RAEFORD, N.C. (AP) - It was still dark on that fateful morning in early January 1998, the first Wednesday of the new year. Five-year-old Brittany Locklear waited alone to catch a school bus at the end of her driveway off Gainey Road in Hoke County.
Her mother had been standing with her, but Connie Locklear-Chavis - Connie Locklear at the time - had gone inside the house to use the bathroom.
When she looked out the door - the sandy road was about one-10th of a mile from the house - Brittany was gone.
As Locklear-Chavis would soon learn, her child had been abducted.
After rushing to Brittany’s school, West Hoke Elementary, to look for her daughter, school officials informed Locklear-Chavis that Brittany never arrived.
The date was Jan. 7.
Neighbors told law enforcement officers that a pickup had slammed on the brakes and wheeled into the driveway at 202 Three Guys Lane near the Bowmore community. A man got out of the driver’s side, grabbed Brittany and sped away with the child in the truck, the eyewitnesses said.
In the days after Brittany’s abduction, neighbors said it was a white man in a brown pickup truck. But authorities later acknowledged that they were unsure of the color of the pickup or other details.
Brittany would never be seen alive again.
On Jan. 8, the day after her disappearance, a search party found Brittany’s naked body in a drainage ditch off Ryan McBryde Road, about 3 miles from the family home. She had been raped, and she had drowned in the roadside ditch, authorities said.
Twenty-one years later, this parents’ nightmare remains unsolved. No one has been arrested and convicted in the girl’s kidnapping, rape and murder.
“It’s hard,” the 49-year-old Locklear-Chavis said earlier this month. “You never can get no justice until whoever done it is brought to trial. Before I die, I hope it does (go to trial).”
She said she thinks about her daughter “every day, all the time.”
• • •
The neighbors who witnessed Brittany’s abduction about 7 a.m. reported that the child did not resist her kidnapper.
By 8:30 that morning, every deputy in Hoke County was on the road searching for the child, published accounts said. Her backpack, overalls and shoes were found 2 miles away later that day on Ryan McBryde Road.
“I’m scared somebody killed her,” her mother said to a Fayetteville Observer reporter as she waited at the Sheriff’s Office at the time. “You always hear it in the news, and you never think it’ll hit home but it has.”
The day after her daughter’s body was found, Locklear-Chavis told an Observer reporter that she and her husband had just been saved by a preacher so they could someday join Brittany in heaven.
• • •
“This case is still ongoing,” Hoke County Sheriff Hubert Peterkin said Dec. 17. “It doesn’t feel cold to me because of what we’ve been doing.”
Peterkin declined to go into specifics. He would not talk about any possible new leads or if detectives have a suspect.
“I don’t want to say anything. If anyone knew the things we knew or things we’ve done or going to be doing,” he said, “you’d be surprised. We don’t want the attention. It has had enough attention, more negative attention over the years. We’re not going to give it that.”
Peterkin, who is starting his 18th year as Hoke’s sheriff, takes exception if asked if this homicide is regarded as a cold case.
“I don’t like the word ‘cold.’ I guess to simply put it, this case is not closed,” he said earlier this month. “We follow leads all the time. We are really, really following every piece of information that we can get. This is important: Whatever they (the public) know, whatever they may have heard, all information is important. We’re talking about the life of a 5-year-old girl who would be 20-something today. Twenty-six. A life that would have been beautiful based on things I heard about her when she was a child.
“I’m the third sheriff that has had it,” Peterkin said of the case. “What happened before doesn’t matter. That case is just as important to my staff and me as if it happened yesterday. It is still a tremendous weight to carry with it not being solved. That’s why I’m adamant about getting it solved.”
Others have made promises about solving the case, including former Hoke County sheriffs Wayne Byrd and Jim Davis.
Peterkin lists the Brittany Locklear murder among the county’s most important unsolved crimes.
“We solve most of our homicides here,” the sheriff said. “Absolutely, it was probably one of the biggest unsolved murders in Hoke County because it involves a child. This one was worse.”
• • •
Brittany’s death stunned and angered many nearby residents in what was then a remote area of cotton fields and scrub pines in the western part of the county, according to news accounts.
Parents who lived nearby took extra precautions with their children who waited at bus stops. The murder also touched others in surrounding communities.
“It was turmoil. It was bad,” said Peterkin, who was a Fayetteville police detective at the time of her death but lived in Hoke County. “The sad thing, Brittany died during the political season. It was an election year. Everybody making promises. It got overshadowed with a lot of that. You should never use any type of public safety case or crime for political reasons. It was just a big mess.
“The community was hurt. Brittany was Native American,” he said, “but the black community, the white community - everybody was sad.”
Brittany was a kindergartner at West Hoke Elementary School. Teachers and classmates called her “Little Brittany” because she was the school’s smallest and youngest child, the Observer reported in a story Jan. 10, 1998.
Assistant Principal Irish Pickett told the newspaper that Brittany stood out because she was so short - the height of a typical 3-year-old - and she hugged just about everybody.
Brittany, her mother said this month, liked going to church and to school.
“She was different from other kids,” Locklear-Chavis said. “At 2, she would go in a store and buy her own body spray and stuff like that. Brittany was walking and talking at her first birthday party. She was a very unique child.”
On the Friday after her body was found, West Hoke Elementary lowered its flags to half staff to mourn Brittany’s death. Pickett said students wanted to know why the girl was killed, a question for which no one had an answer.
That question lingers to this day.
“She should have been a pilot like she wanted to,” her mother said. “She said one day, ‘I’m going to be driving one of them (airplanes), riding in the sky.’ ”
• • •
After she went missing, hundreds of people came out to search for Brittany. County, state and federal law officers and agents set up roadblocks.
Byrd, who was Hoke County sheriff at the time, issued a warning: Anyone with a brown truck would be stopped and questioned. His office was flooded with tips.
“It left the community traumatized,” Peterkin recalled. “You wondered when this guy would strike again. Was your child in danger?”
Early on, news accounts reported, investigators with the N.C. State Bureau of Investigation fielded hundreds of calls on a daily basis. But they lacked the manpower and equipment to handle all those leads. Investigators followed leads and tracked tips full time for about a year before gradually returning to their routine assignments.
Thirteen years ago, Jay Tilley, an agent for the SBI, told Raleigh NBC station WRAL that some of the tips that were called in slipped through because investigators were so overwhelmed early on in the case.
“One thing I always learned as an investigator,” Peterkin said, “any time there is a murder, it is critical what is done the first 48 hours of that. When it comes to a homicide, there are things you must do and must not do.”
Locklear-Chavis said she did not like the way the case was handled in the beginning.
In 2009, Peterkin announced that the Sheriff’s Office was “starting over with the case.”
“That’s why we came in and said, ‘Enough of the guessing, reading. Let’s start over.’ We went to work,” he said Dec. 17, “and it gave us a better visual of what we’re dealing with.”
“It would mean so much, when I think about it,” Peterkin replied when asked how important it is for the department to solve the murder. “Even though it didn’t happen under my administration, it makes me tear up. It hurts. I can only imagine what it would do for the family and the community. This community still holds this case close to its heart. It’s always good for them to know we’re working it.”
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