DATE OF LAST CONTACT: 6th September 1974
MISSING FROM: Charleston Farms area of North Charleston, South Carolina
DATE OF BIRTH: 7th September 1958
HEIGHT: 5’6
WEIGHT: 116lbs
DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS: Carolina Native American (Lumbee), Brown hair, Brown eyes. Gary has a 2 inch scar on the right side of his abdomen from a coffee burn. Was barefoot and wearing a cross necklace. No other clothing description available.
INVESTIGATING AGENCY: North Charleston Police Department
BASIC CASE FACTS
- 6th September 1974 – At 11pm Gary leaves the home of a friend and heads home. He is observed walking down the street but never makes it home and is never seen again.
- 6th December 1977 – A witness comes forward with a bizarre story claiming she saw Gary being murdered in a bar on a South Carolina beach
- August 1998 – Extensive searches on the beach mentioned by the witness turn up nothing.
On a windy, rain soaked night a barefoot Gary Locklear left his friend’s home and began to walk the ten minute walk back to his house. He was never seen again.
Exactly three years after his disappearance a witness came forward with a strange and rambling story which would place Gary twenty miles away from where he was last seen and hinted at his murder. This was the only lead law enforcement ever received and despite thousands of hours of investigation over the years, Gary’s case is as cold now as it was in 1974.
I was asked to take a look into this case to see if I could dig up anything. I don’t think I uncovered anything new but here are all my findings and the story gathered in one place.
Gary’s family have avoided publicity and I could find only four articles in the last 50 years to mention his case.The case was revisited by local news in 2022 when the recording of an interview with a witness was released; this was edited and different parts were reproduced in different publications. I have recreated the transcript from various sources to the best of my ability.
Gary’s parents only spoke the media once each while his siblings and friends never have to the best of my knowledge. I did reach out to a brother, sister and school friend not really expecting a response; and I didn’t get one – which is their right and I respect their privacy. There are however a number of forums online where friends and family of Gary have commented and, failing other sources, I have used these, admittedly unverified, comments in my research.
I am 100% certain that the police have more information on the circumstances of Gary’s life and his disappearance but that they have withheld certain facts.
If you knew Gary, his family or are from the area I would love to hear from you!
GARY’S STORY
Gary Locklear was born on the 7th September 1958. The fourth child of Leon and Elsie Locklear, he had three sisters; Carolyn, Karen and Sharon, and three brothers; Leon jr, Jimmy and Bobby. Originally from North Carolina, Leon and Elsie had moved to be closer to Charleston Air Force Base, where Leon was stationed. Gary and his family were Carolina American Indians, probably of the Lumbee Tribe. Gary’s father, Leon, was well-respected and well-known in the area. A World War Two veteran of the air force, he still worked at the nearby base as a civilian safety inspector. He was also a Sunday school teacher and a member of the local Masonic Lodge.
The Locklears lived at 5421 Pennsylvania Avenue. Today the street has many more properties but in 1973 the Locklear home was the last on the street; surrounded by empty, wooded plots and just a few feet from rail tracks and a swamp. North Charleston was a much quieter place in the early 70s with more farmland, woods and open spaces. The main route through the town, Remount Road; from where Gary disappeared had only recently been widened to accommodate the increased traffic but the majority of businesses remained mom & pop stores with a few diners and fast food joints. I have seen some statements that this road did have some bad areas at the time too, specifically involving drugs. Although the area where Gary lived was quiet there was a lot of heavy industry surrounding the town as well as an air force base, airport and shipping port.
Gary attended North Charleston High and had just enrolled in the Junior Varsity Football team. He had also been a Boy Scout. He often played sandlot football with kids from the neighbourhood and played along the railway lines and the swamp by his home. Friends describe him as particularly quiet and someone who went under the radar at home and at school; an average kid with no enemies.
But there is some evidence to suggest that Gary may have been having some problems at home. Several unverified comments online suggest that Gary’s home life could be rough and that his father was a strict disciplinarian. In a TV interview a detective said that Gary had “some brushes with the law; typical boy stuff” and I do wonder how his father may have reacted to these. Finally, and most telling, is the interview his mother gave to a local newspaper:
“I’d like to tell parents with children who stay out late or get into trouble not to run them off from home”. This sounds very much like Gary had been getting in trouble recently and I can’t help but wonder if Gary had been thrown out of the house on the day he disappeared or left after an argument.
DISAPPEARANCE
Friday 6th September was the day before Gary’s sixteenth birthday and his parents had bought him a nearly new motorbike. He knew about it and was excited. The day was wet, in fact it had been raining for several days and reports were that a storm was on the way. Despite the weather Gary had arranged with his two friends, Dennis and David, to meet at Dennis’ house to play ping pong. David decided not to go because it had started raining again but Gary, apparently barefoot, did go.
