On Dec. 7, 1963, a cold, clear Saturday, Army Sgt. James Lee Haynes disappeared.
Investigators suspect a local man driving home from the tavern deliberately and brutally ran down and killed the Baltimore veteran hitchhiking through remote West Virginia, first striking him with his 1953 Buick, then backing over Haynes’ head.
They believe Haynes, a 31-year-old father of four, is buried in that state in an unmarked grave on Bolt Mountain. Haynes’ body is still missing, and no one has been held accountable for his murder.
His twin daughters, 18 months old at the time of his disappearance, are still searching for him. Earlier this month, with the help of investigators, they organized a search of the mountainside, with cadaver dogs and dozens of volunteers in the hopes they would uncover evidence that could point to the location of their father’s body.
Haynes’ wife, Theda, first championed the cause, as did his surviving brother. After Theda’s death, their daughters, Brenda Lester-Haynes and Linda Haynes, took over. They’ve gathered documents, walked Bolt Mountain, interviewed witnesses and suspects in an effort to find his remains and bury him in Arlington, an honor befitting the sharpshooter awarded a Purple Heart for his actions in Korea.
The family of the man officials believe killed Haynes also wants to see this 62-year saga come to an end.
Nearly a decade after Haynes’ disappearance, a West Virginia grand jury indicted William Lundy Trump of Haynes’ murder. Authorities believe he buried his body on the side of the mountain. Trump’s wife came forward with information that led to the indictment.
In the years after Haynes’ disappearance, Trump insisted he saw an apparition of a “faceless man” in a “government suit” watching him through the windows and doors of his house, late at night. Shortly after his arrest for Haynes’ murder, he was found incompetent to stand trial and was sent to a state hospital. He died from cancer in the 1990s, said Loretta Zurchick, Trump’s oldest daughter, one of three still-surviving children.
“I just hope they find him,” Zurchick said. “If I’d had my ‘druthers, I wish [my father had] turned himself in. ‘Cause you don’t run from stuff like that. It drives you crazy.”
‘Wasn’t always the devil’
The Baltimore Sun reviewed Haynes’ Army personnel file, Maryland State Police records, polygraphs, suspects, clippings of news articles about Haynes’ death, and witnesses’ handwritten accounts. The Sun also interviewed Brenda and Linda, the Army Criminal Investigative Division special agent investigating Haynes’ disappearance and Raleigh County prosecutor’s office employees who organized the search and descendants of the main suspect in Haynes’ death.
Trump was born in April 1929 in West Virginia.
“He wasn’t always the devil everyone’s making him out to be,” Loretta said.
He was hard of hearing and couldn’t work in the mines with his father, she said. Instead, he worked clearing snow and other debris from state roads. While Trump didn’t graduate high school, Loretta said, he loved to read and would devour the books she brought home. He particularly loved “Hie to the Hunters,” a young adult book set in Appalachia, she said.
But when Loretta was in elementary school, her grandfather was crushed to death in a coal mining accident. Trump had to identify his father’s body. After that, she said her father began drinking heavily — whiskey or moonshine. “Something strong,” she said.
When he drank, he got mean, she said, strangling and beating her mother, Martha Ann Cozort Trump, and beating or threatening the children. Police documentation corroborates her account.
At times, the children would run off into the woods behind their home and split up, sleeping outside, John Zurchick, Loretta’s son, told Linda before he died.
“He used to ask their mother, ‘Which one is your favorite?’” Linda recounted. “‘Because I’m going to kill that one tonight.’”
The disappearance
Haynes was last seen on Dec. 7, 1963, in a bar near Bolt Mountain that no longer exists.
He was born in August 1932 in Kentucky and joined the Army at age 17 when his parents moved to West Virginia. He was a sharpshooter on the rifle, 45 mm pistol and carbine, and an expert marksman on the machine gun and 90mm TK gun, Army records show. But his family remembers him as a lighthearted prankster and a kind man who was devoted to his family.
When he disappeared, Haynes was on leave from his post in Germany to visit his family stateside, Army records show. Haynes had purchased a 1963 Volkswagen Bus for the family, but it was in transit, so he hitchhiked to his parents’ home in West Virginia bearing gifts: doll clothing his premature infant daughters had worn, a pair of his oldest daughter’s baby booties — bronzed — and a new electric Procter & Gamble iron for his mother.
Wearing his dress greens, a dark green Army-issue wool overcoat and carrying a gray suitcase, Haynes first rode with his brother to Frederick, Maryland, then hitched a ride with a woman and her grandson, the investigation detailed. She dropped him off in West Virginia, and “last saw him turning a corner,” she wrote in a letter to Theda.
Haynes was next spotted in Bolt Tavern, where he ordered coffee.
