As the producer of a true crime podcast mainly focused on a decades-old double murder, Brad Willis has had plenty of experience with dramatic and compelling storytelling.
But Willis got the chance to be the story himself this week, when a sheriff in South Carolina whose office has been reinvestigating a 1975 killing publicly credited Willis’ show with helping deputies finally identify the victim.
Willis’ MurderETC and other investigative documentary podcasts of its ilk belong to a true crime genre which critics have sometimes accused of being exploitative and ethically dubious. Yet the sheriff of Greenville county, South Carolina, said the public attention MurderETC cast on the killing of Oscar James Nedd – a resident of upstate New York who was found beaten and strangled to death in January 1975 – was key in allowing deputies to recently learn the victim’s name and precisely who he was.
“Most of my life has been spent facing the opposite direction from off-camera at these things,” Willis, a former television news reporter, wrote on X Monday while providing a link to a local media station’s report on a press briefing that the Greenville sheriff’s office held about Nedd. “This morning, the sheriff invited me to the other side. I’m grateful for that and his team’s efforts to solve this mystery.”
Launched in 2019, MurderETC primarily focuses on the 31 January 1975 shooting deaths of local narcotics officer Frank Looper and his father, Rufus Looper, in their garage in west Greenville. A man named Charles Wakefield was convicted of the double execution-style murder in 1976 and released in 2010, but there has long been widespread doubt about his guilt, which MurderETC explores, as South Carolina’s Post & Courier has previously reported.
One of MurderETC’s episodes chronicles how a hunter discovered a corpse wrapped in a blanket on a property in Greenville on the morning of 4 January 1975, less than a month before the Loopers were gunned down. Investigators determined the dead man – whose identity was not known at the time – had been murdered by someone who had strangled him, inflicted blunt force trauma to his head and set his body on fire.
Authorities later charged a man who was rumored to be a hitman for a local organized crime syndicate with killing the victim who for years was only referred to as “Mr X”, according to MurderETC. But officials dismissed the case against that suspect, citing insufficient evidence, and they now reportedly no longer believe he was involved in the death of Mr X.
The Greenville county sheriff Hobart Lewis then took office in 2020, tasked his agency’s cold case unit with using new technology to re-examine old crimes, and on Monday said he became interested in Mr X after listening to MurderETC’s episode on him, titled Greenville, We Have a Problem.
Lewis subsequently had his deputies work with the Greenville county coroner’s office to exhume Mr X’s corpse from a local potters field. Officials then sent the skeletal remains to the National Unidentified and Missing Persons System (Namus) for DNA testing, which resulted in a profile for the victim.
In February, Lewis’ office said in a statement, police in White Plains, New York, reached out to Greenville county deputies and alerted them that the DNA profile apparently matched an unsolved missing persons case from 1975.
Oscar James Nedd – an aspiring journalist who was engaged to be married and had worked two jobs to save $1,500 to attend college, according to a 2005 article in the New York Times – was the person who had been reported missing. And after speaking with Nedd’s family members, “investigators were able to confirm [his] identity”, said the statement from Lewis’s office.
Lewis’s office added that investigators suspect Nedd was killed in New York at age 23 after moving there from Georgia to go to school before being brought to South Carolina. And authorities in New York now have jurisdiction over the case, Lewis’ office said.
New York authorities have not publicly named any suspects in Nedd’s killing. However, the Charley Project website – which has gathered information of about 16,000 cold cases across the US – reports Nedd disappeared after allowing a nephew to stay with him.
Nedd’s sister had reportedly warned him that the nephew had escaped from jail under suspicion of shooting someone else. Police investigating Nedd’s disappearance later found blood all over his apartment, and they spoke to a witness who ominously recounted seeing the nephew struggling to carry a large object – similar to a human body – which was wrapped in a rug, according to the Charley Project.
The nephew allegedly went down the stairs with whatever was in the rug, put it in a car’s trunk and drove away, the Charley Project wrote, attributing that information to the witness.
The nephew was later arrested driving Nedd’s car in New Mexico before being convicted of numerous crimes, including kidnapping, rape and armed bank robbery, the Charley Project added. Records show the nephew spent time in federal prison but was released in 2015.
Nedd was declared legally dead in 2005, though his body remained missing at the time. His sister suggested to the New York Times that she hoped to one day be able to bury him beside their mother in Georgia, as the South Carolina newspaper the State reported.
In addition to thanking Willis for the part he played in learning the truth about Nedd, Lewis credited his cold case unit. “The tireless work and innovative approaches employed by our investigators have brought closure to a case that has remained a mystery for nearly five decades,” Lewis said. “Their determination to seek justice for victims and their families is truly commendable.”
MurderETC’s X account on Monday clued listeners into the news about Nedd’s identity but did not tout the credit which Lewis gave the show.
“If you listened to our episode ‘Greenville, We Have a Problem,’ you know about the man they called Mr X,” the show’s X account said. “Mr X now has a name.”
