Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 9, 1994 TAG: 9409090085
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Ramey and Jerry Watkins, her high-school sweetheart, had just gotten back together again after Ramey ended her relationship with live-in boyfriend John William Jackson.
She was headed on Sunday morning to the Boonsboro house she had shared with Jackson to attend an afternoon football party.
"She said, 'I love you. I'll be back, I promise,'" Watkins recalled. "And she never came back."
Thursday night, Watkins stood outside his home, looking at the sky. "We're losing daylight," he said. "I've got to get on the road again. I'll search the woods, ride the roads. I can't give up hope.
"I'd give my life to have her back."
He has been searching nonstop for Ramey since he went to her workplace at Prime Time Rentals in Lynchburg on Tuesday morning and found out that she had not come to work. He called police and told them she was missing.
According to an affidavit filed in Lynchburg Circuit Court on Tuesday, Lynchburg police Officer Wallace W. Layne went to question Jackson on Tuesday night. Jackson had some of Ramey's jewelry and personal belongings.
Layne said in the affidavit that Jackson later asked him, "How much time am I going to serve for this?" then struck the officer and took off in his car at high speed toward the Bedford County line about a quarter-mile away.
Jackson abandoned his car in Bedford County and fled into the woods. Wednesday morning, Lynchburg police and Bedford County sheriff's deputies found Jackson, 26, dead of an apparent suicide, strangled by a shoestring tied to a fence.
Lynchburg police have no leads to Ramey's whereabouts. She and her car - a red four-door 1990 Mitsubishi Mirage, license plate LXQ-387 - seem to have vanished. State police helicopters scoured the Forest area in Bedford County and Lynchburg for almost five hours Wednesday afternoon, finding nothing. A search of the house where Jackson lived yielded only a few bullets from a night stand drawer and some photographs.
Police found Ramey's clothes in a trash bin behind Bull's Tex-Mex Steakhouse in Lynchburg on Wednesday.
Laura Cofer, Ramey's best friend, arrived from Atlanta on Thursday. She and Ramey, 25, were roommates in Lynchburg from 1988 until 1992. She remembers her best friend as a football fanatic and devoted mother whose world revolved around her 4-year-old daughter, Brittany.
"It is not like Pam" to disappear, she said. "She's too responsible. Nothing was more important to her than Brittany."
The child is staying with Ramey's parents, who have come to Lynchburg from Mississippi.
Cofer spent much time with Ramey and Jackson before she moved.
She said she called Jackson's house in Boonsboro on Sunday afternoon and Jackson told her that Ramey never made it to the party.
Jackson, who worked on mufflers at Kerr Tire in Lynchburg, was "never violent in any way toward Pam," Cofer said. "I never would've expected him to do anything like this."
by CNB