More than five decades after a decorated World War II veteran-turned-milkman was murdered “execution-style” on his route, testimony from his killer’s ex-wife solved the cold case.
Hiram “Ross” Grayam had been shot multiple times when investigators searching the area via airplane spotted his milk truck deep in the woods in Vero Beach, Florida, in April 1968, the Indian River County Sheriff’s Office wrote in a Thursday news release.
The Purple Heart recipient had witnessed the liberation of two concentration camps and survived the Battle of the Bulge before he was shot dead, CBS reported.
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Hiram “Ross” Grayam, who settled in Florida’s Vero Beach with his family and became a milkman after serving in Europe during World War II, was shot multiple times “execution-style” while on the job on April 11, 1968. (Indian River County Sheriff’s Office)
Grayam’s murder went unsolved until this year, when the ex-wife and a friend of Thomas J. Williams’ sister told Florida authorities he’d confessed to Grayam’s killing before his own death in 2016.
“These folks said, ‘I would have never said anything to you before, as long as he was alive, he was a threat to me and my family, we would have never told you,’ but the fact that he is now dead gave them the courage to come forward,” Indian River County Sheriff Eric Flowers said at a press conference this week.
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Thomas J. Williams confessed to his wife and his sister’s friend that he had killed Grayam, according to the Indian River County Sheriff’s Office. (Indian River County Sheriff’s Office)
“Two independent witnesses, who both say this guy confessed to killing the milkman to them, independent of each other, (they) don’t know each other,” Flowers said.
In 2006, rumors that Williams was responsible for the locally infamous cold case circulated — he wrote in a letter to the editor to an area news outlet “saying that he had been accused of the murder, but he denied having knowledge of it, that he wasn’t involved in it,” the sheriff said at the press conference.
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The department is still looking for a second man they believe was involved.
Soon after Grayam’s disappearance on April 11, 1968, a witness told deputies that she saw the milkman talking to two men walking alongside the road before they all left together in the Borden Milk Company truck.
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“She said that Mr. Grayam engaged them in conversation, and announced that he would be back shortly,” Flowers said.
Grayam’s son, Larry, who was 16 when his father was killed, recalled his shock.
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“A deputy came to the door and told my mom that dad had not returned in his Borden Milk Company truck to the yard in Fort Harrison and had talked to her. Then he wanted to talk to the kids – I was the oldest one there,” Grayam’s son told Fox News Digital on Friday.
“We went outside in the yard, he wanted to know if there were good relations between my mother and my father – they wanted to try to see if my father just took off somewhere,” he said.
“At 16 years old I called him an idiot,” the younger Grayam recalled. “I said ‘Do you think if he was going to run away, he would do it in a yellow and black and white truck instead of his own truck?”
Larry Grayam, 72, speaks during a press conference regarding the 1968 murder of his father, Hiram “Ross” Grayam, at the Indian River County Sheriff’s Office in Vero Beach, Florida, on April 11. (KAILA JONES /TCPALM / USA TODAY NETWORK)
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“They knew he carried cash – most people paid the milk man in cash then, they knew he’d have it,” Grayam’s son said of the killers’ potential motives. “Initially, their thoughts were an armed robbery… It was [also] about a week after Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed – racial tensions were the highest that I’ve ever seen.”
Now, detectives are asking residents of Gifford, the town where Grayam was last seen by witnesses, to come forward if they know anything about the second man or Grayam’s final movements.
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“The Cold Case Unit continues to pursue every new lead,” the sheriff’s office wrote in their statement. “Armed with the latest technology and new partnerships, they stand as beacons of hope for families like the Grayams, ensuring that no victim is forgotten, and no crime is unpunished.”
“I’m hopeful, but it’s doubtful unless somebody comes forward that he has confessed to, if we open up an additional line of evidence,” Grayam’s son said of finding the second culprit. “Witness’s memories change, a whole host of things could happen.”
