On June 14, 1985, nine-year-old Debra May Helmick was abducted from the front yard of her family’s mobile home in Richland County, South Carolina, while she was playing with her three-year-old brother. A neighbor tried to intervene as a man lured her into his car and drove off. Two weeks earlier, 17-year-old Shari Faye Smith had been kidnapped and murdered in neighboring Lexington County, and the two crimes soon became linked.

Law enforcement recovered Debra’s remains in a wooded area in Lexington County on June 22, 1985, after a man who had been making taunting calls to the Smith family gave precise directions to her location. Evidence indicated Debra had been suffocated. Forensic work on a note Shari Smith had been forced to write produced indentations that led investigators to a couple who had employed Larry Gene Bell; Bell was arrested on June 27, 1985. He was later tried and convicted for the kidnappings and murders of both Shari Smith and Debra Helmick and received a death sentence.

Did anyone in the area at that time notice unusual vehicles or strangers around the mobile home communities in June 1985?