South Carolina 1968 Cold Case SOLVED — Arrest Shocks the Community 

It was the summer of 1968 and the marsh smelled the way it always smelled in August along the Combahee River. Like salt and mud and something older than memory. The particular scent of the low country that the people who grew up there could never fully explain to anyone who hadn’t. Elias Beaufort had been working that land since he was old enough to carry a crate.

 His family had been on Colleton Parish soil for generations. Longer than the deed in his name. Longer than the county records that documented his grandfather’s purchase of 12 acres in 1921. He was 46 years old in the summer of 1968. A deacon at Shiloh AME Church. A man who grew sea island tomatoes in soil so dark and rich it looked like coffee grounds.

A man whose neighbors said the same thing about him in the same way year after year. That Elias Beaufort was the kind of man who could be counted on. When the church roof needed patching he organized the work party. When a family on Jeffries Road lost their harvest to a late season storm he showed up with crates from his own fields before anyone had asked.

 He had a wife named Ruthie and two daughters. Josephine and May who were seven and nine years old that summer. And who called him daddy. And meant it the way children mean things when the world is still safe. He left for the co-op in Walterboro on the morning of August 22nd, 1968. To settle an account and pick up seed stock for the fall planting.

He never came home and for 55 years in the parish that knew his name and the church that kept his seat and the family that lit a candle for him every August 22nd without fail. Nobody was ever held to account for why. But to understand what was lost on that August morning, you first have to understand who Elias Beaufort was and what it meant to be a black landowner in Colleton Parish, South Carolina in the summer of 1968.

Colleton Parish sits in the South Carolina low country, 40 miles inland from the Atlantic in a stretch of country defined by live oaks draped in Spanish moss, flat tidal rivers that run brown with tannins, and fields that have been farmed in one form or another since before the colony was a colony. In 1968, it was home to approximately 4,800 people, the majority of whom were black descendants of the Gullah Geechee people, a community whose ancestors had survived the rice and indigo plantations of the colonial era and had, over generations,

built something extraordinary in the land along the Combahee. A culture, a language, a way of being in the world that had endured everything that had been done to try to erase it. The summer of 1968 arrived in Colleton Parish the way it arrived everywhere in the South that year, charged and grieving. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

had been shot in Memphis in April. Robert Kennedy had been shot in California in June. The country was fracturing along seams that had always been there, but had never been so visible. And in Colleton Parish, where the seams ran deep as the river, people were watching and waiting and praying and wondering what the summer would bring.

Elias Beaufort had served in Korea in 1952 and come home to the same 12 acres his grandfather worked and bought them outright within 5 years of his return, farming them with a discipline and a patience that older men in the parish recognized as something earned. He was not a loud man. He was not a man who sought attention.

But he was a man who believed with the particular conviction of someone who had seen enough of the world to understand what it meant that the land under his feet was his by right and that no one could take it from him. He drove a 1961 Chevrolet pickup, dark blue. He wore overalls most days and a pressed white shirt on Sundays.

 He kept a photograph of Ruthie and the girls on the dashboard of the truck held in place by a piece of electrical tape he’d replaced three times because the heat kept softening the adhesive. He grew tomatoes, butter beans, and okra, and he sold his surplus at the Saturday market in Walterboro. And he knew the name of every person who bought from him and most of their children’s names as well.

 On the evening of August 21st, 1968, he told Ruthie that he had business at the co-op the next morning and that he would be home before the noon heat. He kissed his daughters good night. Josephine would remember, years later, that he had smelled like the fields, like turned earth, and the particular sweetness of ripe tomatoes warming in late summer sun.

That was the last time she saw her father. At 7:30 on the morning of August 22nd, 1968, Elias Beaufort climbed into his dark blue Chevrolet and drove the 9 miles of county road between his farm and Walterboro. He was seen at the Colleton County co-op by two other farmers at approximately 8:15 a.m. He settled his account with the Co-op manager, a man named Stuart Pell, and picked up two bags of cover crop seed.

He loaded them into the truck bed. He said goodbye to Pell and to the two farmers and pulled out of the Co-op lot heading south. No one who has ever been identified saw him alive again after that. By noon, Ruthie was watching the road. By 2:00, she had sent her brother to drive the route between the farm and Walterboro looking for the truck.

