The Disappearance of Jamie Fraley

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF JAMIE FRALEY

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PETE POWERS

table of contents

JAMIE FRALEY

SUZIE AND STACY

LEAH ROBERTS

BRIANNA MAITLAND

KELSIE SCHELLING

BRITTANEE DREXEL

MISSING LAUREN

MISTY COPSEY

MISSING TIFFANY

MISSING IRISH WOMEN

BETHANY DECKER

Missing From Our Lives

When a person goes missing, the first twelve to twenty-four hours are the most crucial time.  If the person is to be found alive, then it is during that first day when the best chance of a happy outcome exists.

More data exists on the make-up of missing people than of ways to trace them.  Forty per cent of those in the US are children, and a third of the total are African American citizens.  That is a heavy over representation.  Only one in under eight people in the US are from this ethnic group.

Jamie Fraley is neither a member of the African American community nor a child, although at the time she went missing, the diminutive 22-year-old blond could have passed for one. Sadly, when she disappeared, she also did not turn up on the first day – nor the first year.  In fact, 2018 marks a decade since the young woman was lost.

On Tuesday April 8th 2008 Jamie was not at her best.  A touch of stomach flu had invaded her system, and she was suffering badly from sickness and pain.  In fact, it was so uncomfortable that on the previous day she had felt ill enough to visit the hospital, not just once but twice.

Details surrounding Jamie’s disappearance are sketchy; they were back in 2008 and today the authorities are little closer to solving the mystery than they were a decade ago.  The bare facts with which they had to work are as follows:

Jamie was in her Gastonia, North Carolina apartment.  This was in the 1800 block in Lowell Bethesda Road, a semi-rural lane with scrawny trees and mismatched houses.  If not actually in her home, then police believe she was nearby. 

Although the hospital had not admitted her, it is known that Jamie telephoned her mother at midnight, and told her that she was still feeling ill.  Then, at 1.30 in the morning, Jamie called a friend and told her that she was really poorly, and that somebody was going to pick her up and take her back to the hospital.  To police, the most useful element from this call to her friend was that she had to cut it short because she saw that ‘he’ had arrived.

Nobody heard from Jamie again. 

Whether she actually set off for the hospital is unknown, but the evidence suggests that she did not.  Her wallet, her purse, her keys and identification were found in the apartment.  Maybe she was too ill to take them with her, and simply wanted to get to the hospital as quickly as she could, but that is unlikely.  Another possibility is that she left her home expecting to go the hospital, but whoever took her returned her property to confuse police.  Such a move cannot be ruled out, but would be a risky manoeuvre.  The abductor could have been spotted, by a person or on CCTV.  All that is certain in this bare case is that, whether she set off for the hospital or not, she never made it there.  There are no records at all that visited the hospital for the third time.

However, one item of Jamie’s was found outside her apartment, and that was her cell phone.  A couple of days after she went missing, a worker carrying out maintenance on utilities discovered the device.  It was a short distance from her home, on the intersection between East Hudson Boulevard and South New Hope Road.

Police carried out tests on the device, and discovered that several calls had been made from the phone at 4.30am on April 8th.  But further investigations suggested that these calls were not significant in the search for Jamie.  They had been made from Jamie’s ‘recently’ called directory. Perhaps an animal could have been inadvertently responsible?  Or could Jamie have desperately tried any way to contact friends and family to sound a warning about what was happening to her?  Could the kidnapper even have taken the phone, been unable to use it and discarded it three hours after taking the young woman?  Might Jamie have left her apartment, sick and uncomfortable, to wait for the person who was taking her to hospital?  Perhaps she had been mistaken when she saw her lift arrive, and cut short her phone call to her friend. Had she then been attacked while she waited in the early hours of that moderately quiet street?  If so, why had she not taken her keys, her wallet and her identification?    Could the mysterious good Samaritan be a stranger to the area, and Jamie was waiting to show him (or her?) precisely where she lived?  There were plenty of questions, but no answers. Even guesses were no more than stabs in the dark.

The absolutely final clue that police had to work with was a call made to the phone early the same morning, just four hours after her disappearance.  That also led nowhere.  By the time the phone came to the attention of the police, it had been too widely handled to be of any use in terms of a search for fingerprints.

And that was that.  A meagre set of facts on which to work.  An ill girl, definitely alive at 1.30am, maybe also at 4.30.

With so little to work on, police fell back on routine procedure.  Most crimes against a person are committed by somebody who knows them.  But even here, the police came up against a solid brick wall.  The first suspect would be, under normal circumstances, the partner of the victim.  As soon as they could be eliminated from the police enquires then they could start to look further afield.

Jamie Fraley did have a partner.  But he had the best alibi possible to mitigate against him having carried out the abduction; on April 8th 2008 that fiancé was behind bars, locked away as a result of some petty crimes.

Cutting forward to 2015, it appeared for a short while as though there might be a breakthrough in the mystery.  Despite annual appeals to the media, the case seemed certain to join those in the dank corridors full of boxes with ‘Unsolved’ stencilled on their lids.  Then, a man already in prison for murder claimed responsibility for Jamie’s disappearance.  He stated that he had murdered the young girl, back in 2008.

