Lee Roy Martin, also known as the “Gaffney Strangler,” terrorized Gaffney, South Carolina, between 1967 and 1968. However, the killings weren’t Martin’s first brush with the law. The textile mill employee, turned serial killer, would eventually murder four people, two women and two girls, during his reign of terror.
Martin was described as a family man with a wife and three children, but something sinister lurked deep within him.
On May 20, 1967, 32-year-old Annie Lucille Dedmond was found murdered. Dedmond had been strangled and raped. Her husband, Roger, was arrested for the crime, convicted of her murder, and sentenced to 18 years in prison.
Nine months later, the Gaffney Strangler struck again, in February 1968, when Carol Parris, aged 20, was abducted. Parris’s husband had reported her missing when she took their dog for a walk at night, and she never returned. Her body was later found on a riverbank beneath a bridge. Like Dedmond, Parris had been strangled and raped.
On February 8, 1968, 14-year-old Nancy Christine Rhinehart was found buried under a brush pile with one foot sticking out. She, too, had been strangled and raped.
On the same day, Rhinehart was found, Martin anonymously called the editor of the Gaffney Ledger. Martin gave Gibbons directions to locate two bodies and insisted that he was the responsible party for the death of Annie Dedmond, not her husband. Gibbons contacted law enforcement, who found the bodies of Parris and Rhinehart.
Four days later, Martin again telephoned Gibbons, warning that there would be additional killings,
On February 13, 1968, a 15-year-old girl, Opal Buckson, was abducted and thrown into the trunk of a car while walking to a nearby school bus stop with her sister. Buckson’s sister was able to describe the vehicle to police. Later, authorities found Opal Buckson’s body in a wooded area.
On the morning of February 13, two Gaffney residents were patrolling the area in search of a car matching the description. Within hours of the abduction of Buckson, the pair saw a car backing down a dirt path in a wooded area, with a man standing beside it.. When they drove by, the man quickly jumped inside the vehicle and drove off, but not before they wrote down the license plate.
Lee Roy Martin was arrested on February 27, 1968, and later convicted of first-degree murder in the deaths of Dedmond, Parris, Rhinehart, and Buckson. He received four life terms.[2]
After Martin’s arrest, Roger Dedmond, who was ten months into his prison sentence, was released from Union County Prison Camp on March 1, 1968. All charges against him in the murder of his wife were dropped.
On May 31, 1972, while incarcerated at Central Correctional Institution in Columbia, Lee Roy Martin was stabbed to death by fellow inmate Kenneth Marshall Rumsey.
Written By: John G. Clark Jr.