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The Unsolved Murder of Frances 'Frankie' Bullock



FRANKLIN, N.C. – Ronnie Evans tries to remember his cousin as the pretty, spunky young woman pictured on the cover of his new book – the sparkle emanating from her party dress and her eyes – but the image he can’t get out of his head is the one of her lying on a cold slab following her autopsy. “I see these beautiful photos of her and realize she’d be 95 today if she lived, but I also saw her on a slab after the autopsy was done,” he painfully recalled. “That and knowing how it happened to her – to know what she was subjected to – that’s why I’ve kept searching for answers.”



At 77-years-old, the Franklin man has spent the last 12 years investigating the unsolved murder of Frances “Frankie” Bullock. The 40-year-old woman, born October 6, 1922, was stabbed six times in her Franklin home in the summer of 1963 and the case is still unsolved after all these years. Now Evans has included all his research in a book, Frankie: A Life Cut Short, about Bullock’s life and the tragic circumstances surrounding her death. It is a mystery that’s talked about to this day in Macon County and through the years, the murder has spawned many rumors.



“It shook Franklin to the core. It was something that had never really happened before in town,” Evans said. “It’s hard to say something is legendary, but it has become legendary in Franklin. She was known in town – she and her husband were a part of the town’s fabric.” Frankie was an attractive brunette, who dressed well, carried herself well and enjoyed wearing nice clothes and jewelry. The men in town noticed and after her second husband was killed in an accident on October 16, 1960, men lined up to ask her out. Ebion Bullock, her husband, was a maintenance supervisor for Nantahala Power and Light Co. He died from burns when he came into contact with a high voltage line in a power plant. At the time, there was some speculation that his death was possibly a suicide, an allegation that infuriated the temperamental Mrs. Bullock. When word got back to her, she reportedly “made a scene” in NP&L’s offices, Evans revealed. Eventually there was a large settlement and Frankie, though not rich, was well set financially and she added to her income by selling antiques out of her home on U.S. 23/441.



Evans was only 21 at the time of his cousin’s murder and Frankie was a regular fixture at his home because she and his mother were close in age. She leaned on his family even more after the death of her husband and her murder has haunted the family for a long time. As one of few remaining relatives in the area, Evans has been determined to find answers despite the fact all persons of interest in the case are now deceased. “When it happened I was stunned – the entire family was devastated. I know where I was when I was notified,” he remembered. “I was still a kid, still living at home and going to school. I thought the people in charge of the investigation knew what they were doing and would see to it the murderer was found, so it bothered me for a long time.”



The crime scene. Frankie Bullock’s body was discovered around 1:30 p.m., Monday, July 29, 1963, inside her brick home near town. Harold Corbin was at the sheriff’s office visiting his friend Sheriff Bryce Rowland when the call came in. “He said, ‘ride out with me,’” recalled Corbin, who later served as chairman of the Macon County Board of Commissioners. “We were the first ones there. You could look through the door and see the body on the floor and blood all over.” Rowland called the State Bureau of Investigation for help and the two men remained at the door until agents arrived, after which they all walked in. “It was a bloody mess,” Corbin continued. “You could tell immediately that the woman had been stabbed.”



The young window had been stabbed a total of seven times, so deeply her left lung and intestines were lacerated. Her left wrist and breastbone were also fractured and there was a wound in the abdomen, a wound in the right chest and four stab wounds in the left shoulder and chest area. Additionally, there was a one-inch wound on her right hand, indicating she may have tried to grab the knife. There was no sign of a struggle and Rowland told reporters “nothing seemed to be out of place out there.” The woman’s black patent leather handbag with brown bone handles was never found. It was the only item missing from the house.



Bloodstains indicated Bullock had been attacked in the kitchen. A light trail of blood spots led from the kitchen to the dining room, where she collapsed near a table. “Except for a few blood spots on the floor and on cabinets and the stove at floor level, the kitchen appeared to be in order,” the sheriff told newspaper reporters. “Two chairs at the kitchen table were turned outward slightly as if both had been used.” A butcher knife in the kitchen was the suspected weapon, but laboratory technicians examining it found no evidence of blood. Authorities concluded she was killed some time between Friday night and Saturday. There was no forced entry, no sign of a struggle and the doors of the house were locked, which indicated the person in the woman’s home that night was likely an invited guest.



