‘Science will catch up’: 1981 cold case still haunts retired CMPD detective

CHARLOTTE — Darrell Price is retired and hasn’t worked as a cold case detective with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in nearly two years.

But he returned to CMPD headquarters because of an unsolved case that still haunts him.

“As I advanced through the detective ranks and made homicide detective, that was one of the cases I really wanted to look at to see if I could come up with different ideas,” Price told Channel 9’s Erika Jackson.

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Price was in the police academy on February 18, 1981, when five-year-old Neely Shane Smith was reported missing.

She was outside playing with friends at her apartment complex in east Charlotte, when witnesses reported seeing a gray-haired man pick her up and force her into his van.

Neely’s mom, Kimberly Griffin, spoke to Channel 9 afterward: “Somebody is sitting out there saying, ‘I don’t have to worry about that. It’s not going to happen to me.’ You’re wrong – it could be you.”

Price told Channel 9 that abductions were rare back in 1981. “Children just didn’t get snatched and disappear,” Price said.

Crews searched for weeks. Then, nearly two months after Neely disappeared, farmers found human remains in a remote area near the Mecklenburg-Union County line.

“Throughout the weather conditions of the wintertime and two months laying out, she became badly decomposed, to the point where her body was tattered, clothing scattered all over the place,” Price said.

Police identified the remains as Neely’s and launched a murder investigation.

“There was very little to work on in those days. There was no technology that was going to help, no cell phone triangulation records, no geo fencing, no Google searching. So, it just kind of went dry for a long time,” Price said.

The little evidence available was eerily similar to another young girl’s murder. Ten-year-old Amanda Ray went missing in 1979, two years before Neely was reported missing.

“They lived in relatively close proximity to one another. There’s no knowledge of them knowing each other,” Price said.

Amanda’s body was found the day after her disappearance in a wooded area of Mecklenburg County.

Fred Coffey was convicted of Amanda’s murder in 1987. Police said they didn’t have enough evidence to connect Coffey to Neely’s murder, but they’re not ruling him out as a suspect.

The case may be cold but CMPD’s work on it never stopped.

About 18 months ago, detectives used grant money to reprocess all evidence that could carry the killer’s DNA.

“We submitted everything we had and we came back with nothing of value at this time. And our hopes are that science will catch up to this evidence and maybe one day give us a suspect,” Price said.

He added that the progression of technology over the past four decades, specifically artificial intelligence, could one day also help with degraded DNA samples. “Maybe amplify them to the point where you can figure out who that DNA belongs to,” Price said.

Price told Channel 9 he never expected Neely’s case would go unsolved this long. He hopes new eyes on the case can give her family closure.

“I still hope that Detective Hefner and Detective Helms might one day find a lead, call me, and say, ‘Hey, we think we got it.’ And that would certainly make me happy,” Price said.

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