Sheriff credits podcast after 1975 cold case victim, formerly known as “Mr. X,” is identified

The chilly case of a person referred to as “Mr. X” has seen a major breakthrough after almost half a century, South Carolina police stated Monday.

The Greenville County Sheriff credit a real crime podcast — “Homicide, And many others.” — for drawing consideration to the case, which dates again to 1975 when the stays of “Mr. X” have been discovered by a hunter within the South Carolina metropolis. The stays have been “discovered wrapped in a sheet and smoldering, indicating that they’d been set on fireplace,” the sheriff’s division said in a news release Monday. The demise was dominated a murder, with the person topic to blunt drive trauma and strangulation. Police have been unable to establish him regardless of “quite a few outreach efforts through the years.” 

Then in 2020, Greenville Sheriff Hobart Lewis “revamped” the city’s chilly case unit to give attention to re-examining instances with new know-how. Since then, 11 instances have been solved, the sheriff’s division stated. 

The chilly case unit was in a position to establish the person referred to as “Mr. X” as Oscar James Nedd of White Plains, New York. Nedd was born in Georgia in April 1951 and later moved to New York for faculty, the division stated. 

The podcast “Homicide, And many others.” lined his case in a reside episode in 2020.  

Investigators from the sheriff’s workplace labored with the county coroner’s workplace that very same 12 months to exhume the physique from the place it had been buried, and despatched a few of the stays to the Nationwide Unidentified and Lacking Individuals System for DNA testing. A DNA profile was created for the sufferer in that database. In February 2024, the White Plains Police Division contacted investigators to say the profile matched Nedd’s lacking individuals case filed there. 

Relations have been contacted and investigators have been in a position to verify Nedd’s identification.

“The tireless work and modern approaches employed by our investigators have introduced closure to a case that has remained a thriller for almost 5 many years,” Lewis stated within the information launch. “Their willpower to hunt justice for victims and their households is actually commendable. I wish to thank every member of our chilly case unit for his or her laborious work and dedication.”

It is believed that Nedd was killed in New York, the sheriff’s division stated. CBS News affiliate WSPA reported that the stays have been then transported to South Carolina. White Plains authorities are actually investigating the murder.