If the murder had occurred today, it might have been a simple open-and-shut case and the perpetrator would have been quickly apprehended, but this was 55 years ago when there was no DNA testing or other advanced forensic techniques available. From the beginning, Evans said the small town investigation wasn’t handled properly, which is probably why the case has eluded law enforcement agencies for so long. “They dropped the ball quickly the day the body was discovered. The crime scene was not protected,” he claimed. “The new sheriff had only been in office for six months – something like this, he wouldn’t have had experience in – crowd control wasn’t there. The house was inundated with people.”



Bullock’s house was right along the main thoroughfare through town at the time and there was a shift change at nearby Burlington Industries just as law enforcement officers were arriving on the scene. “People could see patrol cars around the house and curiosity seekers stopped to see what was going on,” Evans continued. “Witnesses I’ve talked to said certain people from town – like the mayor or other dignitaries – they let them in the house while trying to do fingerprinting. Even in 1963 they dropped the ball on that. One official called it a dog and pony show.”



Another factor that wouldn’t prove valuable until years later, when crime scene investigation technology advanced, was a lack of detailed photos from the house. Evans said law enforcement relied on the local newspaper photographer to document the crime scene. While the photos he’s seen are good quality, no pictures were taken of the body in the manner in which it was found and there’s nothing documenting the blood spatter and cast-off patterns. “That could have been something we could use recently. Forensics experts can theorize how it took place, but without the splatter and cast-off they couldn’t draw a final conclusion,” he added.



Persons of interest. Evans said 12 individuals were questioned following the murder, but ultimately, there were three key persons of interest in the investigation: Bullock’s estranged fiancé; her brother, who was also her part-time business partner; and another man she had just recently started dating.



When she began dating after her husband’s death, at first everything seemed normal and she talked about the different men she was seeing. Then, according to Evans, her behavior became somewhat bewildering. She had clearly become serious about a gentleman friend, but there was an air of mystery surrounding his identity and how they had met. “She never brought him around to meet anyone,” Evans recalled. “She’d made a couple visits to her sister’s home in Colorado and when she got back, she announced to my mother that she’d met this person on the plane. We never met the man and so we thought she was making it up.” However, she showed Evans’ mother an engagement ring and eventually said the man’s name was John Peterson.



As it turned out, the family was right: There was no John Peterson in her life, but there was a man who was intimately involved with Bullock and his name was Gordon Forrester. He was an IRS agent who lived in Elizabeth City and there was a good reason Bullock didn’t initially reveal his true identity. He was on his second marriage, however, by April of 1963, he’d gotten a divorce. But by the time of her death, Frankie had ended her engagement to Forrester. With a history of heavy drinking and domestic violence against his wives, Evans said Forrester was a prime suspect with the chief motivation. Elizabeth City police picked him up for questioning around midnight Tuesday – some 10 hours after Bullock’s body was discovered. He was initially cooperative and provided an alibi, placing him in Elizabeth City over the weekend. He told authorities Bullock was supposed to visit him that weekend for his birthday, but they’d gotten into an argument and she’d broken up with him. Evans has a letter she wrote to Forrester confirming the break-up story. Law enforcement determined it was highly unlikely Forrester would have been able to get to Franklin and back during the murder timeframe – no flight or rental car records could confirm he traveled by plane. When investigators called him in a second time for questioning, he hired a lawyer.



The second person of interest was Charlie Stanfield, Bullock’s brother, who helped her with her antiques business. Evans said the brother and sister were often at odds and Bullock had loaned him money on several occasions that he didn’t repay. “There was contention over the years just like there usually is with siblings – they both had bad tempers,” he asserted. “Turned out her brother also had a history of domestic violence in his first marriage and was discharged from the military for mental health issues, but the man I knew was easy-going and amiable.”



Stanfield’s behavior was somewhat suspicious the day his sister’s body was found. He and his wife showed up at the crime scene to see what happened. Investigators wanted to question him, but he said he needed to tell their mother what happened. He was supposed to meet investigators later that day, but never appeared. Officers subsequently brought him in for questioning, but Evans said Stanfield went into a rage whenever investigators started talking about the murder. Realizing he might be in shock, officers gave Stanfield some time to collect himself before attempting to interrogate him again a couple of days later. But once again, he became enraged, though he and his wife did provide an alibi: They were at the drive-in theater. “The third time they questioned him the SBI advised him of his rights and still he didn’t get a lawyer,” Evans related. “They asked him and his wife if they’d take a polygraph test and they agreed. Went to the Bryson City Highway Patrol office unescorted to take the test, but they both failed it.” Even then, investigators claimed they didn’t have enough evidence to make him a suspect.