Between 10 and 11pm Gary left his friend’s house, presumably headed for home. His friend watched him walk down Remount Road towards a fast food restaurant where he watched as Gary paused, turned around and looked up and down the street. The friend then went back inside. No one has ever seen Gary since. It is unknown which fast food restaurant Gary was outside nor the area of Remount Road he was last seen in but the image below gives the likely routes Gary would have taken to get to his house from his last known location.
Now seems like a good place to provide the transcript of the only article about Gary I could find. I was unable to get the original but I was able to piece together the text from various snippets which I have reproduced below. This article, entitled “Gary’s Disappearance”, appeared in the 13th August 1979 edition of The Post and Courier newspaper and gives a good account of the night Gary disappeared and the subsequent events:
It was a particularly dark night on September 6th 1974 when Gary Locklear disappeared.
It had rained on and off for several days and a severe storm was moving into the Lowcountry. Gary’s parents, Mr and Mrs Leon Locklear, recall rolling claps of thunder and heavy bolts of lightning through the night sky. They say they can’t remember a worse storm since.
Gary was visiting a friend’s house that evening. About 11pm he began walking home. The friend saw him walk toward a fast food restaurant on Remount Road, pause and look down the street. The friend then turned and went back in his house. It was the last time anyone would admit to seeing Gary Locklear and he hasn’t been heard from since.
“It’s like the ground opened up and swallowed him”, Elsie Locklear says quietly, “then it closed up again without a trace”.
That evening is etched deeply in the Locklear’s memory. For years they have wondered why their 15 year old son, fourth of seven children, did not return to their North Charleston home.
They don’t know if Gary is dead or alive. And they continue to hope that someday he will return but the probability that he is dead seems all too real. “If Gary was living he’d have contacted us by now if there was any way possible”, Leon Locklear, an air force retiree and now a civilian safety inspector at the Charleston Air Force base, says. “I think he’s dead, but there’s always that small chance that he’s lost his memory. It’s hard for us to believe but there’s always that faint hope”.
Since their son disappeared, the Locklears have traced false leads to Florida, Oklahoma and North Carolina in an effort to locate him. They have received crank calls offering information in exchange for money. Police investigations have drawn a blank. Meanwhile, the Locklears have tried to lead a normal life and raise their family. But their missing son is seldom out of their minds.
“The thought of Gary is always with me”, Locklear says. “I wake up at night and it’s right there. He’s not on my mind but all of a sudden it will flash across my mind. I used to go past the place Gary was last seen on my way to work”, he notes. “But I stopped after about a year. Whenever I’d get to the spot, even if I wasn’t thinking about him, he’d fly back into my mind. Now I turn and drive down by the railroad tracks instead of coming down Remount. It’s easier”.
“When will it all end? Not until we know what happened to Gary and where he is. It won’t end until someone steps forward and volunteers information, or until they plant us in the ground”.
What I find interesting in the above article is the statement that “It was the last time anyone would admit to seeing Gary Locklear“, which hints at the fact that there may have been persons of interest who denied having seen him. When taken together with statements made in 2022 by a detective that “the trouble with this case is not that people don’t know, but they know and took that information to the grave” and that the two persons of interest were in their 30s at the time Gary disappeared “so that’s something to think about”, it makes me seriously consider that Gary went elsewhere from that fast food restaurant.
Gary’s parents left his room the same for over five years after he left, leaving a lamp on every night.
INVESTIGATION
Over the years more than 100 investigators have looked at Gary’s case. The faded notes on his case, written by many different detectives over the years; some on napkins, have been lovingly preserved behind protective plastic sheets. But they admit; evidence in the case is nearly non-existent. There were local rumours that Gary had run away to California, that he had a girlfriend in another state or that he owed someone money but nothing definitive. There have been tips and leads over the years. One such led police to search the train tracks that intersect with Remount Road which led to a paper mill in North Charleston. They eventually followed the tracks all the way north to Pennsylvania but found nothing. Another tip led them to the town of Hanahan, just north of North Charleston, and to a slew of warehouses; again there were no answers. The Locklears hired a psychic who told them that Gary had been taken by a Texan man to Texas.
There are two persons of interest in the case; males who were in their thirties at the time and as of 2022 were still alive. There were a number of search warrants issued over the years and searches have been made of these people’s homes as well as a business and a bar. There must be some compelling evidence that the police have never released in order for a search warrant to be issued but with no body the case is still classified as a cold case rather than a homicide, even though the police believe Gary was murdered. Detective Hagge; Deputy Chief of Investigations says he “believes Gary was killed and with all the swamps in the area his body may remain hidden” but he does believe the person who knows what happened is still alive.
It was three years after Gary disappeared that law enforcement received their biggest lead when a witness came forward with a bizarre, incomprehensible story that baffles detectives to this day. The witness was named Patsy.
