Mazie Mae Sigmon-Palmer & Jay Farley
On the evening of July 14th, 1979, 25-year-old Mazie Mae Sigmon Palmer and 18-year-old Jay Farley met up at a nightclub in downtown Charleston,West Virginia called the Roaring Twenties. There, they hung out for a bit and even talked with some friends of theirs. But at some point that night, both would vanish, and no trace of either would be found for years to come…
When looking at the state of West Virginia from above, it’s a place covered almost entirely in forest. From a satellite view, the scars of old strip mines loom larger than any of the state's cities, and even those are just small breaks in the trees. The capital, Charleston is the most populous city in the state but even that has never broken a population of 100,000. Back in the late 70s and early 80s, when our story takes place, there were only around 65,000 inhabitants.
Charleston is a city built with the landscape in mind. It winds along both sides of the Kanawha River in a valley, and where the valley ends the foothills of the Appalachians surround it. Following along the Kanawha River though, in either direction will take you to other small cities. Just to the east of Charleston is the city of Dunbar where a boy named John Eric Farley Jr. grew up. John Jr. preferred to go by Jay and had just graduated high school in 1979. His father John Sr. and stepmother, Goldie, had wanted to move closer to Charleston proper a few years prior, so Jay stayed behind and lived with his grandmother. He wanted to finish out his high school years in the same place he’d started them. Jay and his grandmother Dessie were very close, and both Dessie and his parents recall him being a well-behaved child growing up.
At just eighteen and fresh out of school, Jay was still undecided on what he wanted to do with his life. He thought about going straight into the workforce, perhaps joining the Navy, or maybe giving college a shot. He’d also been trying to plan a few trips to see the rest of the country soon before his high school friends scattered to follow their own paths. He wanted to go out to California to visit his biological mother, and maybe combine that with a trip to see Florida and just make it a road trip across the country. Eventually, he settled on working for a year or two and then going to college, all the while trying to plan when he was going to set out and see the rest of the country.
But before he started any of that, Jay was going to enjoy his first summer as an adult. Jay’s father John said that Jay was very popular with the ladies, and one of the girls he hit it off with that summer was Mazie Mae Sigmon-Palmer. Though she was possibly going to drop the Palmer soon, as she’d just divorced her husband Kenneth Palmer in the late spring of 1979. At 25 Mazie Mae was older than Jay, but neither one appeared to be trying to make a serious relationship of their fling. In fact, John said that his son had made it clear the two were not officially “going steady” because Jay was at the phase in his life where he was not trying to go steady with anyone but instead had “a lot of female companions.”
But still, the two enjoyed each other’s company and were going on dates somewhat often that summer. They’d met at a bowling alley, and would sometimes meet up back there, or they’d go to various bars and nightclubs around the city. Mazie was still getting her life together after her divorce so she did not have a car, and Jay could not yet drive, so the two would hitch rides from friends or family members when they wanted to meet up. That summer Mazie was living in Charleston with her family, though she was originally from the town of Sissonvile a bit farther north. Jay was still in Dunbar but the city was part of the larger Charleston metropolitan area so the two lived pretty close to each other.
Mazie Mae was a complicated woman and how well Jay and Mazie actually knew each other is a bit unclear. Mazie was described by her friends as naive for her age, but unrelententingly optimistic. However, she was also prone to telling lies and would occasionally go by fake names. She would also sometimes pretend to have a different birthdate. Mazie’s birthday was November 24th, 1954 but she would occasionally use the fake birthday of June 3rd, 1960, which was her little sister Rena’s birthday. Sometimes she would even borrow her younger sister’s birth certificate to back this up. So it is possible that Jay may have been under the impression Mazie was closer to his age, but Mazie’s friends did not describe her as being manipulative in her lies, and she seemed to mostly use the fake birthday to get out of paying medical bills. Also, it would have been immediately apparent she was older if she’d shared much about her life with Jay. She’d already been married and divorced, she’d lived in numerous places across the country, and she had years of work experience in both clerical jobs and nursing homes. Mazie had her flaws but overall her friends said she was kind, and that she saw the best in everyone, even when she shouldn’t.
