Richard Frost is not big on New Year’s celebrations.
For him, the dawning of January is a stark reminder of pain inflicted by decades-old wounds that will never heal — and justice yet unserved.
Earlier this week, his eyes were fixed on commemorating two mournful dates that forever changed his life.
On Sunday, Frost spent time in an area just off D.E. Denman Road north of Charleston. It was on an adjacent logging road that the blood-stained car of his 23-year-old daughter, Gladys Marie Frost, was found by hunters on Sunday, Jan. 8, 1989.
On Monday, he visited a nearby section of Denman Road — it was called Snake Hill Road back then — to mark the 34th anniversary of Jan. 9, 1989, when his daughter’s lifeless body was discovered there, some 400 yards from her car.
Asked what he had done during his visit to the site, Frost said, “I just walked out there and spoke to her.”
He added that the site “looks the same. It’s pitiful.”
Miss Frost, a 1983 graduate of Charleston High School, was brutally murdered. She had been beaten, strangled and stabbed multiple times in the neck. The coroner said burns around her chin and jaw appeared to have been caused by a cigarette.
Her date of death was fixed at Jan. 6. Miss Frost had been missing since Jan. 4, when she left her parents’ Charleston home following Christmas and New Year's break to return to a Memphis business school where she was enrolled.
A reported one-dozen or so possible suspects were investigated, but nearly three-and-a-half decades later, no one has been charged in the case.
Richard Frost made another stop Monday afternoon, visiting his daughter’s gravesite in New Town Cemetery north of Charleston.
Afterward, he dropped by The Sun-Sentinel office, asking that something be written about his daughter to keep her memory alive.
Tears welled up in his eyes as the 78-year-old man spoke.
“I don’t know how to put it in words,” he said. “The emotions are still here. It’s something I can’t shake.”
Gladys Frost
Frost is adamant in his belief that, over the years, local law enforcement, specifically the sheriff’s office, has not been dedicated enough to the investigation.
“I believe there is more that can be done than they are doing,” he said.
State law enforcement agencies such as the Mississippi Highway Patrol and the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation have assisted local lawmen, to no visible effect.
The Gladys Frost homicide is the second-oldest unsolved murder in Tallahatchie County’s modern era. The oldest, that of Glendora town clerk Myrtle Hitch, dates to 1981. Overall, some 10 slayings await resolution. Among the group, Miss Frost was the second-youngest victim.
From time to time, authorities have released information suggesting that inroads into the case had been made.
In January 1991, a trip to Chicago by a Tallahatchie sheriff's deputy and an MHP investigator to question witnesses who had been in Tallahatchie at the time of the murder reportedly led to the development of a "strong suspect" in the Frost case, said one official at the time.
Gladys Frost, in a black-and-white version of a 1983 Charleston High School senior portrait
In February 1991, it was announced that physical evidence collected during the investigation, including blood cells and hair fibers found at the crime scene and during the autopsy, had been sent to a Dallas laboratory for DNA testing. Then Tallahatchie County Sheriff Donald Strider cautioned, however, that freezing temperatures and 4 inches of rainfall occurring between the time Miss Frost had gone missing and when her body was found might have impacted the quality of the evidence.
If the DNA analysis turned up anything helpful, it was not made public and no grand jury indictment or arrest followed.
During the administration of former Sheriff William Brewer, Miss Frost’s 1984 Toyota Corolla, which the family had stored since shortly after her death, was sent in early 2009 to the Mississippi Crime Lab in Batesville for new forensic analysis using investigative techniques and technology that were unavailable 20 years earlier. At the time, Brewer said the tests proved “beneficial” and moved the case one step closer to a resolution.
Since then, 14 years have passed.
Tallahatchie County Sheriff Jimmy Fly said Monday there have been no recent developments in the Frost case.
He explained that a $15,000 reward offered by the Tallahatchie County Board of Supervisors for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators in any of the county’s unsolved homicides remains in place.
Fly added that “any information [about any of the cold case murders] is welcome.”
People may call the sheriff's office at 662-647-3700 or MBI's Cold Case Unit at 601-987-1573. Leads may be given anonymously.
Frost said he hopes to see some closure from his daughter’s case during his lifetime.
If not, he prays that the memory of his daughter and of all the other unavenged homicide victims in the county will remain.
“I hope they won’t forget,” he noted.
Meanwhile, Frost will continue to face the painful reminders with a complex flood of mixed emotions.
Her birthday is near. On March 22, Gladys would have been 58 years old.
Editor's note: This is an expanded version of the original story, which appeared in the Jan. 12, 2023, print edition of The Sun-Sentinel.
