John Lloyd "Buddy" Heflin

[Starless]

http://www.clarionledger.com/article...%7Ctext%7CHome

More than 40 years after John Lloyd "Buddy" Heflin disappeared, Mississippi Bureau of Investigation officials confirm they are trying to find out what happened to him.
Heflin last was seen by a family member on New Year's Day 1969, his wife, Alexis Heflin said. She learned from one of his family members that he was missing.
She last had seen her husband about a year before, when after six years of marriage, she moved with their two sons from their home in Oktibbeha County to Chicago. He went to Jackson to work at a Kroger grocery store with friend Earl Burch, she said.
"He wasn't a bad person. He was just 23 years old and got mixed up with some bad people," Alexis Heflin speculated.
Alexis Heflin, who is writing a book about her husband's disappearance, said Burch told her husband's family he was killed and thrown into the Mississippi River.
The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation would confirm only that the case was reopened in 2010.
The Clarion-Ledger learned of the case after Heflin's relatives contacted the newspaper.
Gail Wofford, who had been friends with Buddy Heflin most of her life, has long believed his disappearance is connected to something illegal involving him and a couple in Longview.
One day he came into the coffee shop where she worked and asked her to ride with him to Longview to settle a disagreement, she said.
Once they got there, she said, she could hear Heflin and a man in the back bedroom. The other man seemed angry, and Heflin seemed to be pleading.
Buddy Heflin left the house crying and told her he didn't want to involve her because it would endanger her life, Gail Wofford said.
"He said he couldn't tell me everything because if he did, my life wouldn't be worth a plug nickel, not worth any more than his," she said.
He told Wofford that he'd agreed to do a "one-time deal" that paid a lot of money for the couple.
"He said it didn't go down like it was supposed to, and he saw something he wasn't supposed to," she said.
Wofford and her father both urged Heflin to go to authorities about his predicament, she said, but he said the couple had told him if he went to the police, they'd kill his family..................