Halfway through the summer, on the night of July 14th, 1979, Mazie and Jay made plans to go out. Mazie put on jeans and a pink blouse, and Jay donned a blue and pink plaid shirt. They were going to kick the night off at a club called the Roaring Twenties in downtown Charleston. Jay at least did not plan on being out too late. He left around 9:30 or 10 pm and told Dessie he’d only be out for a few hours. Goldie was at Dessie’s that day and had asked her son if he needed any money for his date but he told her he had a few dollars which should be more than enough. Because Jay didn’t have his license yet a friend named Kevin Withrow picked him up and took him to the club.
Mazie was staying with her mother’s cousin and her mother’s cousin’s husband, but later reports simplify this by referring to the two as her aunt and uncle as they were all very close. Her uncle, Ira, drove her to the club that night. She borrowed five dollars from him and went into the Roaring Twenties to meet up with Jay.
From this point on the timeline gets fuzzy. The official police report and the news contradict each other on a few small details, both of which relied on the testimony of family and friends sometimes taken years after the fact.
According to the police report, Mazie and Jay only stayed at the Roaring Twenties for about an hour, then left. The pair then walked across the street and talked to Jay’s friend, identified as Jimmy Ward, who was sitting in his car. Then they left and crossed the street again where the friend lost track of them as they walked into the parking lot of the nearby Holley Hotel.
The news, however, has this conversation take place around 1 am rather than 11 pm and says that the conversation had consisted of Mazie and Jay trying to get a ride home from one of Jay’s friends. Apparently, the friend declined as he was going to be out on the town for a while longer. The newspaper accounts do not name this friend.
The police report also mentions that at some point in the night, they ran into Kevin Withrow again and Jay borrowed two dollars from him. It’s possible that Jimmy Ward was simply an alias for Kevin Withrow used at one point to give him anonymity, which would help these accounts match up closer. Or perhaps they talked with a few friends at different points that night.
Either way, all accounts agree that Mazie and Jay were spotted going behind the Holley Hotel together after they left the Roaring Twenties. Once the two started trying to hitch a ride, all accounts matched up once again for the rest of the night because the man who gave them a ride came forward soon afterward to give his account.
This man was named Bill Cottrell and he picked them up and took them about two miles away to a nightclub called The Kings Inn. When they pulled up to the lot, Mazie Mae recognized a car parked outside and said out loud “Oh, he’s in there.”
When they started walking in, Mazie saw a friend named Karen Carpenter hanging out at the entrance. The two chatted for a bit before Mazie went to join Bill and Jay inside. They all got a table together on the first floor of the club. Then Mazie went upstairs and Bill had reason to assume she was going to talk to the person whose car she recognized. Bill and Jay shared a drink, but Jay was worried about Mazie. Bill left the King’s Inn as Jay was going upstairs to look after her. After this, Jay Farley and Mazie Mae Sigmon-Palmer vanished into the night.
The next day Mazie’s family were not really worried. She was a grown woman and rather spontaneous and she wouldn’t always tell them if she was going to stay the night at a girlfriend's house. She had had a shopping trip planned that day, but she wasn’t missing any big commitments when she failed to show up. However, by the next evening, after nearly two days, her family knew something was wrong.
Jay’s family was more concerned right away. He was barely an adult and it wasn’t like him to just vanish. But they knew he’d gone out with a girl, so they held off on calling the police that first day. But on the morning of the 16th, when they still hadn't heard from him, they reported him missing. Mazie’s family gave her one more day to show, hoping she was just off having fun, but they too reported her missing a day later on the 17th.
