried at Bethel United Methodist Church Cemetery in Oswego, South Carolina. That same year, according to case accounts, a man named Lonnie George Henry was arrested in possession of a .357 revolver reportedly consistent with the murder weapon, but authorities lacked sufficient evidence to charge him with the killings; he died in 1982. Serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, questioned in 1984, told police he had been in South Carolina on the day of the murders, but investigators treated his statements with skepticism given his history of false confessions, and he was never charged.

The bodies were exhumed in 2007 for DNA extraction, but a breakthrough came only after a South Carolina citizen researcher suggested in 2019 that the Sumter County Sheriff's Office contact the DNA Doe Project. Donors contributed about $2,300 to fund extraction of usable DNA from bone marrow, and after labs sequenced the profiles and uploaded them to GEDmatch and Family Tree DNA, volunteer genealogists matched the victims to family trees within days. On January 21, 2021, the sheriff's office announced the identifications: the woman was Pamela Mae Buckley, born December 16, 1951, in Redwood County, Minnesota, and the man was James Paul Freund, born September 16, 1946, in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

The identifications revealed two lives that had gone missing months before the murders. Buckley, a former Redwood Jaycees Sno-Queen who had declined a pageant title to tour with her folk trio Sunlending, was last seen in December 1975 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where she was reported missing. Freund, a McCaskey High School graduate who had married and later divorced in Pennsylvania, was last seen on December 25, 1975, in Lancaster; his family reported him missing in 1975. Investigators have found no evidence establishing how, or whether, the two knew each other before their deaths.

With the victims finally named, the Sumter County Sheriff's Office reopened the homicide investigation in January 2021 and said it would follow up on persons of interest. Sheriff Anthony Dennis said the identifications brought the families a measure of closure after nearly 45 years. The question of who shot Pamela Buckley and James Freund on that rural road — and why — remains unanswered, and the double murder is still an open, unsolved case.