By Greg Jordan
Bluefield Daily Telegraph
RAVENCLIFF – Authorities are still awaiting test results which could help determine whether the hidden grave of a soldier who disappeared 62 years ago has finally been found.
Searchers gathered Nov. 7 at Little Bolt Mountain, a Wyoming County community, to see if specially-trained sniffer dogs could locate the remains of Sgt. James Lee Haynes of the United States Army. He was reported missing on Dec. 6, 1963 and declared dead on Dec. 8, 1964.
His daughters, Brenda Haynes-Lester and Linda Haynes, were only a year and a half old when he disappeared while hitchhiking from Baltimore, Md. to his parents’ home in Saulsville, a community in Wyoming County. For years, they have maintained the search for their father.
In 1963, Sgt. Haynes was in the process of being transferred from West Germany to Fort Knox, Ky., so he went on leave. He was in the Baltimore, Md., area while his wife and four of their children were there for a funeral. He bought a van in West Germany, but a labor strike delayed its arrival in America. He decided to hitchhike to West Virginia and managed to get a ride to Oak Hill in Fayette County, then kept walking to his parents’ home in Saulsville, a Wyoming County community.
The sisters are not sure if their father walked all the way from Oak Hill to Wyoming County, if he managed to hitch a ride there, or both, Brenda said in an earlier interview. He stopped at a Bolt-area tavern for some hot chocolate or coffee. Years later, one man told the sisters that he was there when their father arrived and described how three other patrons made fun of him when he didn’t order a beer.
Brenda said her father wouldn’t have ordered a beer or any other alcohol because he was going to his parents’ home, and his father was a minister. Out of respect for his parents, he didn’t want to arrive smelling like alcohol. He also had Christmas presents in his luggage.
Picking up his suitcase and duffle bag, Sgt. James Lee Haynes left the tavern. The witness told Brenda and Linda that the three men followed him.
And later that evening, their father was murdered, the sisters said. In 1971, several of one suspect’s relatives said taht he told them he and his companions beat up the soldier, ran over him with their vehicle and then backed over him before putting him in the trunk. A fourth man who had left the tavern saw the three men alongside the road with their trunk open. He slowed and asked if they needed help, but they told him to “keep moving.”
All three of the suspects are now deceased, said Raleigh County Prosecuting Attorney Tom Truman.
Brenda and Linda were among the law enforcement officials and volunteers that searched two Wyoming County locations for clues on Nov. 7. Two specially-trained sniffer dogs with K9 Search & Rescue of West Virginia were used at both locations. The dogs, German Shepherd named Theo and a female border collie named Charlee, are trained to locate possible human remains. In other searches, cadaver dogs like them have found the remains of Civil War soldiers.
The dogs did not indicate at the Little Bolt site, but they did find a possible site near one suspect’s former home, Chief Investigator Jeffrey Shumate with the Raleigh County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office said Nov. 8.
The spot was sprayed with a chemical which reacts to blood. It’s reaction indicated blood’s presence, so samples were taken and sent for testing, “presumably by the FBI,” for testing, Shumate said.
No digging will be done until the tests results are completed, he said.
The federal government’s recent shutdown, which lasted from Oct. 1 to Nov. 12 while a 2026 fiscal year appropriations bill was debated in Congress, caused the laboratory to get behind on its testing, Truman said. The tests results are still pending.
Brenda and Linda said their family has plans for when their father is found. They have one of his uniforms, so they plan to put it with his remains for burial at Arlington National Cemetery. During the Korean War, he was shot in the chest and was later presented the Purple Heart. Receiving this medal qualifies him for burial at the national cemetery.
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