Though their friends and families all knew that both Mazie and Jay were going out on a date with someone that night, the relationship was so informal that both families weren’t completely certain that they were on a date with each other. It’s possible Mazie’s family didn’t even know Jay’s full name. Jay’s family at least knew roughly who Jay was seeing, and when they called the Dunbar police, they told them that her name was Mazie and that her last name was either Sigmon or Shamblin. Mazie’s family, however, living closer to Charleston proper reported the disappearance to Charleston police. Because of both cases being reported to different departments with different jurisdictions, and a lack of urgency on the part of the Dunbar police it would take quite some time to link both cases.
They didn’t know it at the time, but both families were saying the same things about their children. Mazie’s mom Thelma understood that Mazie was an adult with her own life, but they’d always had a close relationship. Mazie would call her mother several times a week to catch up, and if she was staying somewhere new or traveling she’d call her to tell her where she was. It wasn’t out of the question for Mazie to go on a spontaneous trip, but she had never once left town without telling her mother where she was going.
Jay’s parents were also adamant about telling the police from day one that their son had not run away. Jay hadn’t taken any extra clothes with him and if he’d been planning on running away it made no sense he would have refused his mother's offer for some spending cash. Also, Jay shared a room with his younger brother Jamie. Jamie kept most of his savings in their shared bedroom and Jay knew where he hid the money but the cash was untouched.
These complaints fell on deaf ears. The Dunbar police were certain that Jay had run away and would not be convinced otherwise. In fact they seemed reluctant to investigate the case at all. Though Jay’s family had reported him missing on the 16th, Dunbar PD waited several days to actually put his name into their databases, officially file the report, and put out an APB. Sources differ but it was between seven to eleven days before this was done and John had to call several times. John also wanted articles run in local papers to help with the case, but the Dunbar police didn’t try to work with the media at all. So John took it upon himself to pay for missing person’s ads in local papers himself.
This brings us to our first theory about the disappearance, though it is a more conspiratorial one. There were whispers back in Dunbar that Jay was actually killed by the Dunbar police because he witnessed them committing an unspecified act of police brutality, and was going to be a witness against them in court. Looking closer, there was a kernel of truth to the fact that Jay had been present at a controversial police arrest. Apparently, there was a Dairy Queen which was a popular hangout spot for Dunbar teens, and while police were arresting a suspect on drug charges, the suspect fought back, and in the ensuing struggle police gave him a laceration on his head. Jay’s family has only ever said that they heard this rumor from other kids in town, and they never heard anything about it from Jay. They have never spoken publicly to either condemn this theory or give weight to it. It’s quite possible the rumor just started because people were upset at Dunbar PD’s poor handling of the case and felt the need to come up with an explanation of why they seemed to care so little about Jay.
The Dunbar police have since spoken out about the criticism against them. They said that they did not follow up on leads because the case was in the jurisdiction of the Charleston police, and it was simply not their case. They couldn’t allocate the budget to put a man on the case full-time when they weren’t even supposed to be investigating it in the first place. But they say they did cooperate anytime Charleston PD or the Kanawha County Sheriff's department reached out. They also refuted any claims that there was a pending lawsuit against them.
It would be September before the investigation would really begin in any kind of serious capacity. Charleston PD took over but they also thought that Jay was likely a runaway so the case was put on the backburner, along with Mazie’s, but the two were not yet connected. The case sat largely undisturbed until Deputy John P. Seymour of the Kanawha County Sherriff’s office took over and began connecting the dots. Seymour would be essentially the only officer to prioritize the case and both the police departments involved as well as both of the victim's families have spoken very highly of him.
Seymour started by compiling all known information, and he began with Jay’s case. The Dunbar police told Seymour that they thought Jay had possibly vanished with a woman with the last name of Sigmon or Shamblin from Sissonville. But they had not kept records of this tip or followed up on the lead so Seymour started from scratch. He called everyone in the Sissonville area with those last names. Eventually, he got ahold of Mazie’s brother and matched her name up with Charleston PD’s missing person’s report. A few days later he got them both entered into the National Crime Information Center Database. By the time this was done though and the cases were connected it was already January of 1980.