He found nothing. By 4:00, Ruthie Beaufort walked to the nearest telephone, the one at Henry Gadsden’s store on Route 15, and called the Colleton County Sheriff’s Office. The deputy who took the call was named Irwin Tate. He told Ruthie that sometimes men had business that ran late, and that she should call back in the morning if her husband hadn’t returned.

He did not take a report that evening. She called back in the morning. Elias Beaufort’s truck was found on the morning of August 23rd, 1968, pulled partially off a dirt track that ran between two private fields approximately 3 mi east of Walterboro, in an area locals called the reed grass cut. The truck was undamaged.

 The keys were not in the ignition. The two bags of cover crop seed were in the bed. The photograph of Ruthie and the girls was still on the dashboard held in place by its piece of electrical tape. Elias was not in the truck. He was not on the track. He was not in the fields on either side. He was gone. The Sheriff’s Office sent two deputies to the scene.

They walked the immediate area. One of them noted in his report that the ground near the driver’s door showed signs of disturbance, a scuffed heel mark, a partial impression in the soft clay, but that the evidence was inconclusive. No further forensic examination of the scene was documented. No search party was organized by the sheriff’s office.

No announcement was made to the public. When Ruthie Beaufort went to the sheriff’s office 3 days after the truck was found and asked what was being done, she was told by Sheriff Vernon Calhoun himself that in his opinion her husband had left of his own choosing and that there was no evidence of a crime. She was 41 years old standing in a county courthouse in South Carolina in 1968 and the sheriff was telling her that her husband, a deacon, a veteran, a landowner, a man who had kissed his daughters goodnight and said he’d be

home before noon had simply chosen to leave. She knew what the sheriff was doing. She left the courthouse and drove back to the parish and told the congregation at Shiloh A.M. what Calhoun had said. The church organized its own search. 52 members of the congregation and surrounding community covered every field road in Tidal Flat within 5 miles of the reed grass cut over 3 days.

They found nothing. The land absorbed him and gave nothing back. In October of 1968, the co-op manager Stewart Pell told a reporter from the Walterboro Press and Standard that Elias Beaufort had seemed perfectly normal on the morning of August 22nd. The story ran on page nine. There was no follow-up. The investigation, such as it was, produced nothing.

Elias Buford was entered in the county records as a missing person. His case was never elevated to a homicide investigation. His 12 acres remained in Ruthie’s name as they would for decades. The property tax paid every year without fail. The Buford family never left. That was the first thing anyone who knew them always said, that while other families might have gone, moved north to Charleston or Columbia or farther, the way so many low country families did in those years, Ruthie Buford stayed on those 12 acres and raised Josephine and

May in the house Elias had built and kept the Saturday market stall going and paid the property tax and kept the candle lit on August 22nd. Ruthie Buford died in 1999 at the age of 72 and did not live to see what was coming. Josephine, the younger of the two sisters, was 50 years old when her mother died and had been asking questions since she was old enough to understand that the story she’d been told, that her father had disappeared on a county road and that no one had looked very hard for him, was not a story that had ended.

She had written to the Colleton County Sheriff’s Office in 1982 and in 1991 and in 2004. Each time she received a version of the same response, the case remained open as a missing person report. There were no new leads. The file was available for review upon request. She reviewed the file in 2004. It was 12 pages.

 Nine of them were the initial incident report and the deputy scene notes from August 23rd, 1968. The remaining three were responses to Ruthie’s letters to the sheriff over the years. There was no witness list beyond Stuart Pell and the two farmers at the co-op. There was no canvas of the reed grass cut road or the properties adjoining it.

There was no documentation of any suspect being considered or interviewed. But there was one thing. In the deputy scene notes from August 23rd, 1968, there was a single line that Josephine read twice, then photographed with the disposable camera she had brought specifically for this purpose, then read again in her car in the parking lot before she drove away.

 It said, “Vehicle bearing county road authority plate observed on adjacent access road. Operator unknown. Reported by neighboring farmer Henry Gadsden. Not followed up.” A county road authority vehicle. Someone with county government access. Someone who had been in the area the morning Elias Beaufort disappeared.

Whose presence a farmer had noticed and reported. And who had never been identified or interviewed. Josephine Beaufort Simmons took the photograph home to Hartsville, where she had lived since 1987, and put it in a folder. She kept the folder in the same filing cabinet where she kept the letters her mother had written and the press clipping from the Walterboro paper and a photograph of her father standing in his field in 1966, squinting slightly into the afternoon sun.

