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Man's disappearance in 2007 still a mystery
Lack of information is worst part, family says
Jimmy Blevins disappeared two years ago.
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Published: February 24, 2009
CRUMPLER
The thing that tortures Janet Blevins, that robs her sleep and stalks her days, is not knowing what happened to her son.
It was two years ago today that Jimmy Blevins, 41, put his supper on to cook and vanished from his trailer beside N.C. 16 near the North Fork of the New River. Authorities say they believe that Jimmy Blevins is dead, although intense searches have turned up no trace of him.
"Some people say, ‘Well, I don't know how you feel,'" Janet Blevins said yesterday. "Well, if you've got any children and one of them disappears, that's the way you'd feel. You'd never stop looking. Never."
Jimmy Blevins' family is increasing a reward offer to $15,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of his killer.
Authorities consider Freddie Hammer a person of interest in the case, although he has not been charged in it. Hammer is in jail in Virginia awaiting a capital trial in connection with the killings Jan. 24, 2008, of Ron Hudler, his son Fred Hudler, and John Miller Jr. on the Hudler's Christmas tree farm in Grayson County.
Hammer has denied that he killed the three men on the Christmas tree farm or that he had anything to do with the disappearance of Jimmy Blevins.
Hammer is Jimmy Blevins' uncle by marriage. At the time Blevins disappeared, Hammer owed him about $1,600 for work that Blevins had done at Hammer's firewood business. Hammer was the last person known to be seen with Blevins.
Janet Blevins said that the family is increasing the reward not because they do not think that Hammer was involved in Jimmy's disappearance, but because they do not know for sure what happened. They think there might be someone out there who knows something that would help find their son.
"I'd give anything I had to find him," Janet Blevins said. "You imagine a lot of things that might have happened. You don't know where he's at. I've searched the woods so many times."
Sometimes family members have accompanied her on searches. Sometimes she has gone by herself. Her son Joe finally told her that it was not safe for her by herself, that coyotes prowl those woods, so she stopped. But she still watches when she drives, looking for some clue about her son.
The Ashe County Sheriff's Office has conducted three digs over the past year, searching for Blevins' remains based on tips, such as the time a caller described a depressed area in the woods.
"We always check out every lead we get," Ashe County Sheriff James Williams said yesterday. The result has been the same for two years now.
"Not a trace," he said.
Blevins lived in a trailer beside the home of his grandparents, Bill and Thelma Hurley. It was Saturday, Feb. 24, 2007, when Thelma Hurley saw Blevins get into Hammer's truck and ride away.
When they could not reach him by telephone that Sunday and then Monday, family members cut the lock on his trailer. The lights and TV were on. They found chicken cooking in a crock pot in a side room.
Searchers combed the nearby woods, but they never found a trace. Dogs worked scents. Divers and underwater cameras searched the river. Investigators with the Ashe County Sheriff's Office have puzzled over the case, and so has the State Bureau of Investigation.
Blevins' trailer is within a few hundred yards of another of Ashe County's most talked-about mysteries, the unsolved murder of Tim Shatley at the bridge over the river there in 2005.
For a rural mountain community to have two unsolved killings that close together within two years is so unusual that many people in Ashe think the killings are related. Ashe authorities have considered the possibility, but they have said that there is very little physical evidence in the Shatley case. They would like to talk to Hammer about both cases, they said, but they have not been able to do so since his arrest in connection with the killing of the three men at the Christmas tree farm. Hammer says he did not kill Shatley.
Last spring, the Hurleys decided to tear down Jimmy's trailer because it was a painful reminder that he was not coming home.
Neither was to ever find out what happened to their grandson. Bill Hurley died this past September and Thelma Hurley died two months later.
Janet Blevins said she once had a dream that she was on one side of a door and her son Jimmy was on another and he could not get through. But then he came around the door and they fell into each other's arms.
Blevins said she is glad she does not dream about him much.
"It makes you sad when you wake up and he's not there," she said.
■ Monte Mitchell can be reached in Wilkesboro at 336-667-5691 or at mmitchell@wsjournal.com.
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