Soon after this, Seymour himself went to the Charleston Daily Mail to have them run profiles on Mazie and Jay, albeit separately. Though police knew the cases were connected, the connection was not disclosed to the families or to the public for some time.
Among this first small surge of publicity was a heartfelt letter from Dessie to the public. She wrote just a bit about Jay’s disappearance and asked the public to please give her answers. She said she had never caused any trouble for anyone and that she deserved to know where her grandson was. She said she’d done nearly everything she could, having personally called numerous police departments as well as the mayor of Dunbar himself. She said “He was a good young man, never being in any trouble. I sit at night waiting for the doorbell or telephone to ring knowing that he will return.”
With the police keeping the investigation closely guarded, Bill Cottrell’s account was kept entirely secret from the public. Jay’s family thought that he vanished from the Holley Hotel parking lot with a girl who might have been Mazie, but they weren’t sure. Mazie’s case on the other hand is still largely classified as it’s still open, so if police even told her family that she’d vanished alongside Jay is unclear. But it’s possible her family knew more and this information has just not been made public as not everything about her case has been declassified.
Mazie’s family spoke with the media just a bit during those first few years. Her father, Vernon said he both believed and hoped she was still alive, though he did not understand why she would have run away. Her mother, Thelma said she believed Mazie had been murdered because there was no way she would have gone as long as she had without contacting them. Mazie had always called home, no matter where she was or what she was getting into.
While Jay’s family was left largely in the dark, they conducted their own investigation. His parents contacted psychics and hired a private investigator with no luck. They were left to field phone calls and follow up on leads on their own and it took a severe toll on them and their marriage. John said that they never really got the time to talk about Jay or any of their other problems because he was spending most nights walking the city streets looking for his son at all hours of the night. Goldie and John ended up divorced about a year after Jay vanished.
But even if the families were in the dark, once Seymour got ahold of the case the official investigation did start to move forward slowly. Police ran checks on Jay and Mazie’s social security numbers to see if anyone had applied for IDs out of state. They also checked jail and hospital records. They tracked down Mazie’s ex-husband Kenneth Palmer and found he was remarried and living in Arizona and they started to keep tabs on him.
The first promising lead came in March of 1980. Police had gotten tips about a girl in the Sissonville area who strongly resembled Mazie, and went to investigate. They tracked her down and found that it was just a local girl who bore a strong resemblance to Mazie. Apparently, the girl had even grown up on the same street as Mazie, and people in the neighborhood and at school got them mixed up often. Now though, rather than a fun coincidence that the girls could laugh about in school, this other girl was getting mistaken for a missing woman while just going about her day.
Later that spring, another police department reached out to Seymour about Mazie. A public safety officer met with Seymour to tell him that he was trying to find Mazie as well, but not because she was missing. Apparently she was a witness to a breaking and entering case he was investigating. This officer said that he’d tried to ask her family for leads and they told him they had reason to think that Mazie was simply hitchhiking around the country with truckers.
In September of 1980, Seymour interviewed one Richard Allan Dolin. Dolin was in jail at the time of the interview for robbery. Dolin had been living a block and a half away from Jay when he vanished, and was dating one of Jay’s ex-girlfriends, he knew Jay reasonably well. Dolin told police that Jay wasn’t actually missing. Dolin said that he wasn’t the only one who knew that either, allegedly Jay’s brother knew where he was too. Dolin told Seymour that Jay was living in Ohio and that he’d last seen him hanging around a bar. He said that Jay was working in a nightclub called Club High Level on Clark Street in Cleveland. He gave police the address and Seymour contacted the Missing Persons’ division of the Cleveland police to have them follow up. They couldn’t find anything though. Seymour met again with Dolin to double-check that Dolin was telling the same story about six months later and Dolin gave him the exact same information. Seymour double-checked with Cleveland PD but they reiterated that both the club and the address given for Jay did not exist.
