Post by Scumhunter on Nov 22, 2024 9:02:21 GMT -5
(Above photo credit: New Hanover County government website)
From wect.com:
NEW HANOVER COUNTY, N.C. (WECT) - Two days before Christmas in 1999, 25-year-old Tera Tracy walked out of her house and across Holly Shelter Road, to start her overnight shift working as a clerk at The Pantry convenience store, which sat at the corner of Holly Shelter and Castle Hayne Roads. The married mother of four children had taken a job to earn extra money, to help her family afford presents for Christmas.
Several hours after her shift started, around 4:00 a.m. on the morning of December 24th, a customer walked into the store, spotted Tera’s body on the floor behind the counter and called 911. Investigators from the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office responded, and determined someone had beaten Tera, stabbed her several times, cleaned out the cash register and took off. Tera died at the hospital, never making it back home to celebrate Christmas.
“It’s the holidays, it’s my grandson’s birthday, and isn’t this a terrible way to spend his birthday and spend Christmas?”, Janice Hamilton, Tera’s mother, said the day after the murder happened.
WECT News has done several stories on the investigation since 1999. To this day, no one has faced charges for the murder of Tera Tracy.
“They took a mother from her children, and that was wrong, and we can’t get that back,” Ethel Greimann, Tera’s aunt, said when we interviewed her in 2014.
Nearly 25 years later, Tera Tracy’s case takes up several binders in the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office cold case unit. Many investigators have worked the case since she died. In 2024, Sargeant Nick Lee and Detective Steve Blissett are taking another look.
“When we look into these cases, we know that this is going to be a marathon, it’s not going to be a sprint,” Sgt. Lee said about going back over the evidence. “We’re going to have to look at every piece of paper that’s in this case file. We’re going to have to look at every interview. We’re going to have to pick apart what was done by previous investigators to see if there are other things that would lead us to a new lead to follow up on. So, they take time, and we understand that going into them.”
Detective Blissett is closer to this case than many others he’s worked with in his career. He worked as a Sheriff’s Office Patrol Deputy in 1999, and The Pantry was one of the places he would regularly visit on the overnight shift.
Tera Tracy is one of the clerks he’d check on.
“Two o’clock in the morning, law enforcement officers you know, there aren’t a whole lot to talk to,” he said. “So you go to your stores, and you get tired, you want a cup of coffee, you go in there, and you get to know these people. I remember her, and I remember having conversations with her. I don’t think that she had been working there that long.”
Det. Blissett remembers that when he came on shift the morning of December 24, 1999, The Pantry had become a crime scene, with investigators gathering evidence. Case files show a customer went into the store around 3:00 a.m., and Tera was alive. Another customer went in about an hour later and found her body behind the counter. The convenience store did not have security cameras.
“Unfortunately, not every store back that time had cameras, so that’s a battle that we face when we look into these cold cases, is trying to develop leads without some of the technology that we have today,” said Sgt. Lee.
Investigators also do not have the option of looking at Department of Transportation traffic cameras, which are located at many intersections and heavily traveled routes across North Carolina in 2024.
“No traffic cameras back in that time and the time of day that it happened, four o’clock in the morning, there’s not a lot of traffic on the roadways,” Sgt. Lee said about the location where the murder happened. “There’s not a lot of pedestrian traffic out, so there’s not many witnesses that would have seen what have occurred.”
Investigators believe the person who attacked Tera Tracy had a battle on their hands. The autopsy report from the medical examiner’s office at the time shows Tera had several defensive wounds and a broken fingernail.
“She fought, she did,” Det. Blissett said. “We can honestly say that there is no doubt she put up a fight. That’s what makes it hard. There’s got to be somebody that saw something from who did this. It was very violent. There’s just no way that somebody didn’t end up with something, some form of evidence on them.”
There is a lot of evidence in the Tera Tracy case file, nearly 25 years worth.
But, what’s missing is the one key piece that can tie everything together, and solve one of the area’s oldest cold cases.
“Ms. Tracy’s still has a family that deserves answers about what happened,” Sgt. Lee said. “We know that somebody out there has maybe a small nugget of information that we may not know that would help us.”
“I don’t know if it’s just a matter of somebody is scared and all,” added Det. Blissett. But we’re going to, we’re going to keep going. Something’s going to come out of this.”
“I try not to lose confidence, I try to hang on to that and pray a lot,” Ms. Greimann said just this past week when I spoke to her on the phone. “There is a person out there who thinks they got away with the perfect murder, and so far they have. That’s got to stop. There’s somebody out there, I can’t tell you who, and they know more than they’ve said.”
Anyone with information on this murder investigation can call the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office Detectives Division at 910-798-4260.
www.wect.com/2024/11/18/crimes-cape-fear-unsolved-murder-tera-tracy/
Additional relevant links:
www.nhcgov.com/913/Tera-Tracy
unsolved.com/event-posts/will-a-fresh-look-help-solve-the-murder-of-tera-tracy/
Thoughts? I am placing Tera’s case in the national media section due to Unsolved Mysteries posting a link to the above news story on her case on their “In The News” archive section of their website.
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