Folly Beach

In the early 1970s, Richard Valenti was a U.S. Navy sailor stationed in Charleston, South Carolina, living in the beach town of Folly Beach. On May 23, 1973, best friends Alexis Latimer, 13, and Sherri Clark, 14, went for a walk on the beach and never came home.

Valenti had forced the girls at gunpoint beneath his house, where he bound them and hanged them from the water pipes overhead. On February 20, 1974, 16-year-old Mary Earline Bunch also vanished. Around the same time, several other girls in the Charleston area survived abductions or attacks. Valenti was arrested in April 1974 after a young woman he had attacked the previous September learned his name and went to police. He confessed to all three killings and led police to shallow graves in the sand near his home, where all three girls were recovered.

On June 27, 1974, a jury convicted Valenti of murdering Alexis and Sherri, and he received two life sentences. The charge in Mary Bunch’s death never went to trial. He was refused parole 21 times, most recently in October 2020, as Sherri’s sister Paula Marion kept speaking against his release. Valenti died of natural causes in state custody on December 16, 2020, at age 77.