People in this chapter · J.D. Pitts · Glen Edward Chapman · Willie Armstrong

A county case

Within days of the discovery, the case left Brookford. The town’s police department was a single officer. Early in August 1992 the Catawba County Sheriff’s Office and the SBI took over. One of the lead detectives was J.D. Pitts of the sheriff’s office. He is retired and declined to comment when Dateline contacted him.

What those investigators did over the next four years is hard to reconstruct from the public record. When Dateline asked the sheriff’s office for the case file, it received fewer than 20 pages, covering records from 1992 to 1996. The office later said a complete file existed as of 2024. Hickory police, who took the missing person report, did not produce their file at all.

Sources: NBC News Dateline, Cold Case Spotlight

The shoe

Dee Dee was found wearing one shoe. That shoe was the only physical evidence logged in the case, according to Dateline, and it is gone. The last date the records show it in custody is August 12, 1992. The sheriff’s office told reporters that audits of its evidence storage in 2018 and 2024 did not find it, and that no records show the shoe was ever entered into evidence. The loss went unnoticed until Brookford police reopened the case in 2023. The Hickory Daily Record first reported it, and WSOC followed in December 2025.

Why does a single shoe matter? Modern laboratories can sometimes develop DNA profiles from touch evidence, from fibers and from biological traces that 1992 science could not read. A shoe worn by a victim and handled by whoever moved her is the kind of item cold case units resubmit. Without it, investigators are left largely with testimony, and testimony fades.

Sources: NBC News Dateline, Cold Case Spotlight · WSOC, Dec. 30, 2025

Other deaths that summer

Dee Dee’s death was not the only one in Hickory that summer. In August 1992, the bodies of two women, Tenene Yvette Conley and Betty Jean Ramseur, were found within a week of each other in abandoned houses in the city. A Hickory man, Glen Edward Chapman, was charged with both killings. In November 1994 a jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to death.

Chapman was innocent. A Superior Court judge’s 186-page order in November 2007 found that the state had withheld evidence, including a credible confession by another person, and that Chapman’s trial lawyers had been ineffective. Evidence suggested Conley may have died of an overdose rather than murder. The district attorney dismissed the charges and Chapman walked out of prison on April 2, 2008, after nearly 15 years, most of them on death row. He later settled a civil rights suit for $1,025,000.

Dee Dee’s family told Dateline that police had linked Chapman to her death. He was never charged in it. The family did not learn of his exoneration until 2015. The Brief notes the history only because it explains a part of the family’s frustration: for years, they believed the case had an answer that, in the end, it did not have. Nothing in the public record connects Chapman to Dee Dee’s death, and he was cleared in the cases for which he was convicted.

Sources: National Registry of Exonerations: Glen Edward Chapman · Death Penalty Information Center: Chapman exoneration · NBC News Dateline, Cold Case Spotlight · Missing in the Carolinas podcast, March 13, 2026

1996 and 2001

In 1996, Detective Pitts wrote a partial prosecution summary. It sits in the file today. According to the district attorney’s office and the sheriff’s office, it was never shared with the district attorney. In 2001, according to WCNC as cited by Dateline, the SBI closed the case. Electronic evidence records begin that year.

Why the case was closed is not explained in any public record. Brookford’s police chief, who reopened it two decades later, told Dateline there was no accurate reason he could find for closing it.

“There’s no accurate reason to describe why the case was closed.”Brookford Police Chief Willie Armstrong to Dateline

Sources: NBC News Dateline, Cold Case Spotlight

What 1992 could not do

The early 1990s were the first years of forensic DNA in American courts. North Carolina’s DNA database was in its infancy, and profiles from small or degraded samples were often impossible. Cold case units now routinely revisit cases like this one, but they depend on evidence that was collected, logged and kept. In Dee Dee’s case, the public record shows little was collected and the one item logged was lost.

That leaves people. The sheriff’s office’s unsolved case page asks anyone with information to contact Senior Investigator Daniel Jenkins. The family believes someone in Hickory or Brookford has known for 34 years.

Sources: Catawba County Sheriff’s Office unsolved cases