Police were initially hopeful of putting the case to bed, even with such a dispiriting outcome.  But they soon had their doubts about the validity of the confession.  Jerry Douglas Case was serving 22 years for killing another person.  Then, in 2012, he sent some correspondence to the Gaston Gazette in which he claimed to have killed a seventeen-year-old boy back in 1985.  He had not been suspected in that case, but police investigated the man’s claims and decided that there was enough behind them to re-open their investigation.

He was convicted of second degree murder for this crime.  Not satisfied with that confession, Case contacted the newspaper once more, claiming responsibility for two more deaths.  One was a Gaston woman who was shot dead in 2008, and the other was Jamie Fraley.

Whether Case was a fantasist, whether he wanted his name in the history books as Gaston County’s biggest serial killer or whether he just enjoyed the distraction of police interviews and trials from his day to day life as an incarcerated nobody we do not know.  Police showed interest in the confession for a short time.  But the dates did not add up.  Case was already in prison at the time of Jamie’s death.  It was not possible that she could be another of his victims.

Clues in this disappearance remain few and far between.  In 2010 the tiniest of possible leads emerged.  It really was very small, and very remote.  Some teens were taking an illicit swim in one of the disused quarries that litter the Gateway Trail in the King’s Mountain part of Cleveland County. 

Chemetall Foote Corp quarry is a deep pool, a favourite place of youngsters risking an unsupervised dip on a hot and steamy day.  But this group of boys discovered something that they had not expected.  Some human bones lay stripped bare near the quarry, and one of the teens snapped the remains with his phone and showed the picture to his mom who reported it to police.

The bones were identified as human, and from what could be judged they did not show evidence of any traumas such as a breakage or gunshot wound.

At the time, there were at least four missing people in the Gaston County region.  Asha Degree was just nine when she had disappeared from her Fallston home ten years previously.  Mouy Tan had been seen near a school in 2008, she was 43.  In the same year, Jennifer Rivkin’s car was found abandoned in Gastonia, but the woman was never traced.  She was another 43-year-old.  The fourth person was Jamie Fraley.

The bones could belong to somebody who died accidentally, but the main trail in the wilderness park is popular, while the surrounding land is perfect for anybody seeking to hide a body.  Butch Bridges was the ground keeper of the Gateway Trail in 2010.

‘The rocky ridges and overgrowth make it a perfect place to hide a body, if that is indeed what happened,’ he said.  But, just like the outcome with every other lead, seemingly, in the Jamie Frayal case, this was another trail that soon went cold.

Jamie was a tiny lady.  Just four feet eight or nine inches tall, and weighing in at just 95 lb, she was pretty, with blond hair and an innocent, girlish face.  She was only twenty-two years old when she went missing, at a time when her life seemed to be getting onto an even track.

As a child, she had suffered from various bouts of mental illness, including anxiety and bipolar disorder.  However, of late she had started to respond well to prescription medicines, and had begun to attend Garston College, although on a part time basis.

She was a caring young woman, her mother describing her as somebody who would always listen to the problems of others, always be ready to help.  As is so often the case with such kindly but inexperienced people, she still, however, had some lessons to learn about life. In particular, explained her mother, that she could not always sort out everybody’s problems.

When she met Ricky Simonds Jr, her life took on another turn forwards.  They were very much in love, and planned to marry.  She had his name tattooed on her ankle.  However, as we saw earlier, Ricky and the police were common acquaintances.  He was not a violent man, his crimes were not excessive, but he had a track record of petty offences.  Finally, when he was caught stealing, enough was enough and he was sentenced to a short spell behind bars – fifteen months in a state prison on a charge of theft.  But Jamie stuck with her man, determined that she would remain loyal to him and convinced that under her influence he would soon get back on the straight and narrow. 

She had also reached a point where she was able to start thinking about her future career.  Her family said that her helping, caring side would be developed through the job she sought to take on, after her college was complete.  She planned to work in substance abuse, counselling and supporting those who became addicted. It seems as though Jamie also had a strong interest in real life crimes and, ironically, missing persons.  She was a keen user of the Myspace website, often posting under the name Jamie Simonds.  Among the subjects she wrote about were JonBenet Ramsey and Samantha Rae Mendez.  JonBenet was a six-year-old child beauty pageant queen who was murdered in the basement of her home while Samantha was a missing person from Gaston.

After her aborted visit to the hospital, the fact that she was missing was picked up quickly, but not within that crucial twenty-four-hour window.  She had a meeting planned for the next day, and failed to turn up for it.  Given that she was a reliable girl, not given to going out, or away, with telling people, her parents were worried.  However, their fear revolved at this stage around the fact that she had been suffering from stomach flu.  Certainly, the two visits to the hospital had resulted in her being discharged, sent home with some medication (collected by a neighbour – Jamie was a non-driver).  But in her midnight call to her mother Jamie had expressed a fear that from whatever it was that she was suffering, it was not just the flu.  Perhaps she had been right, and was in fact at home extremely ill?

Her parents visited her apartment, and were initially put at ease.  Those personal items mentioned earlier – her purse, wallet; her keys and identification card lay where she kept them; there was no sign of a struggle and to all intents and purposes, Jamie had left her apartment willingly, wherever it was that she had headed to.

But panic started to grow as they tried to contact her.  Nobody knew where to find her.  Soon, the Frayal’s decided that enough was enough.  They contacted the police, and reported their daughter missing.

It is to the credit of the Gaston County police that they took the report seriously.  The department committed three officers to the case full time, and all other members of its investigation team gave some thought and attention to identifying the possible whereabouts of the