His hand on one of the tomato stakes, grinning at whoever was behind the camera. Every year on August 22nd, she lit the candle. Every case on this channel comes from weeks of research, tracking down records, verifying facts, and putting names back on people the system tried to forget. If you want us to keep doing this work, please take a second to like this video and subscribe.

Tell us in the comments where in the world you’re watching from. It means more than we can say. Now, let’s get back to Elias. The case had been classified as missing for 53 years when the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division opened a cold case review unit. And the first call they received was from Josephine Beaufort Simmons.

In 2021, SLED, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, established a dedicated cold case team with a specific mandate to review cases from the Civil Rights era that had been inadequately investigated. The unit was small, two senior investigators and a forensic coordinator. One of those investigators was a woman named Agent Constance Whaley, a 22-year SLED veteran who had grown up in the low country herself, in a town 12 miles from Walterboro, in a family that had been in Colleton Parish for four generations.

She knew the name Beaufort. She had known it her whole life. When Josephine’s call came in the spring of 2021, Whaley requested the full county file and the missing person record the same day. She read the 12 pages in an evening. She looked at the line about the County Road Authority vehicle for a long time. Then she pulled the 1968 County Road Authority vehicle registry from the state archives, a document that listed every county plated vehicle and its assigned operator for Colleton County in that year.

There were 11 vehicles. Eight were assigned to road maintenance crews that operated in teams and had confirmed logs for August 22nd, 1968. One was assigned to the county engineer’s office and had a documented repair order placing it in the county garage that morning. One was assigned to a retired official who no longer used it and whose family confirmed it had been parked since June.

The 11th vehicle was assigned to the Colleton County Sheriff’s Auxiliary Administrative Office. Its operator of record for 1968 was a part-time county employee named Dexter Holt. In 1968, Dexter Holt was 29 years old. He worked 3 days a week for the county in an administrative capacity and ran a modest cattle operation on family land adjacent to the Reed Grass Cut.

 His land shared a fence line with the access road where Elias Beaufort’s truck had been found. He had not been interviewed in 1968. His name did not appear in the file. Henry Gatson’s report of the county vehicle made to a deputy, documented in the scene notes, and then explicitly marked not followed up, was the only trace of him in the entire record.

Whaley began building a timeline. Through county records, deed filings, and a land dispute that had been filed and dismissed in 1967, she established that Dexter Holt and Elias Beaufort had been in conflict over a fence line and a drainage ditch that ran between their properties. A dispute in which Elias had been legally correct and in which a county arbitrator had ruled in his favor in the spring of 1968, 5 months before his disappearance.

Dexter Holt had lost the dispute. He had continued to operate his cattle on land that the ruling confirmed was not his to use. He had made, according to two witnesses Whaley located in 2021, both in their late 80s, both still living in the parish, a comment at the Walterboro feed store in the summer of 1968 that had been heard and remembered and never repeated to law enforcement.

Because in Colleton County in 1968, repeating something like that to law enforcement was not something people in the parish believed would help. The comment, as one of the witnesses recalled it to Whaley 53 years later, was that land problem is going to solve itself. Whaley applied for a warrant to exhume and search a section of the Holt property adjacent to the Reed Grass Cut Access Road.

Ground penetrating radar, run by a forensic team from Clemson University’s Anthropology Department, was deployed across a 40-ft section of the property in the fall of 2021. On the second day of scanning, the equipment registered an anomaly 8 ft below the surface near a stand of old-growth live oaks at the property’s eastern edge.

Forensic excavation began the following week. Elias Beaufort was identified from the remains by mitochondrial DNA, matched against a sample provided by his daughter Mae, who was 71 years old and had driven from Atlanta to be present when the results came in. The forensic anthropologist’s report indicated trauma consistent with a single gunshot wound to the back of the skull.

He had been shot. He had been buried. His truck had been driven to the Reed Grass Cut Track and left there to suggest he had walked away. Dexter Holt was 92 years old. He had lived in Colleton Parish his entire life. He had served on the county planning board in the 1980s. He had donated to the restoration fund for the historic Walterboro Courthouse.

