Alamance County Sheriff’s Office officials say they identified the suspect in the previously unsolved 1979 kidnapping, sexual assault and murder of Tammy Sue Aldridge, but the man they say was responsible is already dead.
Gary Lane Laframboise, who died in March 2020 in South Carolina at age 60, actually had at least caught someone’s attention in 1979, said Sgt. Dan Denton, who began looking at the Aldridge case in his spare time in 2020.
“There was a fingerprint card with Laframboise’s prints on it in the Aldridge case files,” he said. “He’d been arrested in Graham in October 1979 for kidnapping a young girl and impersonating an officer. The officer working the case must have thought that it was a red flag, happening so close to the Aldridge crime.”
Aldridge, 20, was abducted while jogging on Jim Barnwell Road on June 30, 1979. During her captivity, she was allowed to call home that night and the next day, telling her family that she was OK and would be home soon but couldn’t tell them where she was.
Her body, still warm, was found near the intersection of Jim Minor Road and N.C 54 on July 3. Her shirt was on inside out, and her pants were on backwards. She had rope around her ankles and rope marks on her neck and wrists. Her death was ruled a homicide by manual strangulation.
Laframboise pleaded guilty to charges in the Graham case December 1979 and was released in 1983. He moved to South Carolina in the early 1990s.
Sheriff Terry Johnson said the key to the case was advances in DNA technology and semen found on a feminine hygiene product that was collected as evidence.
Denton said that the semen actually was not found at the time the hygiene product was collected.
“The evidence was discovered in the early 2000s when all the evidence was resubmitted to the state lab for DNA testing. In 1979, they didn’t do the sexual assault kits like they do now. Without that, we wouldn’t have had a DNA sample for comparison,” he said.
The DNA testing in the early 2000s produced a single male profile from the semen.
“Numerous detectives over the years tried to find a match for that profile, but were just going down the list of possible suspects,” Denton said. “There were over 30 DNA samples taken and tested, and none were a match.”
After Denton started looking at the case, he followed what had become a common path: finding family matches.
“I got with the Cold Case Coalition in Greensboro, and we had enough of a sample to use. The genealogist, Leslie Kaufman, got started on it. After a year, she identified Gary Laframboise as a possible match,” he said. “We were able to locate a family member, and they were gracious enough to give me a sample. And it was a match. So, we know this is our guy.”
Johnson said that Laframboise had a friend who lived on Faucette Lane at the time.
Johnson has notified Aldridge’s family of the findings.
“This case is 45 years old. DNA doesn’t lie. There is no doubt in my mind that this is our man,” Johnson said. “Ultimately, at the end of the day, this is all about bringing the family some measure of closure.”
