A look into the heinous crimes of the ‘Gaffney Strangler’

Serial killers have grasped the public’s attention for decades, with many of these killers operating across the United States. South Carolina is home to some of these notorious killers, including Todd Kohlhepp, Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins, and the “Gaffney Strangler.”According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a serial killer is someone who commits the unlawful killing of two or more victims in separate events.On Saturday morning, May 20, 1967, a naked woman was found dead on Jerusalem Road, which is a rural road in Union County, South Carolina. The Union County coroner at the time, Fred Phillips, identified the woman as 32-year-old Annie Lucille Dedmond of Forest City, North Carolina, in an article published by the Greenville News the following day.Phillips said law enforcement questioned her husband, 27-year-old Roger Zane Dedmond, for six hours before taking him to the Union County Jail. Roger Dedmond told authorities that he and his wife were visiting nightclubs on Friday night in Cherokee County when they got into an argument about which club to visit next.According to The Gaffney Ledger, Union County deputies testified that Roger Dedmond confessed to killing Annie Dedmond during an argument.Annie Dedmond’s autopsy revealed bruises on her head and neck. Phillips said “something powerful” had been around her neck, which led to Annie Dedmond’s death.Although Roger Dedmond denied killing his wife on the witness stand, in December 1967, he was sentenced to 18 years on the Union County chain gang for the murder of his wife, newspapers reported. Reportedly, 14-year-old Nancy Christine Rhinehart of Gaffney visited her grandmother on the afternoon of Jan. 29, 1968. Rhinehart told her grandmother she was going to a store in downtown Gaffney, where her mother worked. Rhinehart disappeared before arriving at the store.The Greenville News reported her disappearance caused little concern for the town as she was described as a moody girl who wrote sad songs and would disappear frequently.Around 3:25 p.m. on Feb. 7, 20-year-old Nancy Godfrey Parris of Gaffney took her white poodle out for a walk, and neither she nor the dog ever returned, the article also reported.Just after noon on Feb. 8, a call came into the office of The Gaffney Ledger. Managing Editor Bill Gibbons came back from his lunch early and picked up the phone. Gibbons described the caller as a calm, rational, and possibly a middle-aged man. The man said, “Get out three pieces of paper. I’m going to give you three stories.”According to Gibbons, the man continued, “On the first sheet, write the following: go by the junior high school to the chain gang road, following the road toward the chain gang to the second bridge. You will see a dirt road; turn off on it, go to the top of the hill, turn left and go to the edge of the woods.”Gibbons said he was unsure if the man was legitimate or if this was a prank call, but he still followed the caller’s directions.Continuing, the man said, “Stop the car, get out, face toward I-85 and walk one quarter of a mile through the woods, down one hill and to the top of another. Look for a pile of brush.”Without wasting any time, the man on the phone said, “Take out the second sheet and write on it, go to the bridge on the Old Ford Road, look in the water on the downhill side.”In the third “story” given to Gibbons, the caller said, “March 1967, Jerusalem Road, Union County, Annie Louise Dedmon, Spindale, North Carolina.”This is the exact location where Annie Dedmond’s body was found in May 1967. Gibbons said in the Ledger’s article on Feb. 9 that he grew tired of this game the caller made him play, but the man told Gibbons to go back to the first sheet and write the name “Nancy Christine,” and, on the second sheet, to write “Nancy Carol Parris.””Get the sheriff to go with you, and you will find two bodies at the locations I have given you. This is not a crank call,” the man said, concluding the phone call.Although Gibbons and Cherokee County Sheriff Julian Wright doubted the legitimacy of the phone call, they still went to check it out. When they arrived at the location given on the second sheet of paper off Old Ford Road, Gibbons and Wright were shocked to see that off the bridge over People’s Creek was the body of a naked young woman along the bank, faced down in the water.According to the article, the body was later identified as Parris, just as the caller said.It was reported that Gibbons and Wright then believed, without a doubt, that the next location was going to lead them to another body.Immediately after discovering the first body on Feb. 8, a search began in the densely wooded area as two deputies, the sheriff and Gibbons fanned out, following the very specific instructions left by the caller to the location of the body on the first sheet of paper.Gibbons said the instructions were somewhat off, but one of the deputies found the body of a naked young girl after coming up on a pile of brush. Completely covered with leaves and brush, the body of Rhinehart was found.The Greenville News reported on Feb. 9, that Rhinehart appeared to have been tied up, and burn marks, seemingly made by a cigarette, were visible over her body.According to the coroner, autopsies revealed both Rhinehart and Parris were beaten and strangled to death. Parris was dead for about 12 hours, and Rhinehart was dead for almost two days before their bodies were found.Wright requested Union County deputies check Jerusalem Road, but authorities found nothing.The Gaffney Ledger reported police found no connection between Annie Dedmond’s murder in May of the previous year and the two recent killings. Gibbons received another phone call around 9:15 p.m. on Feb. 12; this time, he received the call from home.”This is the same man who called you before,” the voice on the phone said in a calm manner, according to Gibbons. “We’re going to have to do something about that man down yonder serving my sentence.””I killed Mrs. Dedmond, just like I did Mrs. Parris and Rhinehart,” the