His grandchildren were scattered across the state. His neighbors described him as old and quiet and occasionally sharp-tongued. One of them told the Post and Courier after the arrest that he had always seemed like a man with something pressing on him but that she had assumed it was just age. It was not age.

 Agent Constance Whaley arrested Dexter Holt on a Tuesday morning in January of 2022 at his home on the Reed Grass Cut Road within half a mile of the Live Oak stand where Elias Bufore had been in the ground for 53 years. Holt was sitting at his kitchen table when Whaley and two SLED agents came through the door. He looked at Whaley.

He looked at the warrant. He did not speak. He was handcuffed at his kitchen table in the farmhouse where he had lived for 92 years and walked to a patrol vehicle and driven to the Colleton County Detention Center. His family released a statement saying he was innocent and that the evidence was circumstantial.

His attorney filed a motion to dismiss based on his age and health. The motion was denied. In March of 2023 Dexter Holt entered a plea of guilty to murder in the second degree. His attorney had negotiated the charge down from first degree on the basis of his age and the evidentiary limitations of a 55-year-old case.

He was sentenced to 30 years in prison, a sentence that, given that he was 93 by the time of sentencing, meant he would die in custody. He did not make a statement at sentencing. He was led from the Colleton County courtroom in a wheelchair. In the gallery, Josephine Beaufort Simmons sat with her sister May and with three members of Shiloh AME Church who had driven down from the parish that morning and were old enough to remember the summer of 1968.

One of them, a woman of 87 named Ruth Ella Pinkney, had been 14 years old when Elias disappeared. She had been in the congregation that organized the search. She had walked the reed grass cut fields for 3 days in August heat looking for a man she had known her whole life. She said afterward that she felt many things and peace was somewhere among them, but it was not the only thing and she was not sure it was the loudest.

There is a photograph of Elias Beaufort that Josephine keeps on her wall in Hartsville. He is standing in his field in 1966, hand on a tomato stake, grinning at whoever was behind the camera. The tomatoes are tall behind him. The low country sky is the particular white blue of August. He looks like a man who has no reason to think the summer will not keep going exactly like this.

 His 12 acres are still in the family. May’s eldest son farms them now. He grows Sea Island tomatoes in the same dark soil using seed stock that his grandmother saved and his mother carried north to Atlanta and brought back when the land came back to them in spirit, if not indeed. The Saturday market stall in Walterboro has a hand-lettered sign above it that says Beaufort Family Farm and has said so since 2022 when Josephine and May put it up on the 1st August 22nd after the arrest.

Elias Beaufort was 46 years old. He was a deacon and a farmer and a veteran and a father who kissed his daughters good night and said he’d be home before noon. He was a man who had won a legal dispute over a fence line and a drainage ditch fair and square in a county where winning a dispute like that was not a simple or a safe thing for a black landowner to do in 1968.

He had been shot and buried on the land adjoining his own because a man with county authority and county access could not accept that the ruling had gone against him. And because in Colleton County in 1968 that man had reason to believe he would never be asked to explain himself. He was right about that for 53 years.

He was not right forever. The church at Shiloh AME still keeps the fourth pew on the left open on the Sunday nearest August 22nd. The congregation calls it Deacon Beaufort’s pew. Though most of the people who say that name now know him only from what their parents and grandparents told them. That is its own kind of keeping.

The passing of a name through a community that refused to let the silence be the last word. There are questions this case leaves behind that have no easy answers. And we want to know yours. Henry Gadsden reported that county vehicle to a deputy in 1968 and that deputy wrote it down and marked it not followed up.

Who made that decision? And does Colleton County owe that accounting to the Beaufort family? What does it mean that a man who used county government access to commit a murder then served on the county planning board for a decade? And what obligation does an institution have to examine who else it protected? And for Josephine Buford Simmons, who spent 53 years writing letters and keeping a folder and lighting a candle every August 22nd, what does it mean that she had to do all of that? And what would have happened to her

father’s name if she hadn’t? Justice found Elias Buford after 55 years. It found him because a 14-year-old girl in 1968 grew into an 87-year-old woman who still remembered where she had walked. Because a deputy wrote one honest line in a scene report. And a daughter found it 36 years later. Because the earth holds what people try to hide.

And because technology eventually finds what it holds. If you believe that truth is worth pursuing no matter how long it takes, subscribe so you don’t miss the next case. More stories are waiting in the description. Thank you for being here.