After 35 Years, Woman Still Seeks Justice For Slain Daughter

At 78 years old, Norma Lagerholm admits her recent memory isn’t what it used to be. But she can recall the distant past with crystal clarity.

Which is often painful.

She clearly remembers her last conversation with her daughter, Pam, the oldest of her four children.

“She told me what a good dinner we’d had. She said she really enjoyed that dinner,” says Lagerholm.

That was April 18, 1975. A Friday night. 24-year old Pam had plans.

 “She said she was going to hang out,” says Lagerholm. “She was going to a restaurant in Greer to meet some friends. I said, ‘well, just be sure you’re home by one, because you know how your father is.”

She says since moving back home after divorcing her husband, Pam had never broken her father’s rule of being home by one a.m.

But Saturday morning came, and Pam had not made it in. An anxious day passed at the Lagerholm house on Mt. Lebanon Church Road.

“Her father, he just stayed on the tractor all day. He was worried sick because he knew this wasn’t like her.”

Sunday morning came, and there was still no word from Pam. Her worried parents tried to rationalize it.

“We thought well, maybe she went home with some friends and just hasn’t called. But I knew that wasn’t true. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t have the nerve to call the police,” says Lagerholm who still lives in the area.

On Monday morning, when Pam's boss called and asked why she wasn't at work, Norma asked someone else for an answer.

"I got down on my knees and I asked God to please let me know something. Even if it was not what I wanted to hear, just let me know something. And while I was praying, the phone rang."

A detective needed her to come to the Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office. She assumed Pam had gotten into some trouble and needed her mother to pick her up. Norma says it never dawned on her that she was being asked to come identify her daughter’s body.

The day before, in the woods near the Greer Drag Strip (seven miles from the Lagerholms’ place) a local man had stumbled upon an awful tableau: Pam’s body, shoeless and bruised, a gaping wound in her chest.

A newspaper account of the autopsy quoted the coroner as saying “death was caused by a deep slash wound of the left chest, more than four inches in length and about three inches deep”. The coroner stated the wound was caused by “a very sharp instrument which had been slashed with extreme force”. He also noted Pam had been beaten and choked and her nose was broken.

“All I can think about is the torture she went through,” says Lagerholm. “And it hurts to think about that.”

A DYING WISH

If Lagerholm had ever found out who did that to her daughter, she would have never offered to recount to the media such dreadful memories. But 35 years have gone by with no answers. And Lagerholm isn’t sure how many years she has left.

“I’m getting pretty old. And my health isn’t so good. I’d just like to know that I did all that I could to find out who killed Pam before I die,” said Lagerholm.

Which is why a few weeks ago, she contacted William Gary and asked him to take a fresh look at the case. Gary is the senior homicide detective for Spartanburg County. Pam Vaughn’s murder is the oldest unsolved female homicide in the county.

“We haven’t had any real information come in on this case in years,” says Gary. “It’s about as cold as they get.”

He says the case is unusual because, unlike most female victims, Vaughn wasn’t killed for sex or money.

“This wasn’t a robbery. She was targeted. Somebody went after her,” says Gary.

He says that’s evident because of how her car was found.

ABDUCTION

Pam was apparently very close to making it home in time to meet her father’s one a.m. curfew. On that Saturday morning in April 1975, Pam’s orange Pinto was found abandoned on Mt. Lebanon Church Road – the same road her parents lived on – near the intersection of Highway 14, which is the route she would have used coming home from Greer.

According to Gary, the car was turned sideways in the road. The driver’s door was open. The lights were off. The keys were in the ignition.

“It’s like she encountered someone blocking the road, and tried to turn around, like maybe she knew who it was,” said Gary.

He hypothesizes Pam was forcibly removed from her car. A single shoe found on the road near the car seems to support that theory. But apparently at the time, the position of the car and the oddity of the shoe didn’t raise much alarm: Highway Patrol had the vehicle towed to a garage without trying to find the owner. It wasn’t until Pam’s butchered body was found the next day – seven miles away – that someone connected her to the car.

Gary says it’s not clear where Pam was murdered. The location of where her body was found had very little blood considering the nature of her injuries.

“There were drag marks through the woods, like her body had been dragged there,” said Gary. “We think that was just a dumping ground. She was killed somewhere else. But we don’t know where.”

Or by whom.

MOTIVE FOR MURDER?  

So who would lie in wait on a darkened country road to kidnap and kill Pamela Vaughn?

Gary says judging from notes in the case file, investigators worked the case rabidly in the beginning. And they quickly eliminated Pam’s ex-husband as a suspect.

 “He had a very solid alibi,” says Gary. “And he had no motive. They had had a very amicable divorce a couple of years earlier and remained friends.”

(The couple had a son who was 4 at the time of the murder; he still lives in the Upstate.)

The divorce may in an indirect way have something to do with the murder. Lagerholm says after Pam had always been a quiet, reserved girl. But after her marriage ended, she became more outspoken and outgoing and developed a new set of friends that enjoyed “partying”, according to her mother.

"She seemed like a decent girl that just maybe had a little bit of a wild streak in her,” said Gary.

A few weeks before the murder, Pam told her mother something that caught her off guard.

“She said she was gonna be helping a narc. I really didn’t even know what a narc was,” said Lagerholm. “After she explained it to me, I said, ‘well, isn’t that dangerous’? And she said, ‘I’ll be alright’.”

Gary says there is no record of Pam ever working with any local law enforcement agencies as a drug informant – and that’s something, he says, on which police would have kept records. But he adds, just the rumor of her being a narc could have been enough to seal her fate.

“If she's hanging out with people who are in that lifestyle, then they could have gotten wind of of her working with police, even if it wasn’t true, and decided they needed to keep her quiet,” said Gary. “She was the loose cannon."

Investigators began looking closely at her circle of friends. Especially those with a history of drug arrests. Gary says they developed a couple of suspects, including one who stood out above the others. He says the man was cooperative in the beginning, but grew less helpful as the years went by, and has been uncooperative in recent attempts to interview him.

“I would love to talk to the guy, but he has never given me that chance,” says Gary. “If he didn’t do this – I know I wouldn’t want my name to be a potential murder suspect if I had absolutely nothing to do with it. So I would talk to investigators and show them I’m not their guy.”

Gary says whoever committed the murder likely had some help with the abduction and the body disposal. And those involved would have likely told someone by now.

35 years.

That’s a long time for someone to carry a terrible secret.

Knowledge of that sort can be a heavy burden.

But as Norma Lagerholm can tell you, it’s not nearly as heavy as the absence of knowledge.

“I would just like to know something before it’s too late.”

If you have any information on who killed Pam Vaughn, call Crime Stoppers at 1-888-CRIME-SC. You will remain anonymous, and can earn a $2,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest.