Cold Case Files: A troubled, nomadic California native met his mysterious end on a rural Benton County road

On a quiet Sunday in mid-February 1990, two men on motorcycles wound their way along undeveloped roads in the wooded hills of Bella Vista when they spotted something that would haunt local law enforcement for decades. Near Seaham Lane, roughly fifty feet off the road on a hillside, lay the body of a young man face down, arms crossed beneath him.

He wore white high-top shoes, blue jeans, a black shirt, and white socks with green tops. In his pocket was a half-full pack of cigarettes. Nothing else identified him. No wallet, no papers, no personal effects beyond those few items.

The Benton County Sheriff’s Office responded at once. Deputies combed the area shoulder to shoulder and recovered scattered beer bottles and cartons, yet they found no tire tracks, no footprints, and no spent shotgun shell.

The Arkansas State Police were called in to assist. An autopsy at the state medical examiner’s office confirmed what the scene already suggested: the victim had been murdered. He had been shot once through the chest at close range with a 12-gauge shotgun loaded with buckshot.

The body had been moved after death, though investigators could never determine how far. Some decomposition had set in, leading officers to estimate the man had been dead about two weeks. An elevated blood alcohol reading was noted, but investigators later suspected it may have resulted from the natural processes of decay rather than recent drinking.

Identifying the stranger proved difficult. Only one or two usable fingerprints could be lifted from the partially decomposed hands. Those prints eventually matched records from a National Guard enlistment roughly a decade earlier. The dead man was Terry Alan Fremody, twenty-nine years old, white, a native of California. Case number 75-672-90 was opened in Benton County.

Terry Alan Fremody had been born around 1960, the identical twin of Larry D. Fremody. The twins grew up in a family that would later bury Larry at Alexandria National Cemetery in Louisiana after a tragic accident. On August 9, 1977, seventeen-year-old Larry fell from an overpass and was struck by a truck.

. Family members later told investigators that the loss changed Terry. He carried a quiet emotional pain beneath an outgoing, talkative, always-smiling exterior. From his early teens, he and his brother had hitchhiked together. After Larry’s death, Terry continued the habit alone, often disappearing for two or three months at a stretch before returning home.

By the late 1980s, Terry worked odd jobs, including labor in the oil fields. He sold all-purpose cleaner door-to-door with traveling crews. In 1987, while in Pismo Beach, California, he met Tammy Royal. The two moved in together, first in Anaheim and later in Oceano. They had a daughter, Kayla, born the following year. By December 1989 they were engaged and living as a family.

Friends and family described Terry as a natural salesman who could talk almost anyone into almost anything. He wore wire-rim glasses, a pinkie ring, and three necklaces, one gold and two silver. He carried five tattoos that would later help confirm his identity. He also drank heavily and used drugs, habits that strained the relationship.

A few days before Christmas 1989 the engagement collapsed. Tammy had begun an affair and was pregnant with another man’s child. She told investigators she could no longer stay with Terry because of his drinking and drug use. They argued. Terry left Oceano around January 2 or 3, 1990, carrying roughly $600 he had earned in the oil fields.

He began hitchhiking east, a route he had taken many times before. Official records later noted he may have been headed toward Tennessee.

Several weeks into the journey he telephoned his aunt, Jane Wood, in Rowland, North Carolina. It was two o’clock in the morning. He said he was in Little Rock with old friends and in trouble. He asked first for a thousand dollars, then lowered the request to three or four hundred. Wood refused. Terry began to cry.

He told her he loved her and that the less she knew, the better. He never explained the nature of the trouble. That call was the last contact any family member had with him.

On February 18, 1990, his body was found in Bella Vista. Ken Farmer, then a sergeant with the Benton County Sheriff’s Office, worked the case from the beginning. Farmer would later become chief of the Bella Vista Police Department before retiring in 2017 and serving as a Benton County justice of the peace.

Deputies showed photographs of Fremody in bars across the state line in Missouri. They interviewed people who might have crossed paths with a hitchhiker. They spoke with Fremody’s mother, his aunt, and Tammy Royal. They learned he was a stranger to the Bella Vista area with no known local connections. Most murders, Farmer observed, involve people who know one another. This one appeared to be the exception.

The physical evidence was thin. No shell casing meant no ballistic comparison was possible. The body had been moved, erasing the original crime scene. No tire impressions or footprints survived. Beer bottles and cartons recovered near the body yielded nothing useful.

More than thirty-five years later, the case remains open with the Benton County Sheriff’s Office and the Arkansas State Police. Cold-case detectives continue to review files as resources allow, though active investigations always take priority. Time has claimed potential witnesses.

Memories have faded. Modern forensic tools that might have changed the outcome in 1990 did not yet exist. The Arkansas State Police still list the case publicly and ask anyone with information to contact ASP Company D at (479) 783-2395.

Terry Alan Fremody left California with a few hundred dollars, a history of restless travel, and unresolved pain from a twin brother’s death more than a decade earlier. He ended his journey on a wooded hillside in northwest Arkansas, shot once through the chest at close range. His killer has never been identified.

The woods near Seaham Lane have long since grown over the spot where his body was found, but the questions remain as clear as the day the motorcycles first stopped.