caller said. “I killed them with them all begging me not to do it.”The caller continued to describe his “account” of Annie Dedmond’s murder. She was traveling at a high rate of speed in a red Ford with the rear left taillight out when she passed the caller at Linder’s Vineyard. He claimed Roger Dedmond was passed out in the vehicle, and the man on the phone followed behind her. The man then continued to go into specific details about what Annie Dedmond was wearing the night she was murdered, but did not give specifics on how he stopped the car or killed her, Gibbons reported.The caller said, “I took the body to Union County to throw suspicion off Cherokee County.”The man also claimed that before Annie Dedmond’s death, she spoke of a relative in law enforcement and said, “He’s sure to get you.”Gibbons asked the man about the dog Parris was walking when she was abducted, and the man answered, “It’s dead. It is out in the open in the exact location where I killed her.”Gibbons further reported that the caller would not give the location up as it would “give me away.” According to the article, the two spoke on the phone about the details of the other murders, to which the caller disagreed with several timelines reported, insisting Annie Dedmond was killed in March of the previous year and not May.The following day, on Feb. 13, it was reported that a 15-year-old student, Opal Dianne Buckson, was kidnapped after 7 a.m. while waiting for her school bus to arrive near her home in the Mount Sinai community of Gaffney.Opal Buckson’s 16-year-old sister, Gracie Buckson, witnessed the kidnapping. The Gaffney Ledger reported Gracie Buckson was coming around the bend of the road when she heard a scream. Gracie took off running toward the scream and watched as a white man forced Opal Buckson into the trunk of a blue car. Gracie Buckson said the man spotted her, so she ran home to report the kidnapping.A massive hunt ensued after the kidnapping. The hunt was led by Wright, while South Carolina Law Enforcement Division agents, an agent from the FBI, highway patrol and sheriffs from surrounding counties joined in as the search continued on through the night.Many people joined the search for Opal Buckson, including professional golfer Henry Transou and former warden of Cherokee County, Lester Skinner. The two spotted a 1957 Chevrolet backed down a dead-end dirt road near the Cowpens Battleground community and a man squatting beside the vehicle a few hours after the kidnapping. When the two approached the suspect in their vehicle, he quickly got in his vehicle and fled the area, reports stated.The Gaffney Ledger reported a chase through dirt roads began, but when Transou and Skinner were closing in on the suspect, he pulled into a driveway and began talking to another man. The pair wrote down the tag number of the vehicle and called the sheriff’s office about the suspicious behavior.The sheriff’s office gave the two the name and address of the driver, who was identified as 31-year-old Lee Roy Martin. After receiving the information, Transou began driving by Martin’s home any chance he got. Martin did not return to the house with the vehicle until the next afternoon on Feb 14. He was found washing his car in the driveway.The next morning, Feb. 15, SLED agents followed Martin to the textile mill where he worked. Agents obtained time clock information from his job to find out when he was at work and when he was not.SLED Lt. McKinnon found Opal Buckson’s naked body underneath leaves, pine needles and branches around 9:40 a.m. on Feb. 16 in the heavily wooded area where Transou and Skinner found Martin days earlier. Opal Buckson was strangled and stabbed twice, once in the leg and once in the chest, officials said.Martin was arrested hours later at 12:20 p.m. in connection to Opal Buckson’s death. The newspaper reported he was immediately taken to Columbia.Following Martin’s arrest, he was charged in the strangulations of Rhinehart, Parris and Opal Buckson, newspaper outlets reported.On Feb. 19, it was reported that Atlanta authorities expressed interest in the “Gaffney Strangler” as a suspect in the 1965 disappearance of Mary Shotwell Little, who disappeared from an Atlanta, Georgia, shopping center. However, this was just theorized and never proven.The Gaffney Ledger published an article on Feb. 21, 1968, after the family of Annie Dedmond (the first victim) claimed justice was served as they believed Annie Dedmond’s husband was responsible for her murder. Annie Dedmond’s father stated that on that Friday night, his daughter was going to drive off and leave her husband on Highway 18, but “he (Roger) ran and shoved her over and got into the car with her.””He told my brother he did it,” Annie Dedmond’s mother claimed in a statement to The Gaffney Ledger. Days following Martin’s arrest, SLED was working to gather every piece of evidence against him as possible. Clothing and personal items belonging to the victims were found, including the body of the poodle that Parris was walking at the time of the abduction and items that may have belonged to Annie Dedmond.Around 9:30 a.m. on Feb. 27, further down the dead-end dirt road where Martin’s vehicle was seen after Opal Buckson’s abduction, was an abandoned home and well. After emptying the well, authorities found the jacket and one of the shoes Opal Buckson was wearing at the time of the abduction.Officials reported evidence was found for all four murders across the county. Reporters believed some evidence was discovered after Martin led them there when he was transported away from prison on Feb. 26, but officers denied this.Due to the evidence found linking Martin to the murder of Annie Dedmond, Roger Dedmond was released from prison on Feb. 29, 1968, and later exonerated.On May 20, 1969, Judge Wade Weatherford sentenced the “Gaffney Strangler” to four life sentences, one for each murder.On June 1, 1972, the Greenville News reported that the “Gaffney Strangler” was stabbed to death in his cell by another inmate, Kenneth Marshall Rumsey, on May 31 around 5:15 p.m. at the Central Correctional Institution in Columbia.

