SC murder victim known only as Mr. X for nearly 50 years just identified. Here’s how & who he was

They called him Mr. X.

He was buried in a potter’s field in northern Greenville County after being found dead by a hunter in 1975.

He had been beaten in the head and strangled, wrapped in a sheet and set on fire.

Greenville County Sheriff Hobart Lewis announced Monday they now know who Mr. X was.

Oscar James Nedd of White Plains, New York. He was 23, a slip of a man barely 140 pounds, no more than 5-foot-5 inches tall. He wanted to be a journalist and was engaged to be married.

Nedd had saved $1,500 working two jobs to go to college after moving to New York from Georgia.

He was last heard from by his sister Iris Rumph on Jan. 1, 1975, according to The Charley Project ,which has compiled a list of some 16,000 cold cases from across the United States.

Nedd was living in a rooming house in White Plains, the website said, and had allowed a nephew, Joshua Fluellen, to stay with him. His sister warned Nedd the nephew had escaped from jail, accused of shooting someone.

After Nedd’s sister reported him missing a week later, law enforcement officials went to his apartment and found blood spatters, bloodstained clothing, and a large puddle of blood under the mattress, The Charley Project said.

“A witness reported seeing Fluellen struggling to carry a large object, similar to a human body, which was wrapped in a rug,” the Charley Project said. “The witness stated Fluellen carried the object down the stairs, put it in the trunk of a car and drove away.”

By the time authorities went to Nedd’s apartment, a body had been found Jan. 4 in Greenville County. A man who said he committed the murder was arrested but charges were dropped due to insufficient evidence.

Despite the investigation in South Carolina and another in New York, the case stalled for nearly 50 years.

On Monday, Lewis said former Upstate TV journalist Brad Willis’ podcast “Murder, Etc.” was what caught his attention about the Mr. X case. The body was exhumed on July 17, 2020 and some skeletal remains went to the National Unidentified and Missing Persons System for DNA testing.

They released a photo of his remains.

In February 2024, Greenville County investigators were contacted by the White Plains Police Department regarding a match with a missing person case they had been working on since 1975, Lewis said.

Investigators contacted family members and the identity was confirmed, he said. Investigators believe Nedd was killed in New York.

“It’s really encouraging to have modern investigators take a dedicated interest in cases that are so old, especially when those cases never got much attention to begin with,” Willis said.

His goal with the podcast was to help people understand “how many wrongs were never made right.”

He said he hopes someone will be brought to justice.

“But even if they can’t, at least Mr. Nedd’s family can bury the man they’d been trying to find for nearly half a century,” Willis said.

Greenville County Sheriff’s Office cold case unit, which was revamped when Lewis took office in 2020, has since solved 11 cases, Lewis said.

From the New York side, the case went nowhere, despite Fluellen’s arrest driving Nedd’s car in Las Cruces, New Mexico in February 1975. He was charged in a string of armed robberies in New Mexico and Arizona, the Charley Project said.

“Austin Avery, the police detective in charge of Nedd’s missing persons investigation in New York, wanted to travel to New Mexico to question Fluellen about his uncle’s disappearance, but his superiors refused to allow the trip,” the Charley Project said on its website.

Avery retired in 1978 yet never gave up on the case, interviewing witnesses and Fluellen himself. Avery died in 2014.

Since 1975, Fluellen has been convicted of crimes ranging from kidnapping to armed bank robbery, The New York Times reported in a story on Avery’s long-held quest to get justice for Nedd.

Fluellen has said he and Nedd drove to California in 1975 and he did not see him again. He claims Nedd left after meeting a girl in a pool hall.

“He has no explanation for the blood in the apartment or the witness statement,” the Charley project said.

Nedd was declared legally dead in 2005 despite his body never being found.

Avery promised to buy a headstone for him.

Rumph told The New York Times she wanted it installed in Willow Lake Cemetery, located in Fort Valley, Georgia, beside their mother.