From Official Cold Case Investigations :
Raeford -- Hoke County — HOKE COUNTY: Brittany Locklear hadn’t been standing at the bus stop at the end of her driveway outside Raeford, Hoke County, for five minutes before she was abducted. Her mother, Connie, usually waited with her, but on this overcast morning in January, 1998, she went inside for a moment to use the bathroom. When she looked outside her living room window, her 5-year-old daughter was gone. She figured the bus had come until neighbors knocked on her door in a panic.
“They believed Brittany had been kidnapped,” Connie said. “So I got my father-in-law to come and take me to the schoolhouse because I didn’t believe it.” She said she didn’t want to make a fool of herself at the sheriff’s department. When Connie found no sign of her daughter at the school, she called police. A massive manhunt ensued over the next several hours, producing no more than Brittany’s book bag and some of her clothes.
Several neighbors saw it happen from about 200 yards away, and based on their accounts, police began a frantic search for the brown truck they thought the assailant was driving.
Police found Brittany’s naked, lifeless body the next day in a drainage ditch a few miles from her house. She had been raped, and then drowned. Police thought it probably happened shortly after she was taken.
The Hoke County Sheriff’s Office called in the State Bureau of Investigation, and from the outset, the investigation moved at a breakneck pace.
“I know in the first week we got close to somewhere between five and 700 leads,” said SBI Agent Jay Tilley, now retired but one of the original investigators on the case. “We were operating 24 hours a day.”
Investigators canvassed the area, focusing on anyone with a pick-up truck. A year passed without any significant leads.
Frustrated, officials formed a cold case task force around the year anniversary, hoping fresh eyes on the case would lead to the break they needed. They re-interviewed witnesses, and were shocked to find that even the description of the perpetrator’s truck didn’t match from one witness to the next. With little else to go on, they focused on sex offenders in the area and took DNA samples from them. No match.
The sheriff’s department turned their eyes towards Brittany’s family, asking Connie, her husband at the time, Charles, and her father-in-law, James Stevens, to submit to a lie detector test.
They focused on James, and at one point spread pictures of the murdered child before him in the hope he would confess.
FROM: WRAL.com :
After a grueling search through the muddy terrain of a Hoke County wooded area, authorities discovered the body of 5-year-old Brittany Lynn Locklear Thursday afternoon.
Sheriff Wayne Byrd said that the body was found in a drainage pipe, only miles away from the spot where the kindergartner was kidnapped Wednesday morning.
Brittany Lynn Locklear disappeared about 7 a.m. from her home just southwest of Raeford while waiting for the school bus. The Hoke County Sheriff's Department says that the girl was snatched by a man and put into a brown pickup truck with a rack of overhead lights.
Brittany's mother, Connie Chavis, said she had been watching her daughter from inside her home as the child waited at a bus stop about 200 yards away. Just after 7 a.m., Chavis said she went to the bathroom. When she returned, Brittany was gone.
The disappearance has other parents very concerned for the welfare of their own children. Keith Butler says his children will be watching for the bus from inside their home.
Crystal Johnson, the cousin of the missing child, plans to be extra careful herself. Johnson is afraid the same thing that happened to Brittany could happen to her.
Over 300 officers, firefighters, concerned friends and Fort Bragg soldiers turned out Thursday to look for Brittany. Sheriff Byrd says nearly 1,000 more people had contacted his office to volunteer to help. For that, he is appreciative.
Wednesday night, search dogs found Brittany's backpack, along with a pair of overalls and two shoes, in a wooded area on Ryan McBride Road, about three miles away from her home. Thursday, search crews discovered another piece of clothing, possibly belonging to the 3-foot-tall, 35-pound girl.
Thursday morning, authorities conducted a road check near the abduction scene. Sgt. Patrick Brock said they were looking for anyone who may have witnessed anything suspicious the morning Brittany was kidnapped.
Officers searched on land and from the air Wednesday. A Highway Patrol chopper, equipped with infrared technology, took to the air, However, windy weather forced an end to the air search.
When folks heard the tragic news, they responded with shock, sadness, and anger. Elizabeth Craven, a friend of Brittany's family, spoke with WRAL Thursday afternoon. She fought back tears as she talked about Brittany, calling her "the sweetest little child you'd ever want to know."
