Ice cream cold case of 1967 solved

Connie Hevener (inset, bottom l.) and Carolyn Perry (above Hevener) died in 1967 slayings.
Diane Crawford (top r. and c.) admitted to killing the two before she died in 2009.

BY David J. Krajicek
SPECIAL TO THE NEWS

On April 11, 1967, two young women were murdered while closing up for the night at High's Ice Cream Store in the drowsy Shenandoah Valley town of Staunton, Va.

The victims, Connie Hevener, 19, and her sister-in-law, Carolyn Perry, 20, were shot in the head with a .25-caliber handgun. They were found in a back room, with Hevener lying atop Perry, as though trying to protect her.

About $140 was missing. Police figured it was a robbery, and they focused on a man reportedly seen in a phone booth near High's before the murders.

Gus Thomas, 24, lived near the store. Scruffy and unemployed, he was an eccentric character who seemed to get a kick out of the attention.

As one citizen put it, "He sounded crazy."

He was indicted for the murders, but the district attorney tiptoed into the case. Thomas went on trial only for the murder of Hevener, with the idea that prosecutors could mount a second trial for the Perry murder if they lost the first.

They did.

With virtually no evidence against Thomas, the jury promptly acquitted him. The second trial never happened, and as the years passed, the unresolved case hung like a haze over Staunton.

To many in town, something always seemed fishy about the investigation, including the timid prosecution of the straw-man suspect.

Davie Bocock, the police sergeant who led the probe, was responsible for fingering Thomas after he spotted him in the phone booth before the murders.

Murders were rare in Staunton, and Bocock's amateurish original report on the crimes read more like a bus route map than a homicide investigation.

"We drove to Terry Street and turned right," Bocock wrote. "We turned right and drove to Coalter Street, turned right on Coalter and drove an average speed to Spotswood Road, turned left onto Spotswood Road, then turned right ... and continued to Randolph Street."

His travelogue meandered even more before finally getting to the point: a double murder.

Bocock went on to a long career as a Staunton cop, retiring in the 1980s. It wasn't until his death, in 2006, that the High's mystery finally unraveled.

It began when an elderly local woman, Joyce Bradshaw, stepped forward to say that 10 days before the murders, a High's employee, Diane Crawford, had shown her a .25-caliber pistol she said she had recently purchased.

Crawford, then 19, told Bradshaw that she had a bullet "reserved" for Connie Hevener, one of the victims.

Bradshaw also revealed that she had given this information to Bocock the day after the slayings. She said Bocock replied with a strange comment that Crawford was a "crack shot." She took it as a warning to keep her mouth shut.

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