Solved cold cases in South Carolina
2 documented cases.
John Orner
John Orner, a 63-year-old taxi-cab driver who regularly carried soldiers to and from Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina, took his last dispatch call at 11:15 p.m. on February 28, 1961, to pick up a fare at the post. His bloody cab was found abandoned in downtown Columbia the next morning, and his body was discovered on March 3, 1961, beside Highway 601 in lower Richland County; he had been shot once in the head, consistent with a passenger firing from the back seat. Edward Freiburger, an 18-year-old Army private stationed at Fort Jackson, had bought a .32 caliber Harrington and Richardson revolver from a Columbia pawn shop on the day Orner vanished, and a Tennessee state trooper found him hitchhiking weeks later carrying that same loaded revolver. In 1961, ballistics testing was inconclusive and no one was charged. The case stayed cold for nearly four decades until the Richland County Sheriff's Department reopened it in 2000 and an independent firearms expert, John Cayton, concluded the recovered H and R revolver was the weapon that fired the fatal bullet. On that ballistics finding, Freiburger was charged and, in August 2002, convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison in what was described as one of the oldest murder cases ever to go to trial in the United States.
Ronald Eugene Woodham IV
On December 4, 2008, utility workers found the body of a newborn boy abandoned in a wooded area near Conway, in Horry County, South Carolina. He had been born alive and, according to the coroner, could have survived with medical attention; instead he died of exposure. Unidentified, he was buried under the name 'Baby Boy Horry.' The case stayed cold for more than a decade until investigative genetic genealogy by the Texas lab Othram identified the infant's parents. His mother, Jennifer Sahr, formerly Jennifer Rickel, a Coastal Carolina University student at the time of the birth, was arrested in March 2020 and charged with homicide by child abuse. In September 2022 she pleaded guilty to the reduced charge of voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced in 2023. The infant was later given the name Ronald Eugene Woodham IV by his biological father.