Former cop who won ‘Big Brother’ show investigating SC cold case with podcast. How to watch

In a few weeks, it will be 23 years since Sylvia Holtzclaw and Ebb and Maggie Barnes were shot to death in a little bank along Interstate 85 during an apparent robbery.

The crime has never been solved.

Now the case is getting renewed interest thanks to a former undercover police officer turned podcaster who has offered to pay for high-tech analysis of shell casings found at the scene.

Derrick Levasseur is a former Central Falls, Rhode Island police officer who went on to win the Big Brother reality show, collecting some $575,000.

On his YouTube show called Detective Perspective, Levasseur chronicled the crime as most everyone in Greer, South Carolina, have come to know.

Holtzclaw was well known in the community, where she lived all her life and was said to be at Greer First Baptist Church whenever the doors were open. She married her high school sweetheart and divorced when their two sons were young. She volunteered for what needed doing.

Ebb Barnes was a beloved physics professor at the University of South Carolina Upstate, nearing retirement.

Maggie worked for the National Beta Club in Spartanburg and was an accomplished weaver.

The Barneses met while students at King College in Bristol, Tennessee, and married in 1965 in the McConnells, South Carolina, church where Maggie’s father was pastor.

Holtzclaw was working on May 16, 2003 as a teller at Blue Ridge Savings Bank. The Barneses were there to move some money into their IRA account.

Around 1:30 p.m., the alarm in the cash draw tipped off law enforcement that a robbery was in progress.

When they arrived 13 minutes later, they found three dead people in a utility room, shot with what they later discovered was a .40 Glock. The locking mechanism on the outside door was broken and the surveillance tape was missing.

Dozens of federal, state and local investigators have spent thousands of hours following hundreds of leads, and yet the same questions remain.

Why, if it was a simple bank robbery, were they shot? And why has it been so hard to solve this crime?

Levasseur said the missing surveillance tape was especially disheartening.

3 possibilities for the shooter

He pointed to three possibilities for the shooter, all of which the Greer Police investigated.

A transient, someone driving past on Interstate 85 who saw the bank in little more than a mobile home and thought it was an opportunity to make some cash. Levasseur called the building “basically an ATM.”

A Columbia man who stole a car similar to one seen leaving the area shortly after the murdered. It was a red Alero stolen from a Columbia car rental business. The man Emmerson Wright was pulled over in Georgia, wanted for arson and robbery by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, but was able to flee. He was pulled over again in 2005 and killed himself with a .40 Glock when officers approached. The gun did not match the one used in the Blue Ridge murders and Greer Police were never able to interview him.

A man described by a customer in the bank about 30 minutes before the murders as white, short and husky with blond hair. A sketch artist drew a picture based on the description. Levasseur questioned why in a place as small and neighborly as Greer no one came forward to say it was them. “Suspicious,” he said. “Put the sketch guy right up there with Wright.” He said the shooter might have intended to kill Holtzclaw because she recognized him.

In 2015, Greer Police interviewed Todd Kohlhepp, who after he was charged with murdering several people in nearby Spartanburg County admitted to also killing four people at Superbike Motorsports in Chesnee in 2003.

Kohlhepp, once a prosperous real estate agent, denied involvement in the Blue Ridge murders. He avoided a death penalty trial by pleading guilty to seven murders and is serving a life sentence in Kirkland Correctional Institution in Columbia.

Holtzclaw’s son David said he thought Levasseur’s video was well done. He has made it his mission to keep the murders in the spotlight.

Both he and Levasseur said the same thing, “Someone out there knows something.”