New documentary series highlights Gaston County cold cases

James Harold Smith was found dead in the woods near Mountain Island Lake in 1979. His killer was never found.

A new documentary produced by Gaston County tells Smith's story, and it seeks to chronicle other of Gaston County's 19 unsolved disappearances and killings.

The idea for Gaston Unsolved stems from Communications Director Adam Gaub's time as a television news journalist. While he was working for the station WCTI, Gaub reported on the killing of a Craven County woman that to this day remains unsolved.

"I'm actually still in contact with the stepfather and the mom of the victim in that case," Gaub said. "It's something that kind of stuck with me."

Gaub left journalism and began working as Gaston County's new communications director in February 2020, and in 2021, he approached the Gaston County Police Department about creating a documentary series on cold cases in the county.

This week, they released the first episode on YouTube, which told the story of Smith, a man who was identified by forensic technology more than 40 years after his death.

"The hope is that by getting some of the information out there, by presenting it in a compelling fashion, that it'll get people talking about it again, and maybe somebody will come forward with information that they didn't realize they had," Gaub said. "Maybe somebody that's been holding on to something for a long time, it'll just kind of be that spark that they need to come forward."

The oldest cold case Gaston County Police has is from 1966 — that of Livingston Bumgardner, who was found dead in a store that doubled as his home, a bullet wound in his head.

Capt. Billy Downey with the Gaston County Police Department said that the biggest challenge in investigating cases like Bumgardner's is "time and distance."

In one case from 1983, a witness came forward in 2008, but the District Attorney's Office did not want to charge anyone.

Sometime in the last six months, Downey spoke with the man again. He didn't remember anything.

"I talked with his wife, and he's in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's," Downey said.

The next episode of Gaston Unsolved will focus on the case of Jennifer Rivkin, who disappeared in May 2008. A car Rivkin had been borrowing, a silver BMW, was found in the Dixie Village parking lot in west Gastonia. Her purse and her driver's license were inside the car.

Rivkin went missing in April of 2008, less than a month before a different Gaston County woman, Jamie Michelle Fraley, vanished.

"We've never ever been able to link the two. There's nothing that's ever shown that their paths crossed or that they were related or knew each other," Downey said.

Gaub hopes to make an episode of Gaston Unsolved about every cold case in Gaston County, and Downey has hopes that the publicity will help.

"It's always good to get back in the public eye," Downey said. "We serve the citizens, and the citizens are, some of them are victims and the victim's families. So we want them to know, we're still working on those cases."

This article originally appeared on The Gaston Gazette: New documentary series highlights Gaston County cold cases