On a pleasant spring afternoon in Folly Beach, South Carolina, 13-year-old Alexis Ann Latimer and her best friend, 14-year-old Sheri Jan Clark, left Alexis’s family cottage for a walk on the beach. It was May 23, 1973, and the two girls, who were looking forward to starting high school, vanished without a trace. When they failed to return by dark, Alexis's mother, Mary Latimer, grew worried and reported them missing, but her concerns were initially dismissed by police who suggested the girls
were likely runaways. For more than two weeks, the family's pleas for a serious investigation went unanswered.
The community's sense of security was shattered as months passed with no word of the missing friends. The search for Alexis and Sheri turned into a grim, nearly year-long wait for answers. The breakthrough in the case came not from the initial missing persons investigation, but from a series of other violent attacks on young women in the area. In April 1974, after another young woman was abducted, police arrested Richard Raymond Valenti, a 31-year-old U.S. Navy sailor stationed at the Charleston Naval Shipyard.
Following his arrest, Valenti confessed to the murders of Alexis and Sheri, as well as the killing of another teenager, 16-year-old Mary Earline Bunch, who had disappeared in February 1974. He led investigators to shallow graves in the sand dunes near his Folly Beach home. On April 17, 1974, almost 11 months after they were last seen, the remains of Alexis and Sheri were unearthed. Their identities were confirmed through dental records and personal items found with them, including a necklace and a ring.
Valenti provided a chilling account of the girls' final hours. He had approached them on the beach with a gun, forced them into an abandoned shower house beneath a vacant home, and bound and gagged them. Inside the shower stall, he put ropes around their necks, made them stand on chairs, and then kicked the chairs away, watching as they died by hanging from overhead water pipes. His method of killing was strangulation and hanging. Valenti was identified as the serial killer responsible for at least three murders between 1973 and 1974, becoming known as The Folly Beach Serial Killer.
In June 1974, Richard Valenti was tried and convicted on two counts of murder for the deaths of Alexis Latimer and Sheri Clark. He was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences. He was never tried for the murder of Mary Earline Bunch or for assaults on at least five other young women. At the time of his sentencing, South Carolina law made him eligible for parole after just ten years.
For decades, the families of Alexis and Sheri were forced to relive their trauma every two years at Valenti's parole hearings. Led by Alexis's mother, Mary, and Sheri's sister, Paula Clark Marion, the families tirelessly fought to keep him incarcerated, gathering thousands of signatures on petitions and delivering emotional testimony before the parole board. Valenti was denied parole 21 times. At one hearing, Mary Latimer implored the board, "He's not cured. He's an evil person. Please, I implore you, keep Richard Valenti in jail until he dies."
Richard Valenti died of natural causes in a hospital on December 16, 2020, at the age of 77, after serving 46 years in prison. Upon his death, Mary Latimer expressed a profound sense of relief, stating it was a release from the recurring trauma of his parole hearings. "To think that we do not have to go through another parole hearing, to not have to relive what happened to our daughter and to Sherri, it's a real relief," she said. "Perhaps this sounds a bit crass, but this is the best Christmas present I could have."
