Uncovering the Truth Behind My Father-in-Law's Death: My Journey and First Steps in Investigation (Part 6 of 9)

Talking to People in Sumter: What 1968 Was Really Like

I reached out to family members, friends, and colleagues who may have known him. I asked open-ended questions, encouraging them to share anything unusual they noticed. Sometimes, small details can reveal big clues.

I leaned on the community to help me reconstruct what life in Sumter felt like in the late 1960s—because if you want the truth, you don’t start with the official story. You start with the people who lived it.

So I asked the questions that matter: Did anyone hear about the accident? Did anyone see it? Did it ripple through town as gossip, warning, or whispered certainty?

Back in the 1990s, when I first began digging, an older woman—I'll call her Sarah—told me, without hesitation, “Yes.” She said she lived in the trailer park, and that her son was there when the police showed up. She promised she’d have him call me.

He never did.

So, I called Sarah again. This time, the story shrank. Suddenly her son “really didn’t see anything,” and before I could ask the obvious follow-up—Then why the confident yes? —she hung up.

Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was the kind of backpedaling people do when memory gets inconvenient.

Or maybe it was something else entirely: maybe someone realized she’d talked. Maybe someone realized I was still asking.

And if that sounds paranoid, fair enough—until you remember one detail I didn’t learn until later.

In *Shadows Over Sumter*, you’ll learn my phone was bugged.

Moving forward to 2019—back when “pandemic” was still just a word in disaster movies—I put out a message to the Sumter community asking if anyone who’d lived there in the 1960s would be willing to talk with me. Bingo. My daughter and I ended up on the phone with an older woman—a vivid, colorful character—who didn’t just answer questions; she unspooled story after story about how Sumter really worked. She talked about State Police who were “on the take,” the bars around town where contractors gathered and deals seemed to find their way into back pockets, and Shaw AFB’s long-standing reputation for secrecy.

And while she didn’t actually have any firsthand knowledge of the accident itself, she gave me something just as valuable: context, texture, and a handful of sharp ideas that helped shape the book.

Next: Challenges Faced