When Frank Looper woke up on January 31st, 1975, he didn't know it would be the

warmest January day in Greenville, South Carolina since 1911.

79 degrees, the kind of day that could make a man believe winter was finished.

Frank Looper had made big plans for that warm Friday. Having no idea snow would fall on his grave.

A week later, my husband and his deputy friend Ken Pettis had plans to go bird hunting out in the Capabella area.

Frank Looper had scheduled to go with them, but at the last minute he said that he was not able to go.

Frida Belk's family had some land about 20 miles north of town.

Her husband, John Belk, a volunteer undercover narcotics deputy,

had planned a fun day for fellow undercover agent Ken Pettis

and the head of the drug unit, Lieutenant Frank Looper.

So John and Ken Pettis went out to the Motley Creek section, and I got a call after a couple of hours looking for Ken.

And they relayed that his partner had been shot.

A hundred miles to the south, Julia McCollie, who had grown up as Julia Looper, the drug

cops at Ant, answered her phone in Casey, South Carolina.

You know, when I got the call, I almost dropped the phone, because I mean it was such a shock.

My sister is the one that called me and told me that.

And we were all just devastated.

Naturally you would be.

There weren't many details in those first chaotic hours.

It was a time before the internet and cell phones.

Even the worst news took time to travel.

Frida Belk stood in her Greenville home and struggled to find a way to get to her husband.

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