The murder of John Orner
Columbia, Richland County, South Carolina · 1961
Overview
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.
How it was solved
The killing of John Orner was effectively cold for almost forty years, kept alive only by physical evidence that had been preserved since 1961: the bullet fragment recovered from Orner's body and the .32 caliber Harrington and Richardson revolver taken off Edward Freiburger by a Tennessee state trooper weeks after the murder. Investigators had always considered Freiburger a suspect. Pawn shop records showed he bought the H and R revolver, serial number 9948, from the Capital Loan and Pawn Shop on Main Street in Columbia on February 28, 1961, the very day Orner disappeared. On March 29, 1961, Tennessee Highway Patrolman Donald Meredith stopped Freiburger for hitchhiking near Newport, Tennessee and found him carrying a loaded .32 caliber H and R revolver. But the original ballistics testing in 1961 was inconclusive, and the case went no further; then SLED Chief J. P. Strom even documented the inconclusive result in a letter. The breakthrough was not DNA or genealogy but a fresh forensic comparison of the old evidence. In August 2000 the Richland County Sheriff's Department reopened the file, prompted by cold-case investigator Carl Craig, and the State Law Enforcement Division retained an independent firearms examiner, John Cayton, who using modern microscopic comparison concluded that the revolver recovered from Freiburger in 1961 had fired the bullet that killed Orner. That ballistics conclusion was the load-bearing evidence that allowed prosecutors to charge Freiburger in 2001. At his July and August 2002 trial in Richland County, the firearms identification was the central contested issue, with the prosecution's expert testifying that the gun matched and defense experts insisting the comparison was inconclusive. The jury convicted Freiburger of murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison. The South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the conviction in 2005. In 2015 a state appellate court granted Freiburger a new trial, finding his trial lawyers had been ineffective for failing to introduce the 1961 SLED letter documenting the original inconclusive test. Rather than retry a case more than fifty years old, prosecutors reached a deal: in 2017 Freiburger, by then in his seventies, entered an Alford plea to voluntary manslaughter, maintaining his innocence while conceding the state had enough evidence to convict, and he was released after roughly fourteen years in custody.
Sources
- State v. Freiburger
“John Orner was a taxi-cab driver who regularly serviced soldiers at Fort Jackson in Columbia and received his last dispatch call at 11:15 p.m. on the evening of February 28, 1961 ... Orner's body was found on March 3, 1961, on the side of the road of Highway 601 in lower Richland County, and he had died from a gunshot wound to the brain, consistent with having been shot in the head by a passenger sitting in the back seat of the cab ... Freiburger purchased a .32 caliber H & R revolver, serial number 9948 ... Tennessee Highway Patrolman Donald Meredith stopped Freiburger ... for hitchhiking ... discovered the loaded .32 caliber H & R revolver ... in August 2000, the Richland County Sheriff's Department reopened the Orner file, and SLED retained an independent expert, John Cayton, who concluded the weapon retrieved from Freiburger in 1961 was the murder weapon.”
- Lawyers, experts contest ballistics in 1961 murder case
“Ed Freiburger, now 59, faced trial for the 1961 murder of cab driver John Orner ... potentially the oldest murder case to go to trial in America ... Prosecutors relied on sophisticated ballistics testing conducted on bullet fragments recovered from the victim's body in 1961 ... One expert matched these fragments to a gun Freiburger possessed when arrested ... The defense presented a contrasting analysis: The results are inconclusive. Not known, just can't tell.”
- Plea deal marks end of man's case in cab driver's 1961 death
“Edward Freiburger, a 74-year-old from Indiana, was released after serving 14 years for the 1961 death of cab driver John Orner, age 63 ... Freiburger entered an Alford plea to voluntary manslaughter, which allowed him to maintain innocence but acknowledge there was enough evidence to convict him ... Ballistics tests matched the gun to bullet fragments taken from Orner's body forty years after the initial incident ... Freiburger was originally sentenced to life imprisonment in 2002 following a murder conviction. Appeals courts subsequently ordered a new trial.”
- Indiana man heads to court charged with 1961 Richland County murder
“Ed Freiburger, a 59-year-old grandfather and churchgoer, was arrested in April 2001 for a murder committed 41 years earlier when he was 18 ... The case went unsolved for four decades until retired investigator Carl Craig reopened it and refocused on Freiburger, an original suspect ... Freiburger had purchased a gun the day before the murder, and investigators preserved the bullet that killed Orner. Modern forensic techniques allegedly matched the ballistics to Freiburger's weapon ... the original crime scene was now occupied by a parking garage, all original investigators had died.”
- Indiana man connected to SC cab driver's death released from prison
“Edward Freiburger, a 74-year-old from Indiana, has been released from prison after serving 14 years for a 1961 South Carolina cab driver's death ... entered an Alford plea to voluntary manslaughter in the death of John Orner ... A 1961 SLED ballistics examiner concluded that a weapon not belonging to Freiburger was the murder weapon, according to his attorney. The jury had never been provided this exonerating ballistics evidence during the original trial.”
- Wednesday's Decisions from the South Carolina Court of Appeals (Freiburger v. State)
“Edward Freiburger was convicted ... for the 1961 murder of Columbia taxi driver John Orner ... Initial ballistic tests on Freiburger's gun were inconclusive, and then-SLED Chief J.P. Strom documented this in a letter ... at trial decades later, the state presented a new expert witness claiming the gun was used in the murder. Freiburger's defense counsel failed to introduce Strom's letter ... The Court of Appeals reversed and remanded for a new trial, finding ineffective assistance of counsel.”
- Plea deal marks end of man's case in cab driver's 1961 death
“The bloody cab of 63-year-old John Orner was found parked in downtown Columbia in 1961, and his body was later found in a ditch. He had been shot once in the head ... The key evidence against Freiburger, then a soldier at Fort Jackson, was a gun found by a Tennessee trooper who stopped him for hitchhiking a few weeks after the killing. Forty years later, ballistics tests matched the gun to bullet fragments taken from Orner's body ... in 2015, Freiburger was granted a new trial after another appeals court ruled the defense team had failed to introduce a key document at trial: a 1961 letter by state police stating Freiburger's gun didn't fire the bullet that killed Orner.”
- Columbia City man freed after plea deal in cab driver's death
“Edward Freiburger of Columbia City, Indiana, freed after a plea deal in the 1961 death of South Carolina cab driver John Orner; convicted of murder in 2002 and sentenced to life, his conviction was later overturned and he entered a plea ending the decades-old case.”