PATSY
On the 6th December 1977 a teenager named Patsy who went by the nickname “Little PJ” walked into the North Charleston Police Department and proceeded to tell investigators a bizarre, rambling tale concerning someone she thought was Gary and events which happened at a place called Folly Beach, about 20 miles away from North Charleston. The actual interview tape was made available to media in 2022 and various portions of it appear in various news sources with names redacted. It can be listened to in the ABC4 link in the sources at the bottom of this page. Below is a transcript I have recreated from various sources:
Detective: What I want you to do now is tell me what you know, if anything, surrounding the disappearance of Gary Locklear.
Patsy: I looked at him twice. I did look at him twice and he caught my eye.
Detective: Where at?
Patsy: It was at some old place to eat food. It’s right on the beach by steps. I don’t know the name of the place I was just getting something to eat. A snack bar and a jukebox. (name redacted) and (name redacted) and (name redacted) pulled up. This man named (name redacted) pulled up. There were some people walking around the corner and they said “I’ll kill that fucking Indian” and there goes that Indian and there goes one boy went this way and two this way and another around the back. I’ve got the keys, went into the Pavilion. Started cleaning up. I didn’t pay any attention to who it was. I only met the boy a couple of times at the school. It was in a football field under the concession stand during classes. He’s changed but his face isn’t changed. That’s the boy that was on the beach.
Detective: That’s the boy that was on the beach?
Patsy: Yeah.
Detective: How did you know about the boy that was on the beach?
Patsy: They told me.
Detective: Who told you?
Patsy: What’s her name, Lizzy (Surname redacted)
Detective: What did they tell you?
Patsy: Mr Green was doing most of the talking. He was just sitting there telling me about the thing.
Detective: Were they talking to you at that time? And what all was he telling you?
Patsy: I’m not too clear. I just know he was more or less talking about the boy who came onto the pier and he came over to the car and he came home with him….The little door.
Detective: What little door? You lost me, what door?
Patsy: It was in the wall. The refrigerator was up against this wall right here and on the other side of it was a closet door and if you extend the closet door and busted down the wall there would be the refrigerator behind the wall. I’ve never seen anyone else use it. I’ve never seen it used.
Detective: You mean the closet was behind the refrigerator? Is that what you’re saying?
Patsy: It wasn’t behind the refrigerator. You could see it from the dance floor. You can walk right up to it.
Detective: Well what? I don’t understand what was said about it? Y’all lost me!
Patsy: I don’t know what the purpose was.
Detective: Remind me to ask him about that. Seriously, you lost me!
Patsy: Well, that was brought up then.
Detective: How was it brought up? Did the closet have a floor?
Patsy: Yeah it had a floor.
Detective: Could you stand in the closet?
Patsy: I guess you could. I never stood in there. I never seen the floor.
Detective: What do they keep in it?
Patsy: I’ve never seen anyone else use it. I’ve never seen it used.
Detectives struggled to make sense of Patsy’s story but the basic gist was that she claimed to have seen Gary sitting by the steps of a bar called “The Seaside Grille” as she was grabbing a bite to eat. She claims that she heard men threatening to kill him and then later witnessed him being carried underneath the bar via a closet in the wall which was never used. It is unclear if she thought this occurred on the same day that Gary went missing or at a later date. Because of her statement that “he’s changed, but his face isn’t changed” I tend to think the events described occurred sometime after Gary’s disappearance. If this is true then it may imply that Gary was alive and living at Folly Beach; just 20 miles from his home.
I reached out to The Folly Beach Historical Society and a Folly Beach Facebook group in the hopes that someone might remember Patsy, the names she mentioned or whether the bar indeed had a closet in the wall behind the bar, but no one could provide any further information.
Detectives did visit the bar in the 70s but found nothing. Then in 1998, at the urging of Gary’s family, detectives took another look at the case and decided to follow up on Patsy’s tip. By this time The Sea Side Grille had been demolished so using maps and drawings to pinpoint the location they found that nothing had been built over the site and decided to investigate. Using ground penetrating radar, searches sifted through the dirt for three days at a cost of $10,000 a day but came up empty-handed. There was no sign of Gary or that he had ever been there.
The most recent detective on the case no longer believes that Patsy’s information is credible and I am inclined to agree. They haven’t been able to re-interview her because they haven’t been able to locate her. The last they knew she was in Texas but since then they have lost all contact with her. Something important to bear in mind is that if Patsy is seen as non-credible then the persons of interest in this case have nothing to do with her statement and are not the men from Folly Beach; law enforcement clearly have other persons in mind.
Perhaps the most worrying aspect to this is: If Patsy is telling the truth, but her story doesn’t involve Gary, then who did she see being murdered?!
