Roger Dedmond was already in prison for his wife's murder when a stranger telephoned the Gaffney Ledger to say he had not done it. Annie Lucille Dedmond, thirty-two, and her husband had driven over the state line from Spindale, North Carolina, on the evening of May 19, 1967, for a night out in Gaffney, South Carolina. The couple argued, and she ended up alone at the roadside. A man offered her a ride. She was found strangled and raped, her body left across the county line in Union County. Her husband was arrested, convicted of her murder and sentenced to eighteen years.
The man who had picked her up was Lee Roy Martin, born in Gaffney on April 25, 1937, a textile mill worker, married, with three children. For eight months after the Dedmond killing he did nothing anyone knew about. Then in late January 1968 Nancy Christine Rhinehart, fourteen, disappeared while walking home from a friend's house. In early February Nancy Carol Parris, twenty, took her poodle out for a walk one night and did not come back; her husband reported her missing. In a town that still left its doors unlocked, no one yet connected the two.
On February 8, 1968, the managing editor of the Ledger, Bill Gibbons, picked up the phone to a man who told him to take out three sheets of paper, because he had three stories to tell. He gave directions to two bodies and said he had killed a third woman, Annie Dedmond, and that her husband was innocent. Gibbons passed it to the police. They found Nancy Parris naked on the bank of a creek beneath a bridge, and Nancy Rhinehart buried under a brush pile with one bare foot showing. Both had been raped and strangled, and both bore cigarette burns. Four days later the caller rang Gibbons again. There would be more, he said.
The next morning, February 13, Opal Dianne Buckson, fifteen, was walking to the school bus stop with her brother and sister, a little ahead of them, when a man pulled her into his car and put her in the trunk. Her brother and sister saw it and described the car to police. Two days later, two men saw a man matching that description in a wooded area; he drove off quickly, but they wrote down his license plate number. Detectives searched where he had been and found Opal Buckson's body. There were signs that she had fought him, and she had been strangled and stabbed.
The plate led to Martin, who was thirty. He admitted all four killings and took police to the victims' clothing, including Annie Dedmond's, and to a dog that had belonged to one of the women. Roger Dedmond was released on March 1, 1968, and the charges against him were dropped. His case is now listed among American exonerations.
Martin was convicted of four murders and given four life sentences. He later claimed a split personality, a violent side that took control of him. On May 31, 1972, another inmate stabbed him to death at the Central Correctional Institution in Columbia. In 2023, fifty-five years after the killings, the case was part of an exhibit at the Gaffney Arts and Visitors Center.