The girl was waiting for the school bus to take her to West Hoke Elementary, where she was enrolled in kindergarten. Some other students witnessed the abduction. Johnson told WRAL's Mark Roberts what she saw.
Sheriff Byrd told WRAL that he believes that the kidnapping was not a domestic situation. However, Thursday after the body was discovered, Byrd stated in a press conference that his opinion has wavered.
The child's father, who lives in Pembroke, has been interviewed and "checks out."
Deputies say that several children witnessed the kidnapping from down the street. The children gave authorities as much information as they could, saying that a white male jumped out of the truck, grabbed Brittany, took her back into the truck and sped off, heading away from them.
Earlier Thursday, Sheriff Byrd said he was trying to stay optimistic about the search until he had reason to feel otherwise.
The FBI has devised a profile of the killer, and it appears likely that the suspect was watching Thursday search, if not actually involved in it.
At this time, the Hoke County Sheriff's Department has more than 50 leads in the case. Authorities say any new tips would be appreciated. Anyone with information is asked to call the Sheriff's Department at 1-800-842-9111.
“He tried to make me tell him I was the one that hurt that baby,” James said of former Sheriff Jim Davis. “And God knows, I ain’t never hurt no baby.” Five years after the young girl was murdered, an unrelated arrest leads investigators to believe they may have the case solved. A Fort Bragg soldier was taken into custody on a robbery charge; as police were searching his locker, they found pictures of Brittany. There were unconfirmed reports the man participated in the search for the young girl.
Although the man still hasn’t been totally eliminated as a suspect in the eyes of current Sheriff Hubert Peterkin, he said that a closer look at the man led police to believe he likely wasn’t responsible for the girl’s murder.
The sheriff is certain, rather, that the girl was killed by someone who knew her “very well.”
Nine years have passed since Brittany’s murder, and investigators feel no closer to solving the crime than they were in the first few days after it happened. Opinions vary, but a look at the psychology of the murder reveals a chilling predator that terrorizes innocent victims without conscience or self-control. The only thread of hope is that Brittany’s murderer probably was familiar with the area. Maybe one day someone will remember something suspicious and decide to come forward.
“I’ve got this picture of some monster who preys on children,” Agent Tilley said. “It’s not going to be that obvious by looking at him or talking to that person, but deep inside them there’s this monster. And this monster came out when they kidnapped Brittany.”
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These sorts of cold cases really get to me. Not only that the victim is a tiny child but she was snatched not far from her home, in early daylight, in front of witnesses. This means that no child is safe anywhere ever. And that whoever murdered this child has probably done it again and again and is living free. All of this just gets my gut in a knot. I started this blog as a means of extending Astrology through my method of forensics but it has engaged me as an activist for victims. Some of the things I've read and seen online just break my heart.
The most important fact about this case is that the abduction was witnessed by others, some of them neighbors, some of them strangers, so there is no doubt about who did it. This means you don't have to check the charts for the parents. What you need to do here is try to figure out who this person was that took the child. If you look at the first chart I drew, for 7 am, the time at which the child was last seen, you can see that the mother is in the home. Now, these cases are the most difficult because of the dependent nature of children. But in this case the mother and child were separated so I am using the first house for the child and the seventh house for her mother. The Moon is the natural ruler of mothers and also the chart co ruler. You can see it in the fourth house, supporting the mother's claim that she was in the home at the time. Notice that the first house ruler, Saturn, is in the third, showing the child on the roadway. The third house also describes transportation and we know that she was waiting on a bus. We also know that she was taken off in a brown truck. Saturn in Aries would describe a masculine vehicle that is used for work and this certainly applies to a truck. Saturn indicates the color brown. Notice that Saturn is disposed of by Mars, which is rising in the first. To see who it is that came upon the child, look at the Sun. It is right at the first house cusp, showing us the person (presumably male) who presented himself to the child. At the same time, notice that the Moon in Taurus is disposed of by Venus, which rules the fifth house. This shows the mothers' concern for her child at the time. So she was watching, as were others. The large grouping in the first house shows us a number of people who were near the child at the time.
