The story below is from our November/December 2021 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
The brutal slaying of a high school senior in 1929 stunned the Bent Mountain community.
Courtesy of the Virginia Room, Roanoke Public Libraries
The Back Creek Orchard Company of J.D. Willett at Bent Mountain.
Freeda Bolt awoke on a mid-December morning excited. She was eloping! Mary Gardner, with whom she and her older sister boarded in Willis in Floyd County, was a bit skeptical, as Bolt put on her long black coat with a grey fur collar. Bolt, 18, was a senior at the high school in Willis, seven miles away from her home, and like other young people lodged near the school. She told Gardner that in the evening Buren Harman, of Floyd County, and she were heading to Roanoke or possibly farther to be wed.
Days passed and the Bolt’s parents grew suspicious. They had not heard from their daughter and offered a $100 reward for anyone knowing of her whereabouts. Gardner could offer little information other than Bolt’s announced elopement. Harman, who was seen in Floyd the day after Bolt left, denied that he and Bolt had met the evening prior or had wedding plans. Nevertheless, Sheriff D.P. Hylton decided to hold Harman in jail for questioning until more was known.
Eventually Harman confessed to what the Bolt family had feared. He had murdered the petite Bolt (she was five feet, four inches tall and weighed 135 pounds) along the road descending Bent Mountain, dragged her body thirty yards off the shoulder and down the hill, and hidden her beneath leaves and logs. What he stated next to investigators was chilling and unthinkable – he had returned to Bolt the next morning , found her still alive and then finished her off. Bolt’s body would lie in the woods for six days before Harman confessed.
Hylton, along with Deputies Giles Harris and J.C. Anderson, discovered the body where Harman had indicated it could be found. A heavy cord had been tied around the victim’s neck. Dr. G.A. Kolmer, county coroner, was called to the scene. As dark had descended, Bolt’s body was removed to the Back Creek Orchard building owned by J.D. Willett. Hylton used Willett’s phone to notify Bolt’s parents. The following morning, the body was taken to Salem for an autopsy that eventually concluded Bolt had been strangled.
The shock of the crime reverberated throughout the small, tight-knit Bent Mountain community and throughout Floyd. Sheriff Hylton decided to move Harman to the jail in Roanoke City for better protection of his inmate. As the murder occurred in Roanoke County, the county’s commonwealth’s attorney, R.T. Hubard, would spearhead the prosecution.
Five days before Christmas, Bolt was laid to rest in the Mayberry Cemetery. The funeral at Little Flock Church was attended by a large crowd, but the Roanoke Times noted “the girl’s mother and her sister, Opal, who have been prostrated since the tragedy, were unable to attend the services.”
Harman’s trial began on April 7 in Salem before Judge Thurston Keister. A packed courtroom of spectators listened intently to witnesses – sixty total – over the course of several days. Most in the standing-room-only crowd brought packed lunches lest they have to surrender their seat or standing space to go eat.
Harman, 20, sat stoic, attired in a double-breasted, dark blue suit with his black hair combed straight back. The coroner provided the most compelling testimony in not only refuting defense counsel’s contention that Bolt may have committed suicide but also the revelation that she was pregnant. Others testified as to the relationship between the defendant and the victim and verified evidence from articles of clothing to a discarded suitcase.
Harman’s defense counsel, led by Bruce Hunt, raised objections at every turn, from challenging their client’s incriminating statements made in jail to the question of jurisdiction for the trial. In a final effort to vindicate Harman, the defense paraded before the jury evidence that the Harman family of Floyd County was plagued by insanity, imbecility and epilepsy. Bolstering the defense’s claim was the expert testimony of Dr. L.G. Pedigo who asserted that Harman suffered from epileptic insanity to the degree that Harman had the mental capacity of a twelve-year-old. Pedigo told the court, “He is mentally unsound. He is below par mentally to start with and he is so far abnormal that under any excitement, or irritation, or provocation, his impulses and passions would get beyond any self-control he has left.”
Among those substantiating the defense’s claim of genetic insanity was Harman’s distant cousin and member of the Floyd County Board of Supervisors Arthur Harman. According to the elder Harman members of the extended family had committed suicide, been sent to insane asylums, died of epileptic fits and had “imbecile children.”
Dr. J.S. DeJarnette, superintendent of Western State Hospital at Staunton, and Dr. John Bell, superintendent of the state’s epileptic home at Lynchburg, also examined Harman and affirmed the testimony of Pedigo and others.
The trial lasted nine days. The jury returned a verdict of guilty, and Judge Keister sentenced Harman to a life sentence in the state penitentiary. Keister, believing Harman to be “mentally deficient,” spared him the death penalty in accordance with state law at the time. A.G. Smith of the Roanoke Times described Harman’s reaction. “The prisoner heard the verdict with the same immobile countenance which has characterized his demeanor throughout the trial…A slight movement of the upper lip followed a moment later by the faintest suggestion of a smile were noted.”
Smith also summarized the trial as “the most bitterly contested and sensational court battles ever witnessed in this section” and “probably the longest criminal trial a Roanoke County court has ever witnessed.”
Harman would serve eighteen years in prison before being released. Freeda Bolt’s murder was popularized as a bluegrass ballad written by D.M. Shank and recorded by the Floyd County Ramblers in 1930 and later by the renowned Carter Family in 1938.
The story above is from our November/December 2021. For more stories, subscribe today or view our FREE digital edition. Thank you for supporting local journalism!