On the evening of October 21, 1977, 15-year-old Ranee Ann Gregor, a White female, left her home on Clever Road in Robinson Township, Pennsylvania, with her 17-year-old boyfriend, John Feeny. The young couple was believed to be heading to a pizza parlor and was last seen at a gas station at approximately 10:00 p.m. When Ranee did not return home, her parents grew concerned and contacted the authorities.
The following morning, a grim discovery was made.
John Feeny was found murdered in his blood-splattered van, which was parked with the engine still running near an old strip mine in a local lovers' lane. He had been shot once in the neck at close range with a shotgun. Inside the vehicle were Ranee's blue jacket and her purse, but of Ranee herself, there was no trace. Her disappearance sparked extensive searches by more than 400 volunteers and police, who scoured the nearby area and even dragged a local lake, but she was never found. Ranee was a junior at Montour High School at the time she went missing.
For three decades, the case of Ranee's disappearance and John's murder remained a painful, unsolved mystery for their families and the community. The incident was part of a series of 27 unsolved murders that plagued southwestern Pennsylvania between 1976 and 1977. A break in the case finally came in 2007 when Edward Arthur Surratt, a former truck driver and a convicted serial killer already serving multiple life sentences in a Florida prison for other crimes, confessed to the murders of both Ranee Ann Gregor and John Feeny.
Surratt, the prime suspect in at least 18 murders, admitted to killing the two teenagers as part of a broader confession to eight murders. He offered the confession in the hopes of being transferred to a prison in South Carolina. However, his admissions were described by authorities as vague, and he has not been charged in connection with Ranee's disappearance or John's murder. In his confession, Surratt chillingly stated that Ranee's body was 'unrecoverable by anybody's standards,' providing a semblance of closure but no solace of a final resting place for her family. Ranee Ann Gregor is still officially listed as a missing person, her case a haunting reminder of a violent past.
