A 14-year-old was raped and murdered in NC in 1980. Police just made an arrest
On August 26, 1980, Ronda Blaylock didn’t return home from a trip to the bowling alley with her friend.
The two were walking home from the bowling alley in Rural Hall, North Carolina, when they were offered a ride from a man they didn’t know, according to The Mount Airy News.
They took the ride and her friend was dropped off unharmed, but 14-year-old Blaylock never came home, The Mount Airy News reported.
Her parents reported her missing that night and, three days later, the Atkins High School ninth grader’s body was found in the woods in Surry County, about 18 miles from where she was last seen, and a medical examiner determined she had been stabbed to death, the Winston-Salem Journal reported.
But the case remained unsolved until recently.
Nearly 40 years after the teen was killed, and a year after her mother died North Carolina police arrested a suspect., according to the Winston-Salem Journal.
Robert James Adkins, 62 of Dobson, North Carolina, was arrested Friday and charged with first-degree murder and first-degree forcible rape, according to a release from the Surry County Sheriff’s Office.
Adkins was denied bond by Judge Marion Boone in district court on Monday, according to WXII. He had not appointed a lawyer and refused to speak when asked if he had anything to say, WXII reported.
Blaylock’s family told WXII what the last nearly 40 years have been like.
“We would think about it, not constantly obviously, but from time to time and say, ‘I wonder if that person who did that, they can be walking among you and you never even know it and you hope that some day some kind of lead would develop and they would be able to make an arrest which thankfully has been the case,” said her cousin Jeff Shouse, according to WXII.
The case involved work from “current and retired agent and officers” in the Surry County Sheriff’s Office, the State Bureau of Investigations, the State Crime Lab, the State Bureau Cold Case Unit, the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office, and the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division and Stokes County Sheriff’s Office, the release said.
The Ronda Blaylock Homicide Task Force was formed in 2015 to “investigate new leads in the case” and test evidence, like DNA, with technology that didn’t exist in 1980, the Winston-Salem Journal reported.
Former Surry County Sheriff Graham Atkinson told WXII that many interviews were re-conducted and evidence was reexamined.
“There were people who were moved to other parts of the country who were contacted who were re-interviewed and after each one of those interviews, the task force would come together, look at everything that had been developed and then decide the next step but it was a painstaking process and lots of blood, sweat and tears, lots of hours, lots of effort went into this,” he said, according to WXII.
This story was originally published August 6, 2019 at 2:35 PM.
