Horry County has more than 60 unsolved homicides. How are police trying to catch killers?
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Horry County’s Unsolved Homicides
Horry County has a number of cold cases, some that date back nearly 50 years. Police have taken different approaches to try and solve them.
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Horry County has more than 60 unsolved homicides. How are police trying to catch killers?
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When Myrtle Beach Police decided to launch its cold case team in 2013, one of the first cases on the list to be reviewed was the homicide of Jim Davis.
The 43-year-old was shot about 3:30 a.m. in 2003 while working at The Pantry at 34th Avenue North in Myrtle Beach.
Davis’ death is among a number of unsolved homicides in Horry County. Some of those date back nearly 50 years ago with the oldest in 1978.
The cold case team is not a new concept in police work. Often departments use volunteers and outside agencies to examine files and information in case something may have been overlooked or missed.
Still, it could take years for a case to be solved, or maybe not at all.
Decade passed before two high-profile cases solved
It took 13 years before police were able to find out what happened to New York teenager Brittanee Drexel.
The 17-year-old was on a spring break trip with her friends in Myrtle Beach when she disappeared on April 25, 2009.
The case garnered national attention as her family searched for answers as to what happened to her.
It wasn’t until 2022 that both police and her family got answers when her killer, Raymond Moody, was charged with her death. He led authorities to the teen’s remains, which were discovered in Georgetown County.
In another high-profile case, police searched for the person who left an infant, named Baby Boy Horry, to die in a shopping bag inside a shoebox along a Conway area highway in 2008.
It was determined that the baby was alive upon birth.
However, it took law enforcement 12 years to solve the case. It wasn’t until authorities were able to use advances in technology to track the parents of the infant, ultimately discovering that it was the mother who left the baby along the roadside.
Investigators on the case identified Jennifer Sahr as the infant’s mother through a biotechnology company, which allowed them to use the baby’s DNA to find a distant relative.
With such new advances, families are hopeful that cases can be solved even years later.
But much of a case being solved still depends on someone coming forward and telling what they know, police say.
Shawn Davis took to social media in January 2025 seeking help in solving his father’s death.
Jim Davis was shot and killed 21 years ago in what police believe was a robbery. Whoever pulled the trigger, then robbed the cash register, taking $43 and fled the store.
Shawn Davis’ efforts have generated new tips in the investigation. However, there still have been no arrests.
Cold case team works on ‘unfinished business’
Myrtle Beach Police Department’s cold case team uses volunteers, mainly retired police officers, to investigate unsolved homicides and other violent or high-profile cases.
The volunteers work alongside detectives to review the crimes.
Myrtle Beach has 10 unsolved crimes, or cold cases, in Myrtle Beach, according to department numbers as of February 2025.
Horry County Police no longer has a cold case team, according to Horry County spokesperson Mikayla Moskov. However, there are two dedicated detectives that work on nothing but unresolved cases, according to Capt. Gregory Lent, who is over Horry County Police’s Criminal Investigation Division. That’s something that many departments across the country don’t have, Lent said.
Horry County Police has 57 unsolved homicides, according to numbers provided by Moskov in February. The oldest of those cases happening in 1978.
Tony Lever, who retired from Myrtle Beach Police in 2017 after 24 years, joined the cold case team “because there is unfinished business.”
He continues to assist on cases he previously worked on before. That includes the case of Jim Davis.
Lever, who, along with other members of the cold case team, wouldn’t talk about specifics of cases.
But ultimately, he wants “to bring closure for not only the victim but the families,” Lever said.
Alan Patterson Jr., a retired Hanover, New Hampshire officer, has been on the cold case team for four years.
With the veteran officers like Patterson, who retired in 1993, working on the cases, there is more than 500 years of experience in the room. There are about 11 to 13 volunteers currently on the team.
Patterson said the goal is to bring the case forward, while having compassion for the families.
“It’s personal to them,” Patterson said of the families.
James Normile said being on the cold case team provides a different perspective.
“People move on and forget,” Normile said. “Maybe (the investigation) will jog their memory and they will speak up.”
Normile retired from New York City Police after 27 years – 11 of those years were in homicide.
“Every family deserves justice,” Normile said.
Normile worked on one case for 10 years. He’s still working on it, and it bothers him that he hasn’t been able to solve it.
Normile, who now lives in the Myrtle Beach area, has all of his notepads – 200 of them – in the hopes he will be able to solve it. “It’s frustrating,” he said.
Normile said a large part of such investigations is sitting with the family and giving them answers.
“It may not be want they want, but at least they have closure,” Normile said.
However, even after years of investigating and pouring over evidence, “sometimes there are no suggestions to be made.”
What is Horry County’s murder rate?
Horry County has a murder rate of .48, according to 2023 statistics, the latest numbers from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program.
This means that for every 10,000 people, .48 murders are reported. The FBI numbers are based on numbers reported to the agency.
Horry County, which the Census says has a population of 354,000, reported having 19 murders in 2023.
However, county and city officials and the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce have disputed such statistics, saying that crime rates don’t consider the swelling population of the Myrtle Beach area during the tourist season.
Lent said the rate also doesn’t take into consideration that often victims who are not from here have been found or killed in Horry County.
Horry County has a clearance rate of 53% for its homicide cases, according to the FBI. The FBI considers a case cleared if a suspect has been arrested, charged or turned over to the courts for prosecution, or the suspect is dead.
The number puts the county among 11 of 46 South Carolina counties with a murder clearance rate of 50% or lower.
In the 10-year period from 2013 to 2022, only about 57% of homicide cases in the U.S. have been solved or cleared., according to the Project: Cold Case, a database of homicides across the U.S.
This story was originally published May 12, 2025 at 7:30 AM.
