Family, investigators still hope for answers in Blue Ridge Savings Bank murders

When he got the job as athletic coordinator with Greer Recreation and when he worked at the Master's golf tournament, and sometimes for no reason at all, David Holtzclaw has gone over to Mountain View Cemetery to talk to his mom.

He always goes on Mother's Day and on May 16, the day she died. The visits bring him a certain amount of peace amid the lingering, difficult questions about who murdered her while she worked as a teller at Blue Ridge Savings Bank in Greer 12 years ago.

That's all Holtzclaw has, memories and questions. Who shot Sylvia Holtzclaw and Eb Barnes and Maggie Barnes to death with a 40-caliber Glock on that warm May day around lunchtime? Why, if it was a simple bank robbery, were they shot? And why has it been so hard to solve this crime?

Thousands of hours have been expended by dozens of federal, state and local investigators, and yet they are no closer to answering those questions than when the first officer arrived on the scene 13 minutes after Holtzclaw tripped the bill trap in the cash drawer, unleashing an immediate alert that a bank robbery was in progress.

The case remains open, and leads continue to come in, said Greer Police Lt. Eric Pressley. In fact, a promising one came in not too long ago that investigators are working on. He declined to give details on what it was or whom it involved, but the informant gave them a name.

There have been many names through the years and some 700 leads. Callers said their neighbor did it, or Joe did it. Inmates looking for lesser sentences called in with tips.

"We didn't ignore any of them," Pressley said.

The essential question is how close have they come to finding the killer?

May 16, 2003, Greer

It was a Friday. David Holtzclaw had arrived home in Greer in the early morning hours from Tallahassee, Florida, where he worked in sports marketing for Florida State University. His mom was waiting up. They talked for a bit and then went to bed. Sylvia was supposed to work half a day and then David and his older brother, Kevin, were taking her to tour the BMW plant, something she had wanted to do for some time.

David was asleep when his mother left that morning. On her way to work, she stopped by Joy Davis' work and left a friendship greeting card on the door. Sylvia Holtzclaw, if nothing else, was a woman who always thought of others, said Davis, who grew up next door to the Holtzclaws and called Sylvia her second mother. They were so close they considered the yard between their houses a hallway.

Sylvia had lived in Greer all her life. She married her high school sweetheart, and divorced when their sons were young. She remained in the house on Overbrook Drive, which was on the next street over from her parents. David remembers making a ready path between the two houses, especially since his mother worked all his life, first at Winn-Dixie warehouse, then in banking.

She was one of those members at the First Baptist Church of Greer who was there every time the doors opened. She volunteered for what needed doing, went to all her sons' athletic events, and when they went to high school, she became a regular at Greer High School football games, sitting in the bleachers right beneath the press box because David was inside calling the game on the radio.

Sylvia Holtzclaw loved the Clock Restaurant and about the only thing she'd never share were the brownies from the Poinsettia Bakery.

She taught her sons to respect people, their property and their thoughts.

On that last morning, David got up, showered and went to meet some friends at Calabash Express for lunch. His brother, a Greer firefighter, called to say their mother couldn't take the afternoon off because the teller who was supposed to relieve her had called in sick. He then asked if David would get Arby's and take it to their mother.

David dropped the lunch off at the bank and went to the mall. An hour later he got a call from a longtime friend.

"Stay there," the friend said.

"What? Stay here?" David responded.

"I'm coming to get you," the friend said.

They went around and around, David protesting that he was leaving and the friend imploring him to stay. Finally, the friend said, "I don't know how to tell you this. There's been a robbery and your mother is dead."

May 16, 2003, Spartanburg

Eb and Maggie Barnes needed to move some money into their IRA account. They headed to the Blue Ridge Savings Bank branch on the frontage road in Greer from their home in Boiling Springs. The bank specialized in building loans and investments. Loan officers more typically went to construction sites to do business. Not much cash was kept on hand.

Eb was a longtime and much beloved physics professor at what was then called the University of South Carolina Spartanburg. He had recently retired from the University Center in Greenville. In less than a month, he'd be 62.

The Barneses had met while students at King College in Bristol, Tennessee. They married in 1965 in McConnells, outside Rock Hill, at the church where Maggie's father was pastor.

They were known for their devotion to teaching. They dressed in period costumes for talks at schools about blackwork, a kind of embroidery, and weaving. Maggie had begun weaving after she found a spinning wheel in an Alabama farmhouse owned by her great-grandparents. She also worked at the National Beta Club in Spartanburg.

They had three children and six grandchildren.

Pressley, the Greer police lieutenant, said the family has declined interviews about the murders through the years and has infrequent contact with the police.

"They are of the mindset that this was what God meant to happen and leave it at that," Pressley said.

From all he has heard, the Barneses were gentle people, Pressley said. Non-confrontational. Students remember seeing Eb at winter commencements wearing a Santa hat with his academic robe that signified his Ph.D. in physics from Clemson University.

