Disappearance of Jamie Fraley

Ricky Simonds Jr., Fraley's fiancé, was still imprisoned at the time of her disappearance, so investigators ruled him out as a suspect. They quickly refocused on his father, Ricky Simonds Sr. He, too, had a criminal record, including six years in prison for manslaughter in the 1980s after strangling a girlfriend to death.[2]

Simonds Sr. lived in the same complex as Fraley, just two doors away, and did maintenance work there. He had driven her to the hospital the second time on the day she disappeared, making him one of the last people to see her that day. Reportedly he was obsessed with Fraley. He refused to take a lie detector test.[1]

Two months to the day after Fraley disappeared, however, the investigation into Simonds ended with his death. On June 7, Kim Sprenger, a former girlfriend who had recently obtained a protective order against him, noticed a foul odor in her car. It persisted, and the next day she opened the trunk.[2] Inside, Sprenger found Simonds' body. Police investigating found he had a set of her car keys; a week earlier Sprenger's purse had been stolen from the car. The cause of death was ruled to be accidental heat stroke; during the previous days, high temperatures in the area had exceeded 90 °F (32 °C).[2]

Police theorized that Simonds had used the keys to let himself into the trunk with the intent of ambushing Sprenger at some point, letting himself out with the working emergency latch. When heat exhaustion set in, however, it was possible that he had panicked and forgotten to use it, remaining in the trunk to die. After completing their investigation into Simonds' death, detectives told the media that he had been considered a person of interest in Fraley's disappearance, which remained an open case.[2]

Members of both the Fraley and Simonds families believed Ricky Sr. had taken useful information about what happened to Fraley to his grave. Her mother, Kim, who had supplemented the official investigation with efforts of her own, recalled crying when she learned of his death.[9]

Ricky Sr., she claimed, "was hiding something and we couldn't never get that out of him". Ricky Simonds Jr., by then released from prison, also said he believed his father, whom he described as being more of a friend, was aware of what had happened to Fraley, but generally found the unusual chain of circumstances overwhelming. "[F]irst my fiancé goes missing, then my dad climbs in a trunk and dies? Does that make sense to anybody?" he asked a local TV station.[9]

In 2015, Jerry Case, a man then serving federal prison time for kidnapping, made a possible confession regarding Fraley's disappearance; he had been incarcerated at that time.

When he confessed, Case was on trial for a 1985 murder in Gaston County which he had confessed to in a 2012 letter to the Gaston Gazette. In 2015 he wrote another letter to the Gazette, confessing to killing Fraley and another local woman who had been shot and killed in her house, which was then set on fire later that year. "I guess you could say this is confessions number two and three", he wrote.[4]

Prosecutors immediately dismissed Case's confession as unlikely regarding Fraley, since he was incarcerated at the time she disappeared (although he was released a few weeks later) and he only provided details of the case that had already been made public. They also discounted his marginally probable confession regarding the later murder of the other local woman, though he had been free at the time the later homicide occurred.[4]