Winter brought the next lead. On February 18th, 1981, Jay’s father got a phone call from an unknown number. The caller said “Meet me at 2 pm at the Greyhound bus station. You know he’s dead. If you want to know who killed him, I have the proof.” John went and waited but the caller never showed.
In the summer Seymour focused on trying to find out more about Mazie’s medical history. As Mazie would often use fake names, police did not even have her dental records. That meant it was possible her body had already been found somewhere and they just couldn’t identify it. Mazie had lived in numerous places; a few cities in New Jersey, as well as some small towns in Pennsylvania, and she’d spent time in Oklahoma City. The most promising lead was that she had had dental work done in New Jersey. Police spoke with the media to get word out that there might be a dentist in New Jersey who could hold the key to solving the case if he could just recognize Mazie.
It was slow going for Seymour to learn a lot about Mazie’s personal life. Both Mazie’s best friend Lillie Goldberg and her ex-husband were gone when Seymour tried to talk to them, Kenneth having fled after the first time police questioned him. Lillie had vanished because she owed back rent and was avoiding the police.
Kenneth Palmer re-appeared soon though in Christmas of 1981. He got drunk and drove his new wife and children to Mazie’s mother’s house. He then crashed their Christmas celebration and told Mazie’s mom that Mazie had shacked up with a new man in Kentucky, where Kenneth was apparently living, and had moved in just down the street from him. Apparently, Kenneth didn’t answer any of law enforcement’s attempts to contact him because he’d fled West Virginia with a great deal of debt that he did not intend to pay off. When Mazie’s mom urged him to go to the police with what he knew, he refused.
Numerous skeletal remains were examined and ruled out all over the country. Seymour checked in a few times with Jay’s birth mother in California to make sure he hadn’t gone out there to stay with her. Seymour thought for a long time that there was merit to the runaway theory. However, as the years wore on he changed his mind. He talked more with Mazie’s friends and started to believe their assertions that she would never have vanished without telling her mother where she was. Jay’s family had been saying the same thing all along. There was also the fact that neither Mazie nor Jay had a car, and no cars had been stolen from the immediate area on the night they vanished, so the logistics of running away would have been complicated.
About three years into the case the families started to get more information about what was actually going on. The families were finally told that the cases were connected, and they were given a rough timeline of events of what had actually happened that night. Jay’s family had heard rumors that Jay had been at the King’s Inn that night, but by the time their suspicions were confirmed it had been years since the disappearance. Jay's dad tried to talk to people who were there that night, but of the witnesses he could track down no one remembered seeing them. Both families spoke with the media at this time and the case saw its first real surge of publicity.
What was not made public though was Mazie Mae’s checkered past, which police had slowly been putting together behind the scenes. Though Mazie’s friends remembered her fondly, she wasn’t perfect. According to some, her habit of bending the truth was not limited simply to using aliases for medical work or loans. Her ex-boyfriend Steven Young told Seymour that Mazie would lie often, even to her best friends and family, and it didn’t seem like the lies always even made sense or served any kind of purpose.
Lillie Goldberg had reappeared at some point when she heard the police wanted her help in finding Mazie. Her first meeting with police had, by a strange coincidence been at the Holley Hotel where she met with Seymour to answer some questions. After that she threw herself into the investigation, doing everything she could to help. She even went to New Jersey herself to try and remember where she and Mazie had gone for dental work years prior, but she couldn’t find the building. She did not hold back on what she told the police. She gave them all of Mazie’s aliases of which she had nearly a dozen. The ones she was using close to her disappearance were Cindy Shamblin and Mae Boomer. She had also in the past gone by Roberta Mahoney, Shirly Coffman, Mae Josephson, Lilly Gildberg, Lilly Kaniple, Lil Darko, and Beverly Harpold.
In talking with more of Mazie’s friends and digging more into her life police also uncovered her numerous connections to biker gangs and drug dealers in the area. Mazie Mae was a woman with many secrets, and her associations with known criminals seem shocking compared to her bubbly and often naive personality. In talking with Mazie’s friends and family police uncovered numerous possible suspects.
