Brutal Murder Of Brittany

On the morning of January 7 1998 Brittany Locklear and her mother, Connie Chavis, were staying outside their mobile home in southern Hoke County, NC for Brittany's kindergarten school bus. Connie had to use the restroom and went back inside for a few minutes while Brittany remained outside, just yards from the mobile home. When she returned, Brittany was gone.

A neighbor, Rose Johnson, witnessed the kidnapping. Johnson said the suspect was a white male in a full-sized brown or tan truck.

“I saw a truck come flying around the curve and down toward Brittany,” Rose Johnson said. “It slowed down quickly, and someone hopped out of the truck real fast. He bent over like he was picking something up, hopped back in the truck, and drove out of there real fast.”

More than 500 people volunteered to search the region for Brittany. Her clothing and backpack were found the same day as the kidnapping. The next day her naked body was found in a drainage ditch on a farm road just three miles away. She was raped and drowned. Brittany's parents were shortly cleared of involvement. Detectives received more than 1,600 tips in the weeks that followed Locklear's death. They quizzed every known child molester in a 50-mile radius. They searched in vain for their only real lead: The white man in a brown pickup truck mentioned by many witnesses.

In 2003 authorities named Keith Douglas Londeree, 44, as a suspect. Londeree was recently arrested on an unrelated bank robbery charge. When Londeree's employer, the Fort Bragg Fire Department, cleaned out his work locker they found a photo of Brittany. SBI agents say it was a photo clipped from a newspaper article about the kidnapping and they have no data on why Londeree had it. The police took a DNA sample from Londeree but it did not match samples taken from Brittany's body and he was simply cleared as a suspect.

Years later authorities are no closer to solving Brittany's murder. Brittany's family has grown frustrated with the sheriff's department and has blamed them for using the case for political gain. SBI agents now question the eye-witness accounts and caution that the truck could have been almost any color.

DISCUSSION

This is a case I think about a lot but haven't seen much debate of it outside of local news on the anniversary of her kidnapping. It will be 21 years next week. It seems like it should be possible to solve given they have DNA proof. The Londeree lead has always seemed so odd. It's not like he had a flyer or something that was just thrown in his locker. It was a deliberate newspaper clipping still there 5-ish years later. He wasn't related in any other way to her family. The sheriff some years later seemed to think the family was cleared too quickly and tried to get Brittany's father to confess to no avail.