Chapter 24
It wasn’t long before the background on several old missing person cases as well as a realistic reconstructed facial image of the skull that had been recovered were received from the FBI. The focus was on one case in particular right away. In 1968, race relations and segregation issues were causing great unrest throughout the South. South Carolina was on the front lines of the effort by black people to win their constitutional rights. The civil rights organization known as Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) organized groups of people interested in demonstrating for the cause. Many of these people, both white and black, were from the Washington, D.C. area. They traveled on charter buses and were known as Freedom Riders. While most of them traveled to locations in Mississippi and Alabama, many also disbursed throughout the south and established a front anyplace where they could gather other southern supporters. Southern black churches were often the center of activity for the movement. The member of one such church known as Trinity Methodist, located in Orangeburg about 100 miles north of the Lowcounty was a hotbed of the national rights movement in South Carolina. It was from there that two Calfin College students set out on a mission to the south of the state. Their first attempt for the cause was to organize a sit-in at a Warrenton drug store counter. All the South Carolina newspapers covered it. Soon it was learned that a local black minister was giving them refuge.
On an early Sunday morning, the local chapter of the KKK gathered at the minister’s house outside of Warrenton and burned a cross on his front lawn. During the process, the two college students came out of the house and confronted the violent group in white hooded and caped sheets. This lead to the Royal Knight of the group facing the two men within three feet, pointing his figure in their faces and saying, “this is your only warning. Get out of town, or you won’t be able to do so.”
One of the hooded men was Otis Schoenfeld, Jr. His father, Otis Sr, worked as a police officer on Warrenton police force for 10 years. During January of that year, Otis Sr. was part of a raid on several young black men who were making moonshine in a thicket near the World War II dilapidated airport near the town. The black men were well armed and elected to put up a fight instead of surrendering peacefully. Several casualties resulted from the shootout, but the worst thing that happens was the killing of Otis Sr. One of the moonshiners blasted him point-blank with a 12 gauge shotgun loaded with double ought buckshot. Otis Jr. loved and respected his hard working father. The circumstances surrounding his father’s death made a lifelong impression on Otis, Jr., and furthered his hate for black people. Otis Sr. was laid out in his coffin in his uniform. Oats remembers vividly staring at the shiny badge on his father’s chest. The number, 47 displayed in the center of the badge, became indelibly imprinted in his mind forever. While viewing the full-length profile of his father, he reached down and retrieved the .38 caliber police revolver from the hip of the dead man. He swore at the time that he would use it in some way or other to avenge his father’s murder.
It wasn’t long before he got a chance to fulfill his promise. The two civil rights workers were walking down the road near the minister’s house. He and Wilford Catman had been stalking them since they arrived in the area. Wil pulled the 1953 snow-white Ford sedan onto the hard gravel roadside. Oats, sitting on the passenger side of the sporty sedan with matching fender skirts, stuck his arm out the window, pointed his father’s .38 caliber revolver at the men and ordered them into the back seat. The men hesitatingly got into the car one at a time. By that time, Oats was outside standing close enough to the men to smell their hifalutin body cologne. It was particularly noticeable to Oats, as he recognized it as a famine smell he experienced from the over made-up women on the rare occasions he went to church. He slammed the door behind them. One of the men said, “Oh shit!”
Oats got back into the car and turned around in his seat all the time keeping the gun pointed at the men.
“Let’s go Wil,” said Oats.
Wil shifted the car into low gear and left deep tracks as he spun around and onto the main road heading north. If any person was near the house to witness the crime, they never interfered or tried to help. A week later the parents of the two men reported they were missing to the Orangeburg police. But the story fell on unsympathetic ears of the white police force of the Southern town. They knew many of the college students were out demonstrating with Martin Luther King, Jr. somewhere in the south and had no sympathy for them.
At the time Lonnie’s Landing was no more than a sloping space among the trees by the Salketcher Swamp Bridge. Oats, being an avid fisherman, kept his 12-foot wooden flat bottom boat tied to a tree at the site. Today, he and Wil would make good use of it as a conveyance of death. As the car pulled up to the landing, Oats jumped out before it came to a stop. He opened the back door and waved the men out. Melvin Abernathy, not having said a word previously, finally realized his faith, went to his knees, and began begging Oats for mercy. His plea fell on deaf ears. Sammy Benes, the second student, watched as Oats grabbed the kneeling man by his short hair and shoved his head down. Then he placed the pistol directly against the head of the crying may and pulled the trigger. Then without an iota of hesitation, he lifted the gun and fired it into Sammy’s chest. Sammy lurched backward against the car and slide to the ground.
Both men, with promising futures, had their lives snuffed out without giving it a second thought. In fact, the racial attitudes of the time gave Oats no reason to cover or conceal the blatant murder, which was in clear view of the road. He knew that if anyone saw the crime, they would commend him on his contribution to the vanishing but still live ways of the south.
Oats and Wil each grabbed a foot of the first victim and dragged him toward the boat. The body’s still warm blood made a trail as it moved along the ground and through the shallow water beside the boat. Then they put the second body into the boat, flipping it over face down on the bottom of the water soaked filthy craft. Oats showed no more compassion than if he were dragging a dead hog to a dipping barrel of boiling water to loosen up its hair before pulling it. Then he pulled a rusty tire rim from of the trunk of the car and set it in the boat.
Oats got into the boat as Wil shoved it back into the middle of the stream. The full boat had only about two inches of freeboard as it moved along the water and down the river about a mile and a half. Being as familiar with every nook and cove of the swamp as he was with the back of his hand, Oats knew exactly where he wanted to dump the bodies. Eventually, he pulled east into a cove he knew was 30 feet deep at its deepest point. He could always depend on the cove to produce several good catfish on a catfish line. Now it would serve another useful purpose. He tied the tire rim to one leg of each body and rolled the bundle over the side. As they sank, the water made a swirl beneath the boat. Then Wil paddled back up the river, confident that they had permanently disposed of the two troublemakers. In addition, they were right. But they had no way of knowing that 40 years later, the bones of the two young men would come back to tell their story.