Police talked with her sister Rena about Mazie’s ex-boyfriends to see if she found any of them suspicious. Rena told them about an old flame of Mazie’s who used to hang around the boulevard recreation center where Mazie and Jay had met, as well as the Roaring Twenties. Rena said that she and Mazie and their friends had gotten rides from this man on occasion but she did not know his name. He was a white male with long curly red hair, and he drove a black van. He also had a jacket with motorcycle patches on it. If the police ever managed to track this man down is unclear and his name has not been made public.
One of the more promising suspects was one William Jerrel Hodge. Hodge was living with Mazie not long before she vanished and had a spotty criminal record. He had charges for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, as well as grand larceny and aiding and abetting. Friends with Hodge was another suspect named Brian Keith Hannah. He had a long record too but mostly for petty crimes; breaking and entering, public drunkenness, and credit card fraud. Hannah had at one point lived with both Mazie and Hodge.
Lillie was familiar with both men. She said that Hodge and Hannah had also at one point stolen a car for a joyride down to Florida, but they hadn’t been caught. Lillie told police that both Hodges and Hannah worked at a construction site on the outskirts of Charleson operated by a man known as Tiny Darko. Lillie said that Hannah was especially dangerous and that Hannah had at one point tried to rape one of her friends. In early 1983 Seymour tried to locate William Hodges and Brian Hannah but whatever he found has either not been made public, or simply did not amount to anything noteworthy.
Though the specifics of Mazie’s double life were kept largely secret until recently, the case finally receiving some publicity helped to drum up several new leads. However, added publicity also meant that many of these leads were not reliable.
One of the more interesting leads came from one Chester Dwight Mayle Jr. who was in jail awaiting armed robbery charges when he spoke with police. Mayle was part of a Pagan motorcycle gang in Charleston, and he told police about a young couple that had been murdered around the time Mazie and Jay vanished. He said their bodies were encased in concrete and then thrown in a nearby river. The couple did not match the descriptions of Mazie and Jay but police followed up on the lead nonetheless just in case there was any truth to the story. Nothing was found, and there were obvious contradictions in Mayle’s story. He also failed a polygraph so police believe the story was likely fabricated to try and bargain a plea deal.
The next lead came on May 18th of 1982. Seymour got an anonymous letter claiming that Jay had argued with Kevin Withrow in the street shortly before he vanished. The letter urged Seymour to check the junk houses near where Kevin lived. Kevin was interviewed shortly after this and told police that he had a bad memory, doubly so if he were intoxicated. He said it was possible that he and Jay had argued about something that night but that he had no memory of such a disagreement. Kevin also said that if Jay had needed a ride home that night he would have given him one if he just asked. When asked about what he thought happened to Jay, Kevin told police that when Jay was with a girl he was overprotective and hot-headed, and could have easily gotten into a fight and gotten himself hurt or killed.
The following spring John Sigmon, Mazie’s brother, sent law enforcement a letter he’d received of a nude woman that the sender claimed was Mazie Mae. The picture was a magazine clipping, not an original photo, and the sender was investigated. But, eventually, this lead was ruled a dead end as well.
As 1983 turned to 1984 police had multiple people following up on leads and liaising with the families and media, it had finally become a proper investigation.
The first real answers that either family would get would come later that year. Thirty miles from Charleston at a strip mine at the base of a mountain, a security guard was doing his morning rounds off of Cannelton Hollow Road. It was May 10th at around 6:30 am, and his day was already off of his usual routine. The coal trucks were running very late so he walked down the road for quite a ways, as he was worried there might be a fallen tree or something else obscuring the road. Normally he never patrolled this far from the mine on foot. It turned out that the trucks were just running late, but he did find something on his walk. He spotted a blue and pink plaid shirt in the nearby woods. Upon closer inspection, he realized he’d found a body.
