Clovis native part of article in Texas Monthly

Clovis native Sandy Massey received an email Jan. 19 that shed light on a mystery she had wondered about since July 1966.

A story about the young woman’s death, and the 55-year effort to identify her, is featured in the most recent issue of Texas Monthly.

Every summer Sandy, then 15, would stay with her grandparents in Pecos, Texas, where they owned The Ropers Motel.

On July 5, 1966, in the morning her granddad checked in a young man and a young woman, Massey said. Her granddad said the girl “was so young and (the man) looked a lot older.”

She said her granddad thought “it was a little strange, the age difference.”

Massey, then under her maiden name of Moore, said she first saw the man and woman who had checked in as husband and wife, sitting by the swimming pool. The man was drinking a beer and the young woman was drinking a soda.

Massey said she noticed the young woman was younger than the man and thought she was probably 18 or 19 years old and that he looked 25.

“That was quite a bit of age difference in that time,” she said. In those days, a girl that young would not have “gone with someone that much older.”

“A couple of hours later the maid came in and was hysterical” and directed she and her granddad to the swimming pool where a girl’s body had sunk to the bottom at the 12-foot deep end, she said.

“I jumped into the pool and tried to bring her up two times but she was too heavy — I couldn’t bring her up by myself,” she said. A guest helped her lift the girl’s body and put it on the side of the pool. She started CPR on her, when the ambulance arrived and took the young woman away.

“One of the controversies (about this) is there was a broken bottle on the side of the pool at the deep end,” she said. When they brought her body up, they noticed a knot on her ... "I think it was the front of her head.”

She said she and her granddad thought that was suspicious and that maybe there had been “foul play” involved. They thought someone might have hit her with the bottle and she became unconscious and pushed her into the pool.

“The police were talking about this too,” she said.

After the ambulance took the young woman away, Massey said she went back to the office and was by herself when the man who was staying with the young woman came in and asked for their registration card. He said he needed it for identification to bring to the hospital.

She said she gave him the registration card. “The man was supposed to follow the police and everybody to the hospital.”

But someone noticed the man “took off in the opposite direction,” she said. “He never showed up at the hospital.”

She said without any proof to the contrary, the young woman’s death was ruled a simple drowning. The police checked on the name the man gave to stay at the motel and it belonged to a person stationed on a military base in North Carolina. It was a fake name.

Massey said the town collected donations to bury the young woman, with nobody knowing next of kin.

“I went back two more summers and I would visit her grave and put flowers on it,” she said.

On January 19th, Massey received an email from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The center told her the young woman she pulled out of the pool 54 years ago had been identified. The people at the center wanted permission to give her contact information to the police in Pecos, who wanted to talk to her about what happened that day.

The police “wanted my side of the story as to what happened,” she said. The case about the young woman’s drowning was still open and “they are trying to find the man.”

The identity of the young woman was discovered through the DNA in her skeletal remains, according to the Pecos Police Department. The young woman’s name is Jolaine Hemmy of Kansas. She was 17 at the time of her death.

Pecos Police Chief Lisa Tarango told The News she was contacted by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which had the young woman’s case in their files. From there, the chief decided to look into the case and visited the funeral home where the young woman’s body was prepared.

Chief Tarango said an elderly gentleman pointed her to the young woman’s file. She got a judge to authorize the exhumation of her body. The University of North Texas did an identification of the DNA from her remains.

The police department then partnered with several organizations who using skeletal DNA and family tree genealogy were ultimately able to find some of the young woman’s siblings and identify the name of the young woman.

Massey, who moved from Clovis to Lubbock in 2001, said she was surprised to hear that the young woman’s identity had been discovered after all these years.

“I was relieved when I found out,” she said. She said it relieved some of the guilt she felt for giving the man the registration card, which made it difficult to find his identity.

She said two of the woman’s sisters have since contacted her and thanked her for trying to save their sister’s life that day.

She said the Pecos police contacted her three times since. They wanted to know what the man traveling with Jolaine looked like. She told them he was about 5’10” and had light brown hair, “more brown than blond.” He was Caucasian.

Her grandparents, Paul and Garnett Rooks, moved away from Pecos three years after the drowning, she said. They sold the motel and bought another in Albuquerque.

Massey said she has not been back to Pecos since her grandparents left and does not know anyone there.