Mars shows us how swift the snatching was. The sign Aquarius is an air sign and adds to the speed. The node in the eighth house disposed of by Mercury, the natural ruler of children, shows us the plan was centered on finding a child and either having sex or killing that child or both. Pluto in the eleventh shows sex or personal contact with an unwilling partner. This is usually a sexual assault. Since Pluto co rules the tenth house, it is describing a strong, violent individual who has no problem overpowering the child. The tenth house is patriarchal and often describes men, although not always. In this case, we already have information that describes a man as the abductor. The tenth house at play here also makes me think that this man may have children of his own. Scary thought.
Charts like these are hard to analyze. Partly because the child is very young and should be ruled by the fifth house but the child is not with the mother, who is elsewhere, setting the child apart on it's own. But the mother is involved, albeit from a distance, and has to be considered. I am not comfortable using the first house ruler alone for the child because she is so young and the mother cannot be the first house occupant because she is not present at the time. So what to do? Use the first house ruler in combination with Mercury for the child and use the Moon for the mother. Now, a problem arises here because the Moon rules the seventh, presumably the abductor, so clouds of confusion settle in and make it even harder to isolate the players. In this first chart, I can see that the Moon is describing the mother because it is in the fourth, showing us someone in the child's home, where we know the mother remained. Saturn rules the first and it is in the third, showing someone in the neighborhood or in a car or waiting for a ride, all of which seem to apply to the child. Mercury is in the twelfth, where it remains hidden from view which describes the child after she was taken. So where the heck is the abductor in this chart? Isolating this marker takes a bit of imagination it seems and I tend to go with the planet closest to the Ascendant, which should describe the person facing the child, coming upon the child, etc.. and since she was taken quickly and the Sun is within seconds of the Ascendant and then moves swiftly into the twelfth, I think this is the closest marker we are going to find. The Sun, in turn, rules the eighth house, which shows us many variations of events, many of which will apply here. Death, sexual assault, a criminal, a secret plot, someone being driven by desire, often desperately. And any planet crossing the Ascendant will be disposed of by the first house ruler, showing this little girl to be the focus of her abductor from the first moment. In this chart you can see a number of planets rising in the first, descriptive of the people standing nearby that witnessed the abduction. But his planet, the Sun, is stretched out ahead of the others, making no aspect to any of them, showing him to be an "outsider" of sorts, someone they did not know, who got away from them quickly.
The Sun is traveling void of course so it makes it difficult to discover it's future path. It makes no aspect to any other planet before leaving the sign Capricorn. But the Moon, swifter in motion, is within a few degrees of a trine to the Sun. In fact, this is the only planet that aspects the Sun in any event. What does this mean? Well, the Moon has proven to represent the mother in this case but it is also the co ruler of the chart by default. The Moon is also in trine aspect to the north node and creates a Grand Trine between all of these planets, the Sun, the Moon and the Node. To me, this looks like things just fell into place for this event, that made it easy for this man to take her. With a trine, circumstances can be so close they seem impossible, such as this person just appearing and the child just being there for a split second and the abduction goes off without a hitch. Not very many things in life happen that smoothly and easily. But if anything can make the impossible possible it is the Grand Trine.
The next few charts I drew up basically show us the mother leaving her home to look for her daughter. This is where the Moon leaves the fourth and moves into the third. Also, we see the authorities get involved when Pluto moves into the tenth while ruling the tenth. We see the Sun move into the twelfth, showing us the abductor going into hiding, getting out of sight. And then, further along, we see the first house ruler become Uranus with Uranus entering the twelfth, showing us the dumping of the body. We know she was found dead so we don't have to work hard at that, trying to find the body. What we want to do here is try to figure out who took her. This is always difficult but I am sure that Sun in Capricorn will lead us to him, especially since the Sun begins to rule the seventh house around the time the charts show us the child's death. Sun in Capricorn in a forensic chart describes an working man with earthly qualities, mainly someone who does physical labor. He may run his own business, since Capricorn is the sign of the CEO. Power seems to play a role in this case, as Pluto rules the midheaven throughout the event and the Sun is a marker for the murderer. In these charts, Saturn represented this little girl and his ruler is disposed of by Saturn, making a case for a child molester. This was not his first abduction. He has an irresistable fetish for little girls. He planned this out carefully and it would seem he had seen her before, perhaps with her mother in some other time and place. This might explain how the Moon (the mother in this case) facilitated his attempt to take the child. The mother is not aware of it, but she had been with the child when they crossed his path. This chart is too tight, too neat and the abduction too opportunistic to not have been planned. I believe he targeted this child and if the mother has memory of exposing her daughter to anyone knew in the past few weeks prior to her kidnapping, she may be able to single him out.
