Harold Lawson Rogers, a well-known Columbia, South Carolina nightclub owner, disappeared in the summer of 1949 at age 46. The last known contact with him was July 7, 1949. His Packard was found abandoned on the 1300 block of Senate Street with his coat on the back seat, and he was known to often carry large sums of money — facts that led authorities at the time to suspect foul play.

Friends and family, including six younger siblings, pressed for searches; they even asked that local ponds be dragged, but no trace of Rogers was ever found and the case went cold.

In August 1984 construction workers found a skeleton behind the old Kress building, and journalists revived Rogers’s story. A forensic anthropologist judged the remains to be of a muscular man likely younger than Rogers, a view supported by Rogers’s brother and a friend who said Harold was slender, so the bones were considered unlikely to be his. Does anyone who lived in Columbia then or since have information that could help shed light on what happened to Harold Rogers?