Police got the call at 7 am that morning and started searching and processing the scene. At some point that day or early the next morning Goldie herself called Charleston PD because she called them any time she heard about a body being found nearby, and she kept close tabs on any such news. They may have already been on the case though. By 2 pm the next day, police were at Jay’s family dentist, and an hour later they had a match. They canceled all of the current leads and inquiries they’d sent out. Jay Farley had been found at last.
In initial media reports from the 80s police kept even the cause of death for Jay a secret. They said only that they were able to determine he’d been dead for 1-5 years before being found, and that they determined he was likely killed the day he vanished because he was wearing the same clothes.
Now that more time has passed, more details have been released. Jay had a bullet hole in his shirt with the bullet itself being found in the ground underneath his ribcage. Decayed tape was found on or near his hands. He wore a ring that his family identified, as well as his socks. Police scoured the area for his pants, shoes, or underwear but could not find them. A year and a half before his body was found there was another body found in the same general area that was also nude from the waist down. The body was also male and as of the time the police report on Jay was compiled this other case was still open. Police scoured the mine for Mazie Mae but could not find any trace of her.
John and his ex-wife Goldie were interviewed not long after Jay’s body was found. They said that police had botched the investigation so badly that they had absolutely no faith it could ever be salvaged. They said they’d completely lost trust in law enforcement. John said that every police officer he’d spoken to about Jay’s disappearance over the years had either brushed him off or outright laughed at him except for Seymour. However, Goldie also said that while they were heartbroken, the discovery did help to give them some closure. She and the rest of Jay’s family had always found themselves looking for Jay anytime they were in a crowd, hoping to find him, and now their search could end.
The police report from 1984 has Mazie Mae listed as a suspect in Jay’s disappearance, but this seems to be more of a formality than anything else, as Mazie still has not been found. She was or perhaps is, a woman of contradictions. She was full of childlike wonder but also surrounded herself with dangerous people. She cared deeply about her friends and family, but that didn’t stop her from lying to them. But it’s important to know all of these aspects about Mazie Mae if any answers are ever going to be found. Had her friends hidden her gang associations from police, they would have virtually no suspects.
The friends and loved ones of missing people are always faced with a difficult choice when someone vanishes. If they admit too many flaws about their loved one, or god forbid, criminal activity, the media will drop their case and police could write them off as simply hiding, or getting what was coming to them. However if the loved ones of the missing try to hide too much, and say only the phrases we hear all too often, that their smile lit up the room, that everyone loved them, then no one gets enough of a full picture to really look for them.
Mazie Mae Sigmon-Palmer was far from perfect, but her family would like answers, and the family of Jay Farley would like to know why their son was killed. In just 2020 the police along with Jay’s family, and the Charleston Daily Mail, teamed up to compile all known information that’s been released on the case and make it readily available online. They are urging anyone and everyone interested in true crime to read over the case files and browse the old articles. The families and the police want people to spread the word and finally breathe some publicity into this case. Perhaps now that everything’s been brought into the modern age and archived online, someone who knows something will finally come forward. But until then, the murder of Jay Farley and the disappearance of Mazie Mae Sigmon-Palmer will remain unresolved.
Episode Information
Episode Information
Research & Writing by Bethany Branson
Hosting & Production by Micheal Whelan
Published on September 29th, 2024
Music Credits
Original music created by Micheal Whelan
Outro/theme music created and composed by Ailsa Traves
Sources and Other Reading
The Charley Project. (n.d.). Mazie Mae Sigmon Palmer. The Charley Project. Retrieved from https://charleyproject.org/case/mazie-mae-sigmon-palmer
WOWK 13 News. (2023). Inside the investigation: 40 years later, what happened to Jay Farley and Mazie Mae Palmer? WOWK 13 News. Retrieved from https://www.wowktv.com/video/inside-the-investigation-40-years-later-what-happened-to-jay-farley-and-mazie-mae-palmer/5520981/
[Video]. (n.d.). YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRnyIT8fAHc
WOWK 13 News. (n.d.). Unsolved. WOWK 13 News. Retrieved from https://www.wowktv.com/unsolved