Man charged with killing ‘Boy Under the Billboard’ pleads guilty to killing son, wife

Update: The story was updated Jan. 15, 2020.

More than 20 years after a young boy’s skeleton was found beneath an Orange County billboard, the child’s father pleaded guilty Wednesday to killing him and his mother.

John Russell Whitt, 57, pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of his 10-year-old son, Robert “Bobby” Adam Whitt, and his wife, Myoung Hwa Cho. They were killed in Concord, near where the family lived at the time, and their bodies were dumped along Interstate 85 in North Carolina and South Carolina.

Orange County Superior Court Judge Allen Baddour sentenced Whitt to 52 to 64 years for the murders. Whitt’s sentence will start in 2037 when he completes his current stay in federal prison for robbery.

Bobby Whitt is believed to have died in July 1998, just two months after his mother’s body was found in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Cho, a native of South Korea, was suffocated with a towel, Orange County Assistant District Attorney Anna Orr said Thursday. Whitt told investigators he had met another woman and started a relationship, Orr said. He made plans to get rid of his wife, so he could move the mistress into the house, she said.

“The mistress moved in with him, and she and Bobby did not get along. He was a source of a lot of arguments between them,” Orr said. Whitt “had told her that his wife went home to Korea to be with her family and she asked him to send Bobby to be with his mother, which of course, he couldn’t do.”

Whitt came up with a plan to kill Bobby, she said.

“He took him to a storage facility, he told him get in the back of car, that they were going to play a game, and he suffocated him with a towel,” Orr said. “Then drove his body up here to Mebane and dumped it on the side of the road, where it was found.”

Whitt did not elaborate on his crimes in court Wednesday, Orr said.

“He said that he still loves them and misses them,” she said.

Boy’s identity was a mystery

An Orange County grand jury indicted Whitt in May 2019 on charges of first-degree murder and concealment of death in the killing of his son, according to court documents. The Sheriff’s Office had said he confessed to the two killings.

In 1998, Bobby’s clothing was the only clue that the decomposed body was male, former Orange County Investigator Tim Horne told The News & Observer in a February 2019 interview.

A family member thought he and Cho had returned to her native South Korea, and because he was never reported missing, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) database had no record of him.

For years, the roughly 10-year-old boy’s identity remained a mystery, despite widespread news coverage and multiple agencies working on the case, The N&O has reported.

A break in the case followed Orange County Investigator Tim Horne connecting with a genetic genealogy consultant, Barbara Rae-Venter, who had helped solve the Golden State Killer case. Horne has since retired.

Whitt has been in federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky, for robbing people at ATM machines and carrying a weapon in the commission of the crimes.

He was scheduled to be released on those charges in 2037, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

This story was originally published August 12, 2019 at 11:00 AM.