In the close-knit community of Folly Beach, South Carolina, Mary Earline Bunch was a familiar and beloved 16-year-old girl. The daughter of the town's former police chief, Julian M. Bunch, she was part of the fabric of the seaside town. Her life, full of the promise of youth, came to an abrupt and terrifying end in the winter of 1974, leaving a wound in her family and the community that would never fully heal.
On February 20, 1974, Mary Earline vanished.
Her disappearance spread a chill through Folly Beach, a community already on edge. Nearly a year prior, in May 1973, two other teenage girls, 13-year-old Alexis Ann Latimer and 14-year-old Sheri Jan Clark, had also gone missing from the beach. For two agonizing months, the Bunch family held onto hope, a hope that was brutally extinguished in April 1974. A dog walking on the beach began digging in the sand dunes, leading to a horrific discovery: the decomposed remains of a young woman.
The body, bound by rope at the hands and feet, was soon identified as Mary Earline Bunch. Her discovery was the key that unlocked the wider, terrifying truth of what had been happening in Folly Beach. The investigation quickly led to a U.S. Navy sailor stationed in Charleston named Richard Raymond Valenti. He was a married father who lived just blocks from the Bunch family; Mary Earline had even occasionally babysat for his children. After his arrest for a separate assault, Valenti confessed to the murders of all three girls.
Valenti led investigators to the shallow graves in the sand dunes where he had buried his victims. Not far from where Mary Earline was found, police unearthed the remains of Alexis Latimer and Sheri Clark. Valenti admitted to abducting the girls at gunpoint, strangling them, and hanging them from pipes beneath a beach house. A prosecutor would later describe him as a "sexual deviant." The community was horrified to learn the killer had been living in their midst, a man who some knew as a Bible-carrying Christian.
In June 1974, Richard Valenti was tried and convicted for the murders of Alexis Latimer and Sheri Clark. He received two consecutive life sentences. Despite his confession to killing Mary Earline Bunch, the murder charge in her case was ultimately dropped after he was sentenced for the other two slayings. For the families, this legal resolution was only the beginning of a new, lifelong struggle. Due to the parole laws at the time of his conviction, Valenti became eligible for parole hearings every two years.
The devastating impact on the Bunch family was immeasurable. Mary Earline's younger sister, Lucy Bunch Hopkins, later spoke of the unending grief. She recalled the chilling memory of seeing Valenti in the police station after his arrest, clutching a Bible with a missing person's flier for her sister tucked inside. Their mother, overcome with heartbreak, died from pneumonia just a year after her daughter's murder. Their father, the former police chief, slept with a pistol under his pillow for the rest of his life. "I'm the only one left because of him," Hopkins said years later, reflecting on the man who shattered her family.
For decades, the families of all three victims fought tirelessly to keep Valenti behind bars, attending every one of his parole hearings. Their efforts were successful; Valenti was denied parole 21 times. The man known as the Folly Beach Serial Killer died of natural causes in prison on December 16, 2020, at the age of 77, finally closing the last chapter of a case that had haunted the South Carolina coast for more than four decades.