CHEROKEE COUNTY, S.C. —

Serial killers have grasped the public’s attention for decades, with many of these killers operating across the United States. South Carolina is home to some of these notorious killers, including Todd Kohlhepp, Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins, and the “Gaffney Strangler.”

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a serial killer is someone who commits the unlawful killing of two or more victims in separate events.

On Saturday morning, May 20, 1967, a naked woman was found dead on Jerusalem Road, which is a rural road in Union County, South Carolina. The Union County coroner at the time, Fred Phillips, identified the woman as 32-year-old Annie Lucille Dedmond of Forest City, North Carolina, in an article published by the Greenville News the following day.

Phillips said law enforcement questioned her husband, 27-year-old Roger Zane Dedmond, for six hours before taking him to the Union County Jail. Roger Dedmond told authorities that he and his wife were visiting nightclubs on Friday night in Cherokee County when they got into an argument about which club to visit next.

According to The Gaffney Ledger, Union County deputies testified that Roger Dedmond confessed to killing Annie Dedmond during an argument.

Annie Dedmond’s autopsy revealed bruises on her head and neck. Phillips said “something powerful” had been around her neck, which led to Annie Dedmond’s death.

Although Roger Dedmond denied killing his wife on the witness stand, in December 1967, he was sentenced to 18 years on the Union County chain gang for the murder of his wife, newspapers reported.

Reportedly, 14-year-old Nancy Christine Rhinehart of Gaffney visited her grandmother on the afternoon of Jan. 29, 1968. Rhinehart told her grandmother she was going to a store in downtown Gaffney, where her mother worked. Rhinehart disappeared before arriving at the store.

The Greenville News reported her disappearance caused little concern for the town as she was described as a moody girl who wrote sad songs and would disappear frequently.

Around 3:25 p.m. on Feb. 7, 20-year-old Nancy Godfrey Parris of Gaffney took her white poodle out for a walk, and neither she nor the dog ever returned, the article also reported.

Just after noon on Feb. 8, a call came into the office of The Gaffney Ledger. Managing Editor Bill Gibbons came back from his lunch early and picked up the phone. Gibbons described the caller as a calm, rational, and possibly a middle-aged man. The man said, “Get out three pieces of paper. I’m going to give you three stories.”