I say this because the Grand Trine which facilitated this event is between his ruler, the Sun, her ruler, the Moon, and the node, which shows the plan or scheme that evolved. When he saw the girl, he began to plan her abduction.
I do not like to use the planets or signs to describe people because the world is so diverse, it cannot be useful. Any attempts to narrow the physical appearance down smacks of profiling and that's not my intent. I know I have used the traditional readings in the past but I have abandoned that. Now, I attempt to describe the person's character, activities, probable interests, etc... So looking at the charts drawn that show the Sun on the seventh cusp, I will try to single some things out.
Pluto rules this man's home so expect to find it in disarray, to say the least. It may have been demolished or destroyed in some manner and may be being renovated. It is likely that he has done some exotic things with the home, such as digging out underground areas or adding terrariums or overpopulating the home with pets like snakes or turtles. Because Pluto is disposed of by Jupiter in Aquarius, there may be a lot of junk in and around the home. He tends to be a hoarder, with a love for old, eccentric and antique items. He may have a collection of old radios or vintage electronics of all kinds.
If you look at the books I compiled, you can see many attributes associated with Capricorn and the Sun. Power is one of the most often indicated. As I said before, power plays an important role in these charts so it must be assumed that power describes the abductor. This may be why this man has never been caught. The Sun, for instance, often indicates kings, rulers, politicians, prominent socialites and people in high office, such as judges, sheriffs, attorney generals, etc... men in positions of power and in the public eye. I will not go so far as to say that this man was a judge, for instance, but I will say that he is in a position of prominence in the local area, or was at that time, and was not looked at, regardless. There was much attention given to a local firefighter who had pictures of the child in his locker. Of course, he may have just taken an interest in the case, being a local hero, wanting to save the child... but then again he may be the killer, erecting a tribute to the child using souvenirs, like many killers do. But the Sun in Capricorn is disposed of by Saturn in Aries and since Aries is a fire sign, it is possible he did do this. The Sun can also indicate better than average athletes, hunters, as well as popular heroes. Was he considered a hero in the local community? That, in itself, could be descriptor enough for this murderer.
But you cannot dismiss the sign Capricorn and the planet Saturn. The abductor had a work truck, according to the charts and the color brown was both reported by witnesses and supported by the planet Saturn. Saturn is at odds with the descriptors for the Sun, describing, on another hand, the day laborer, the poor, the needy and the one who works like a dog for little money. It is a planet of deprivation and desperation. Saturn is in Aries, which can describe desires that are extreme. I think this fits a child molester, a madman who is driven to have sex with little girls, a deviate. And then there's the sign Capricorn, which seems to dovetail more closely with the Sun in it's descriptors. It tends to describe people in government, elected office, at the head of corporations. It is not a sign of servitude, it is a sign of elegance and rulership. Hard work is implied through the ruling planet, Saturn, but the results usually give the subject power and admiration from the public. This is why I think this man was in a position of power in the local community and was not looked at because of this fact, regardless of any work trucks he may have borrowed or owned.
There is an element of cruelty associated with Capricorn; the materialistic person who will sacrifice life and limb for money or success. These can be those that restrict or imprison others, such as those who work in or manage prisons. This also extends to those who are held against their will, people and animals alike. This sign can indicate slaughterhouses and the fur industry. In this same manner, Capricorn can indicate property and property owners, the use of property for financial gain or a job or career in the ownership or taxing of property or possessions. He may work in any of these industries, have hobbies in any of these industries or be known for creating or running a business in any of these industries. But there is no doubt that his man was prominent in the local community, held a powerful or admired office in the region and was not looked at because of that. This child's mother met this man at some time in the past and was with the child at the time. She may have gone to a government office or business location and ran into this man. This is where he saw the child and began his plan to take her.