BAREFOOT…NO CLOTHING DESCRIPTION
Something kept bugging me about the fact that there was no clothing description for Gary, as well as him being barefoot. A nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I couldn’t shake. Several people have advised me that is was common for kids in The South to go barefoot at this time – but not when it was raining, and there was a big storm forecast for that night. I am also bothered that no one seemed to know what Gary was wearing. His friend he had just spent the evening with should have been able to give a description (if he was asked) and his family should have had an idea what was missing from his closet and yet all we know is that he was wearing a cross necklace and was barefoot. This bothers me.
When you add to this the comment from his mother about running him off from home, the fact that a violent storm was moving in and it was already raining so much that his friend decided to stay home and the fact that Gary had left all his possessions, including his wallet, at home it begins to make me think something more was going on. A comment online from someone who claims to be close to the family claims that it took a while before Gary was reported missing and this is backed up by a comment from a detective that “Gary’s parents told us it was the night of the worst storm of their lives”, because if Gary had been reported missing within a few days, the detectives would have known it was the night of the storm without needing to be reminded.
SPECULATION
Because of the strange circumstances of the night Gary disappeared, I have formed an opinion on what was going on with him at that time. It is my belief that law enforcement already know this information but have not released it for reasons of privacy or to protect certain facts in the investigation. I must stress; this is my own opinion based on my interpretation of the known facts. I could be totally wrong…but I could be spot on too.
I believe, based on his mother’s comments, that Gary had recently been getting into trouble; he had been staying out late and had had a few run-ins with law enforcement. Perhaps over the summer holidays he had fallen in with a bad crowd. Based on the persons of interest being older (in their 30s) I think Gary may have been hanging out with older men. It seems likely that there was an argument between Gary and his parents and he was run out of the house, per his mom’s statements. If he left suddenly it may explain why he was barefoot and left behind all of his possessions. I also don’t believe that this happened on the same day that he disappeared; I think the reason that his family provided no description of his clothing was because Gary had been absent from home for a few days and they didn’t know what he was wearing at the time, except his cross necklace. When Gary was last seen by his friend he was outside a fast food restaurant, but we know that he had left his wallet at home so either he had gotten money from elsewhere or he wasn’t intending to buy food – perhaps he was meeting someone at that restaurant, or visiting someone who worked there. Gary wasn’t reported missing straight away and I wonder if that is because his parents didn’t actually know he was missing because he hadn’t been staying at home. Was Gary actually heading back home or was he going back to the home of whoever he had been staying with?
I am of the opinion that Gary had been staying at an older man’s house and it is from there that he disappeared. I believe this person was older; in his 30s in 1974 and I believe that there were people in North Charleston who knew and never came forward which explains the enigmatic comment from the detective that “the trouble with this case is not that people don’t know, but they know and took that information to the grave” and the statement in the newspaper that “It was the last time anyone would admit to seeing Gary Locklear“. I strongly feel that people in that town know what happened and refuse to talk.
OTHER THEORIES
There are of course other theories that need to be mentioned:
PATSY AND FOLLY BEACH
If you believe Patsy’s story then Gary remained alive for an unspecified amount of time and ended up at Folly Beach where he was subsequently murdered and hidden underneath a bar.
GARY MADE IT HOME
There is always the possibility that Gary did actually make it back home that night; which would explain why all of his possessions were left at his home. This would mean that whatever happened, happened at Gary’s home and would implicate his family in his disappearance. A comment on Reddit from someone who claims to have known Gary says that his siblings all told different stories about that night. They also suggest that Gary’s body was buried under the patio at his family’s home. I cannot verify this information or the person, but I am including it here because it is, unfortunately, a possibility.
SERIAL KILLER
From comments online it seems that most of local people are of the opinion that Gary was murdered by Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins. Pee Wee was a serial killer and he was active in the area at the time – but location seems to be the only thing linking him to Gary. Pee Wee wasn’t known to abduct and murder young men and in fact the majority of his crimes seem to have been committed against his criminal associates or women who were hitchhiking. I personally don’t think Gary’s disappearance had anything to do with a serial killer.
WHERE’S GARY?
There is one thing I am sure about; Gary would never have voluntarily left home a few hours before his sixteenth birthday when he had a new motorbike waiting for him at home. Whatever caused Gary’s death I believe occurred somewhere close to home, by people he knew. I tend to agree with the detective who believes, due to all the swamps in the area, that Gary’s remains will never be found.
SOURCES
- ABC4 Bring them home, documentary series
- City Data Forums – This forum, although old, has some friends and family of Gary commenting
- Genealogy Bank – Article about Gary (behind a Paywall)
- Historic Aerials
- Reddit Posting that includes comments from people who claim to have known Gary or his family
- Whereabouts Still Unknown
- NAMUS
Never Seen Again 