According to Gibbons, the man continued, “On the first sheet, write the following: go by the junior high school to the chain gang road, following the road toward the chain gang to the second bridge. You will see a dirt road; turn off on it, go to the top of the hill, turn left and go to the edge of the woods.”

Gibbons said he was unsure if the man was legitimate or if this was a prank call, but he still followed the caller’s directions.

Continuing, the man said, “Stop the car, get out, face toward I-85 and walk one quarter of a mile through the woods, down one hill and to the top of another. Look for a pile of brush.”

Without wasting any time, the man on the phone said, “Take out the second sheet and write on it, go to the bridge on the Old Ford Road, look in the water on the downhill side.”

In the third “story” given to Gibbons, the caller said, “March 1967, Jerusalem Road, Union County, Annie Louise Dedmon, Spindale, North Carolina.”

This is the exact location where Annie Dedmond’s body was found in May 1967.

Gibbons said in the Ledger’s article on Feb. 9 that he grew tired of this game the caller made him play, but the man told Gibbons to go back to the first sheet and write the name “Nancy Christine,” and, on the second sheet, to write “Nancy Carol Parris.”

“Get the sheriff to go with you, and you will find two bodies at the locations I have given you. This is not a crank call,” the man said, concluding the phone call.

Although Gibbons and Cherokee County Sheriff Julian Wright doubted the legitimacy of the phone call, they still went to check it out. When they arrived at the location given on the second sheet of paper off Old Ford Road, Gibbons and Wright were shocked to see that off the bridge over People’s Creek was the body of a naked young woman along the bank, faced down in the water.

According to the article, the body was later identified as Parris, just as the caller said.

It was reported that Gibbons and Wright then believed, without a doubt, that the next location was going to lead them to another body.

Immediately after discovering the first body on Feb. 8, a search began in the densely wooded area as two deputies, the sheriff and Gibbons fanned out, following the very specific instructions left by the caller to the location of the body on the first sheet of paper.

Gibbons said the instructions were somewhat off, but one of the deputies found the body of a naked young girl after coming up on a pile of brush. Completely covered with leaves and brush, the body of Rhinehart was found.

The Greenville News reported on Feb. 9, that Rhinehart appeared to have been tied up, and burn marks, seemingly made by a cigarette, were visible over her body.

According to the coroner, autopsies revealed both Rhinehart and Parris were beaten and strangled to death. Parris was dead for about 12 hours, and Rhinehart was dead for almost two days before their bodies were found.

Wright requested Union County deputies check Jerusalem Road, but authorities found nothing.

The Gaffney Ledger reported police found no connection between Annie Dedmond’s murder in May of the previous year and the two recent killings.

Gibbons received another phone call around 9:15 p.m. on Feb. 12; this time, he received the call from home.

“This is the same man who called you before,” the voice on the phone said in a calm manner, according to Gibbons. “We’re going to have to do something about that man down yonder serving my sentence.”

“I killed Mrs. Dedmond, just like I did Mrs. Parris and Rhinehart,” the caller said. “I killed them with them all begging me not to do it.”

The caller continued to describe his “account” of Annie Dedmond’s murder. She was traveling at a high rate of speed in a red Ford with the rear left taillight out when she passed the caller at Linder’s Vineyard. He claimed Roger Dedmond was passed out in the vehicle, and the man on the phone followed behind her.

The man then continued to go into specific details about what Annie Dedmond was wearing the night she was murdered, but did not give specifics on how he stopped the car or killed her, Gibbons reported.

The caller said, “I took the body to Union County to throw suspicion off Cherokee County.”

The man also claimed that before Annie Dedmond’s death, she spoke of a relative in law enforcement and said, “He’s sure to get you.”

Gibbons asked the man about the dog Parris was walking when she was abducted, and the man answered, “It’s dead. It is out in the open in the exact location where I killed her.”

Gibbons further reported that the caller would not give the location up as it would “give me away.”

According to the article, the two spoke on the phone about the details of the other murders, to which the caller disagreed with several timelines reported, insisting Annie Dedmond was killed in March of the previous year and not May.

The following day, on Feb. 13, it was reported that a 15-year-old student, Opal Dianne Buckson, was kidnapped after 7 a.m. while waiting for her school bus to arrive near her home in the Mount Sinai community of Gaffney.

Opal Buckson’s 16-year-old sister, Gracie Buckson, witnessed the kidnapping. The Gaffney Ledger reported Gracie Buckson was coming around the bend of the road when she heard a scream. Gracie took off running toward the scream and watched as a white man forced Opal Buckson into the trunk of a blue car. Gracie Buckson said the man spotted her, so she ran home to report the kidnapping.

A massive hunt ensued after the kidnapping. The hunt was led by Wright, while South Carolina Law Enforcement Division agents, an agent from the FBI, highway patrol and sheriffs from surrounding counties joined in as the search continued on through the night.

Many people joined the search for Opal Buckson, including professional golfer Henry Transou and former warden of Cherokee County, Lester Skinner. The two spotted a 1957 Chevrolet backed down a dead-end dirt road near the Cowpens Battleground community and a man squatting beside the vehicle a few hours after the kidnapping. When the two approached the suspect in their vehicle, he quickly got in his vehicle and fled the area, reports stated.

The Gaffney Ledger reported a chase through dirt roads began, but when Transou and Skinner were closing in on the suspect, he pulled into a driveway and began talking to another man. The pair wrote down the tag number of the vehicle and called the sheriff’s office about the suspicious behavior.

The sheriff’s office gave the two the name and address of the driver, who was identified as 31-year-old Lee Roy Martin. After receiving the information, Transou began driving by Martin’s home any chance he got. Martin did not return to the house with the vehicle until the next afternoon on Feb 14. He was found washing his car in the driveway.

The next morning, Feb. 15, SLED agents followed Martin to the textile mill where he worked. Agents obtained time clock information from his job to find out when he was at work and when he was not.

SLED Lt. McKinnon found Opal Buckson’s naked body underneath leaves, pine needles and branches around 9:40 a.m. on Feb. 16 in the heavily wooded area where Transou and Skinner found Martin days earlier. Opal Buckson was strangled and stabbed twice, once in the leg and once in the chest, officials said.

The Gaffney Ledger/Tommy Martin

Martin was arrested hours later at 12:20 p.m. in connection to Opal Buckson’s death. The newspaper reported he was immediately taken to Columbia.

The Greenville News

Following Martin’s arrest, he was charged in the strangulations of Rhinehart, Parris and Opal Buckson, newspaper outlets reported.

On Feb. 19, it was reported that Atlanta authorities expressed interest in the “Gaffney Strangler” as a suspect in the 1965 disappearance of Mary Shotwell Little, who disappeared from an Atlanta, Georgia, shopping center. However, this was just theorized and never proven.

The Gaffney Ledger published an article on Feb. 21, 1968, after the family of Annie Dedmond (the first victim) claimed justice was served as they believed Annie Dedmond’s husband was responsible for her murder. Annie Dedmond’s father stated that on that Friday night, his daughter was going to drive off and leave her husband on Highway 18, but “he (Roger) ran and shoved her over and got into the car with her.”

“He told my brother he did it,” Annie Dedmond’s mother claimed in a statement to The Gaffney Ledger.

Days following Martin’s arrest, SLED was working to gather every piece of evidence against him as possible. Clothing and personal items belonging to the victims were found, including the body of the poodle that Parris was walking at the time of the abduction and items that may have belonged to Annie Dedmond.

Around 9:30 a.m. on Feb. 27, further down the dead-end dirt road where Martin’s vehicle was seen after Opal Buckson’s abduction, was an abandoned home and well. After emptying the well, authorities found the jacket and one of the shoes Opal Buckson was wearing at the time of the abduction.

Officials reported evidence was found for all four murders across the county. Reporters believed some evidence was discovered after Martin led them there when he was transported away from prison on Feb. 26, but officers denied this.

Due to the evidence found linking Martin to the murder of Annie Dedmond, Roger Dedmond was released from prison on Feb. 29, 1968, and later exonerated.

The Greenville News

On May 20, 1969, Judge Wade Weatherford sentenced the “Gaffney Strangler” to four life sentences, one for each murder.

The Gaffney Ledger/Carl Grant

On June 1, 1972, the Greenville News reported that the “Gaffney Strangler” was stabbed to death in his cell by another inmate, Kenneth Marshall Rumsey, on May 31 around 5:15 p.m. at the Central Correctional Institution in Columbia.