Four others were in the bar, records show: William Lundy Trump, Trump’s teenage brother-in-law James Cozort, who is deceased, and a friend of Trump’s were drinking together. A fourth man was there by himself.
The fourth man told police that Haynes left the bar after Trump, Cozort and their friend, who had been drinking heavily, began mocking Haynes over his choice of drink. Haynes, the man said, picked up his suitcase and left.
Shortly, Trump and his companions departed together, the fourth man said. The man claimed that as he was driving away, he saw Trump and his companions on the side of the road, standing around the trunk of their car, covered in blood, he said.
Figuring they’d hit a deer, he stopped and offered help, but the men told him to “mind his own business and get out of here,” he told investigators.
So, he did.
‘I killed a soldier boy’
According to initial reports, Cozort was driving Trump’s two-tone Buick and, drunk and reckless, ran over Haynes while Trump was passed out drunk in the backseat.
Afterward, they loaded Haynes’ body into the trunk and then took him to Bolt Mountain. There, they dug a hole “beneath the big beech tree” and buried him, reports said. Trump read from the Bible above Haynes’ grave and nailed the soldier’s dog tags to the tree above.
But, Loretta said, that version of events is not true. Instead, she said her father confessed to deliberately murdering Haynes.
Maybe a year after Haynes’ disappearance, she said, he told her family he got into a fight in the bar with a man whose name he couldn’t recall — maybe named “Haney” or “Hayes” — and then ran him down outside. He reversed the car back over the man’s head, he told them, to make sure he’d killed him.
“One of my brothers said that he had been wrapped up in a blanket, and put on top of the cement back where Mommy used to wash her clothes,” Loretta said, though she did not recall seeing Haynes’ body there.
Trump was obsessed with Haynes’ death, carrying around newspaper clippings of the death, frequently showing them off, witness reports said.
“Look what they’re accusing me of,” he told a salesman later interviewed by detectives. “I killed a soldier boy.”
Trump’s drinking worsened over the years and his behavior deteriorated, Loretta said. Finally, on May 15, 1971, Trump beat in the windows of his son John’s 1959 Ford with a baseball bat, and his family fled to the woods behind their home, once again.
“Either he’s going to kill me or I’m going to kill him,” Loretta recalled telling her mother, Martha.
The next morning, Martha filed a police report saying that Trump confessed to the murder of a soldier. She told investigators where they could find evidence: a jewelry box with the chain of a dog tag and a copper boot charm.
He told his family “not to touch the box … because it belonged to a dead soldier,” Martha told police.
Police took Trump to Upper Big Branch and demanded he lead them to Haynes’ body but “Trump denied any knowledge of burying someone in this area.”
“Trump was very upset and quite nervous while at this particular location,” records said.
It’s on this information that a grand jury indicted Trump.
He was found incompetent and sent to the state hospital. He got out a year later, and the charges were dropped due to insufficient evidence.
The search for Sgt. James Lee Haynes
This past April, Brenda and Linda asked authorities to reopen their father’s case.
In the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division, cold case unit special agent Jessica Valenti did. Valenti connected with the Raleigh County Prosecutor’s Office, which tapped investigator Jeff Shoemate and legal intern Grant Joynes to determine search areas.
On Nov. 7, the local fire department, the West Virginia State Police, the Raleigh County Prosecutor’s Office, the Army CID, the West Virginia National Guard and Beckley Police assisted in the search. Along with cadaver dogs from the volunteer group K9 Services West Virginia, dozens of volunteers searched where the “big beech tree” had once stood and Trump’s former house.
Valenti said they knew it would be a challenge because investigative records had been and the landscape had changed. The first spot, where they believed the beech tree once stood, turned up nothing.
But at Trump’s home, a small, dilapidated cinderblock-and-wood structure, something happened. Inside the kitchen, the cadaver dogs alerted. Not once, not twice, but four times.
Investigators sprayed the wall of the kitchen with Luminol, a chemical that reacts with iron, and found a large amount of possible blood on the wall and the floor.
Valenti took photos of the scene and samples, sending them to an Army laboratory for testing.
Trump was a hunter who might have dressed his own game, and the structure has since been used as a chicken coop and shed. The “blood” may not be human, or even blood at all, said Joynes, the legal intern. But, he said, if it is Haynes’ blood, it puts them closer to finding out where he lies.
It also raises questions about whether Trump lied about what he did with Haynes’ remains, Valenti said.
The finding strengthened Brenda and Linda’s determination.
“Our fight is far from over,” Brenda said, and Linda agreed.
“We still believe we will find him in our lifetime,” she said.
If you have any leads into the disappearance and death of Sgt. James Lee Haynes, you can contact investigators anonymously at https://ift.tt/cNamIqZ.
Contact Kate Cimini at 443-842-2621 or kcimini@baltsun.com.
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