From the Walterboro Police Department
On Saturday officers from the Walterboro Police Department attended the 50th-year remembrance memorial for William Hoff and James Crosby.
On November 1, 1972, 16-year-old James Allen Crosby and 14-year-old William Edward Huff were dropped off by their mothers at Colleton Junior High School. The best friends were never seen again. Short stories ran in The Press and Standard later that month, saying the boys were missing and asking anyone with information to call then-Sheriff John I. Seigler. No one came forward. Searches — on foot by deputies and Rescue Squad volunteers and in the air by a SLED plane — proved futile.
In 1973, there was speculation that a skull found in Ireland Creek may have belonged to one of the boys. It didn’t.
Fast forward to April 1984. Two men were running a dog hunting for game trails in the woods on old airbase access roads behind the airport. First, they spotted a boot, half covered with leaves. Then they uncovered a bone next to the boot. Then a pair of pants with bones inside. They called the sheriff’s office.
The area in which the bodies were found was no more than a half mile from the school where the boys were last seen 11 years before.
A search by deputies found more bones and more articles of clothing. Crosby’s mother identified a blue flowered shirt as the one worn by her son on his last ride to school. Their skulls were never found.
In May 1984 Sheriff’s Deputy Steve Bazzle, who headed the three-man detective’s section of the sheriff’s office, continued the investigation. But the only physical evidence he had were shirts, shoes, a pair of pants, and a few small bones, including a jawbone, but dental records didn’t match Crosby and apparently weren’t compared to Huff.
The only outside information came in 1987, 15 years later, when a person came forward. The person said in the fall of 1974 when they were teenagers, he and three others were cutting class with a school administrator chasing behind them. They smelled something awful and saw a flannel shirt and then a head. But they were too scared to tell anyone what they’d seen. And never did until 1987. By then, whatever clues might have been found in 1974 were long gone.
The case has never been solved.