Officers found two handwritten notes to Bullock, one on the front door of her house and the other on the back door and the third person of interest, Lewis Clayton of Dearborn, Michigan, admitted writing these notes. He was an antiques finder in Franklin on business. He had taken Frankie out to dinner several times and said they had gone to a concert at the local Methodist Church the Thursday prior to the murder. On Sunday, he told investigators, he had gone to her home to fill in some holes in her yard. “I told her I would fix them because she might get into some insurance trouble if anyone stepped in one,” The Franklin Press, reported. According to Evans, his cousin actually began seeing Clayton before she broke things off with Forrester. He noted that Clayton took a polygraph test and was cooperative with investigators.

During his own investigation, Evans and another family member met for four-and-a-half hours with an SBI attorney who answered questions and reviewed the investigative file with them. “The information we got just created more questions,” he admitted, adding that he requested a follow-up interview but it never happened.



Evans was most interested in Forrester’s story and researched his life extensively during his investigation. Turns out he had been married four times and was still married when he started dating Bullock. Evans tracked down the ex-wife and the son they had together in Manteo. “She said he [Forrester] was abusive when he was drinking,” Evans claimed. “The son told me he didn’t know his father and had been adopted by his stepfather.” Forrester died in the mid-1970s and was buried in a Louisiana cemetery beside his first wife. Even though two of Forrester’s ex-wives later admitted he abused them, when questioned following the murder, Evans said none had documented the abuse or filed charges against him at the time, which wasn’t unusual in the 50s and 60s.



Technician turned sleuth. Evans worked as a radio broadcast technician most of his adult life. The role of investigator is something that he felt compelled to do and something, as it turns out, at which he is fairly adept. Though Frankie Bullock’s death had left a nagging feeling in the back of this mind, it was his cousin Charles Davidson who had originally kept a close eye on the investigation through the years. “He shadowed the investigators wherever they went,” Evans recalled. “When he passed, I thought someone better pick up where he left off. I had just retired and I got all the information, clippings and letters he’d collected. It’s in my nature once I get a hold of something I’m just like a dog with a bone – I won’t let go.”



His first stop was the sheriff’s department, which had jurisdiction over the case originally, before it was turned over to the State Bureau of Investigation. Evans contacted SBI Agent Charles Moody and they met at the Macon County Detention Center, along with Chief Deputy Andy Shields. While he originally felt as though the officers were questioning him about the case, Evans said his partnership with Moody would prove to be beneficial throughout his investigation. “Moody eventually retired and went to work for the sheriff’s office, so he became an ally in this thing,” Evans explained. “I realized he had a deeper interest because he had taken the case with him to Washington, D.C., in 1991, to the FBI academy. He wanted to know more.”



The initial meeting with Moody and Shields was fruitful: Evans was shown crime scene photos and received input from two men who had an interest in the cold case. “That meeting got me really started. I came away with a lot of information and theories they had,” he said. “The next thing that started to occupy my mind was that she was stabbed six times and had a defensive wound in her hand – so what’s the evidence and where is it?”



The only evidence included the dress and undergarments she had been wearing the night of her death and the knife left at the scene, but Evans had a difficult time locating it. People at the sheriff’s office said they didn’t have it. The Franklin Police Department said it wasn’t there either and had been eventually passed along to the SBI.



In the meantime, Evans was also in search of the investigative report completed at the time of the murder. The SBI told him the report wasn’t a matter of public record because it was still technically an open case and the agency had to “protect the investigation techniques of the SBI,” though Evans doubted techniques from the 1960s would mean much today. “Meanwhile the files are archived at the SBI office. I don’t know why the family can’t know what’s in the report – that’s where we get our closure. My mother was getting up in age and she wanted to know what happened,” he said. He reached out to State Senator John Snow and explained his dilemma. Snow, in turn, contacted the SBI director who agreed to a compromise. The report would have to be turned over to the SBI attorney, who would have to review the file in-depth and then allow the family – Evans and Bullock’s niece – to ask questions. It took a couple of months before the meeting was arranged. Evans had prepared a long and short list of questions for the attorney, not knowing how much time they would have with him. “We met at the Hickory SBI quarters at 10:30 a.m. and finished around 4:30 without a lunch break or anything,” he continued. “We barely finished the short list and we were all tired and hungry. We’d talked about trying to schedule a follow-up, but that never happened.” He did manage to ask the attorney about the missing evidence. He told Evans the SBI doesn’t keep evidence and that it had been sent back to the sheriff’s department in 1963. The sheriff’s office once again said the evidence wasn’t there. Almost a year after his first call to the police department, Evans decided to check again. This time it was good news. The chief found the evidence and turned it over to the sheriff’s office. “That was my first win and it took over a year,” Evans said of the slow progress in the case.