When they arrived at the bank that day, Holtzclaw was the only employee there. Ordinarily, she would have had to buzz them in, but, Davis and David Holtzclaw said, on that day the locking mechanism wasn't working.

The call to police came in at 1:28 p.m. Three of the responding officers had had Professor Barnes for a teacher.

Seeking a suspect

Officers found Barnes and Holtzclaw in a utility room at the back of the building. Investigators won't say how many times they had been shot. They won't confirm that the surveillance video is missing, but they acknowledge they have little physical evidence, other than shell casings. It was a public place — fingerprints would be of no use. Fibers. All the blood was captured in that room. There was no evidence of a struggle.

At the beginning, a task force of 40 officers from Greer Police, Greenville and Spartanburg sheriff offices, the State Law Enforcement Division and the FBI worked from a former pool hall/restaurant that served as the Greer Police training facility. It was on Littlefield Street, a road closed when the new Greer City Hall complex was built.

Phone lines were added, white boards, tables, chairs. It was a round-the-clock effort. Using the FBI lead tracking system, information would come in, be entered into the system and assigned to an officer, who filed a report when the lead was run down.

Townspeople brought food for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Restaurants sent over meals. Days stretched into 20-hour shifts.

Officers obtained surveillance video from cameras at a gas station at the southbound ramp of Interstate 85 and a station at Highway 14 and the frontage road. One showed a red car exiting the interstate, turning left. The other picked up the car turning left again onto the Frontage Road. The Barneses' truck could be seen following that car down the road.

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Investigators tried all sorts of ways to enhance the blurry, grainy video. Ultimately NASA technology was used and General Motors engineers determined the car was an Oldsmobile Alero, a car made for four years in the late 1990s-early2000s and bought primarily by rental companies.

Police ran down every person in the Upstate — about 100 — who owned one. Nothing.

They heard from a customer who was in the bank earlier that day about a man in his early 50s who was acting shady. He was white, with blond hair, short in stature, portly. The janitor. Nothing.

They checked out a multiple homicide at a bank in Nebraska. Another dead end

A year passed. Then came something that looked promising. A man was pulled over in Georgia driving a red Alero that had been stolen from a rental car company at the Columbia airport not long before the murders. The man was Emmerson Wright, wanted for arson and robbery by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. A Glock was his weapon of choice.

But at that traffic stop, Wright ran off into the woods that day and disappeared. Greer Police looked into his background and, while the car had been stolen 100 miles down the road and he robbed people with a Glock, the police were never able to put him in Greer. No phone records, receipts.

Then another year passed. Wright was pulled over again. When officers approached, he stepped out of his car and shot himself in the head. He remains a suspect.

Police also considered a man from Spartanburg, convicted of bank robbery. But his alibi was airtight. His time card shows he was at work. His supervisor confirmed.

FBI behaviorists speculated that the killer was a local person, an idea that Joy Davis, Sylvia Holtzclaw's longtime friend, finds terrifying.

Greer Police Capt. Matt Hamby said it seems just as likely the person pulled off the interstate, committed the crime and got right back on and kept going. The killer got away with very little money and none of it was marked.

Hamby wonders just as everyone else in Greer and Spartanburg who knew the victims why the robber had to kill them.

"This is pure speculation but something went wrong and panic set in," he said. "Bank robbers have a plan. They rehearse it in their mind and most are very low-key events."

Often, customers in a bank don't know a robbery is in progress, he said.

The video shows the suspect vehicle leaving the southbound ramp off Interstate 85 at Highway 14.

Commitment

David Holtzclaw has used every tactic he can to keep the murders in the public eye, Facebook, a YouTube video. A billboard near the now-closed bank was put up late last year.

He implored "Unsolved Mysteries" to air a piece and, even though it doesn't fit their parameters of looking for a specific suspect, the producers aired a short on the crime.

The Barnes family settled a lawsuit it had filed against the bank. The terms were undisclosed, and David Holtzclaw hopes it was a lot of money, but he said, "Whatever it was, it wasn't enough."

The Holtzclaws were forbidden to sue by Workman's Compensation laws because Sylvia was an employee.

David moved back to Greer and into his mother's house. He said he couldn't concentrate on his job, so far away. His brother has since married and had a son.

Hamby said the case is never far from his mind or of other investigators still with the force who worked it from the first day.

David said he and his brother tried to get legislators to pass a law requiring banks to have off-site monitoring of bank surveillance cameras.

"We didn't get anywhere," he said.

Almost a year later, the Blue Ridge Savings Bank Greer branch was almost robbed again, Holtzclaw said.

In October 2011, the North Carolina Commissioner of Banks closed Blue Ridge Savings Bank and the assets were transferred to the Bank of North Carolina. The Greer branch closed a month later.

The blue trailer remains on the site, which is for sale.

Holtzclaw said he goes out of his way to avoid driving anywhere near the building.

"There are so many unknowns," he said. "But somebody knows."

He hopes their conscience or their memory will push them to call police and tell what they know.