20-year-old jogger was kidnapped and killed, NC cops say. Suspect ID’d 45 years later
A 20-year-old college student went out for a jog in 1979 and never returned home, North Carolina officials said.
Now, 45 years after Tammy Sue Aldridge was discovered to be kidnapped and killed, the Alamance County Sheriff’s Office said it has solved the cold case. In an email to McClatchy News, deputies identified the suspect as Gary Lane Laframboise, a man who had a friend living near the student’s jogging route.
“I hope that this development and what’s happened here will give the family a little bit of closure,” Sheriff Terry S. Johnson said during an emotional press conference shared online Thursday, April 4.
The case dates to June 30, 1979, when deputies said Aldridge was abducted while jogging along Faucette Lane in the Burlington area. “During her captivity, she was allowed to call home twice” and told her family she was OK.
But then a few days later on July 3, 1979, Aldridge’s body was found along a highway. “Her ankles were bound,” and she was “still warm,” the sheriff said, leading investigators to believe she hadn’t been dead for long.
Aldridge died from strangulation and had been sexually assaulted, authorities said. Another man previously was found not guilty in the case, and “rightfully so,” according to the sheriff.
Mystery lingered until the case re-opened in 2020. Deputies reportedly started looking into Laframboise and discovered he had been accused in an unrelated kidnapping in October 1979, just months after Aldridge’s body was discovered.
Laframboise died in 2020, so deputies compared a DNA sample from the scene to one of his family members, Sgt. Dan Denton said in the news conference. They discovered it was a match, ending the decadeslong search for clues.
Deputies during their news conference shared an age-regression photo of Laframboise, estimating what he would’ve looked like at about 20 years old, and asked anyone with additional information to come forward. The sheriff’s office said it can’t confirm whether the suspect acted alone.
The department is based in Graham, a roughly 25-mile drive east from Greensboro.
This story was originally published April 5, 2024 at 7:42 AM with the headline "20-year-old jogger was kidnapped and killed, NC cops say. Suspect ID’d 45 years later."