After speaking with the sheriff and district attorney, Evans was allowed to examine the evidence with certain stipulations. He wanted experts with him, ready to make the most of the meeting. While watching a PBS program one night about how the Sherlock Holmes tales by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle led to modern-day forensics, Evans got the idea to reach out to two of the individuals featured in the series: Karen Smith and Henry Lee. He tracked down Smith, a blood spatter and cast-off expert teaching CSI classes in Florida. She showed interest in the cold case and directed Evans to reach out to a touch DNA expert in Colorado who had worked on the JonBenét Ramsey case. Evans contacted him, but discovered he couldn’t afford his services. “He said he would like to get involved, but his retainer was $5,000 and each sample would cost a $500 lab fee,” Evans added.



However, he also contacted Dr. Max Noureddine, a DNA forensics expert who is known for helping indigent clients and the wrongfully incarcerated. He and Smith were willing to make the trip to Franklin in exchange for the cost of gas and their hotel bills. Evans and the experts met with the sheriff to examine the evidence: The pale pink Bobbie Brooks dress (which Frankie is wearing in the above photo), her Italian-made sandals and the crime scene photos. There were small holes cut out of the dress because Moody had recently sent it to the crime lab to see if any of the blood on the garment could have belonged to someone else. It was another dead end. Smith also went to great lengths to test for blood underneath the oak floorboards of Bullock’s former house, but admitted she wouldn’t have been able to prove how long the blood had been there after all these years. The interesting story about this process is detailed in Evans’ book and ended up being a forensics breakthrough featured in law enforcement journals.



The last option was to conduct touch DNA sampling on the dress to identify any other fingerprints, but it was another expensive long shot. The evidence had been shuffled around so much over 55 years and it would cost $500 per lab sample. Noureddine said he’d probably need two-dozen samples, which obviously didn’t fit into the sheriff or DA’s budget. “Also, the two prime suspects, Charlie and Forrester, were around her a lot and could have touched her at any time, but it didn’t mean they killed her,” Evans added. “At that point, I decided it was time to halt the investigation and wait for science to catch up.”



Finding closure. For 50 years, Bullock’s headstone at Woodlawn Cemetery in Franklin didn’t have a date of death. They had hoped someday they would know for sure what happened and add the correct date, but this never happened. Just five years ago, Frankie Bullock’s niece, Faye Wells, decided it was time and “July 26, 1963,” was engraved on the stone she shares with her late husband, Ebion Bullock.



Evans admitted “closure” might not be the best word to describe how he feels after 12 years of searching for answers in his cousin’s murder. “Someone mentioned the word ‘enlightenment’ to me and I think I’ve been enlightened by all this. I wanted to find out what in her life led up to this and that’s where I started in the book,” he explained. “I could have covered the murder itself in one chapter, so that’s what I did, and then we go back to the day she was born and come forward with the things I know and then the investigation beyond the murder.” During this process, he also discovered a lot of surprising information about his family history. As with any family, some well-kept secrets were unpleasant to think about and difficult to publish for the world to see. “There’s been times I’ve felt guilty about putting relatives’ names in the book,” he admitted.



But then the image of the autopsy photo makes its way to the forefront of his mind again and he’s reminded that justice never prevailed in his cousin’s case. “No one should be excused from being examined,” he continued. “Even before her death, she’d already suffered quite a bit with the death of her husband and then less than two years after Frankie died, her younger sister committed suicide. Her mother outlived all her children.”



He also discovered quite a bit of unreported domestic abuse in Frankie’s life with her brother, as well as the estranged fiancé and his ex-wives. Though the crime is still unsolved, Evans has found a way to ensure her death wasn’t in vain. “I dedicated the book to the families of the victims of unsolved homicides who have suffered the anguish of waiting for justice and closure and to those who have suffered and survived domestic violence and abuse,” he said. “As far as this book, I plan to make no profit off of it: Net proceeds are going to REACH of Macon and Jackson counties.”

Sources: Jessi Stone, Smoky Mountain News, August 29, 2018, and Quintin Ellison, Smoky Mountain News, July 11, 2012.



Frankie: A Life Cut Short is available from Amazon and other booksellers.