Maybe answers can help family heal
Sorrow can endure for generations.
For almost seven decades, Lewis Smith of Elizabethtown has longed to know what happened to his aunt and cousin.
Leila Lewis Bryan, 36, and her 4-year-old daughter, Mary Rachel, disappeared from Carolina Beach on the evening of May 10, 1941.
This week, Smith’s wait may end.
That’s when the results will be in from a radar scan done Thursday in the Carolina Beach cottage where his aunt and cousin lived with Edis Bryan. Smith believes the scan will show the two are buried there beneath concrete slabs.
Some people think Leila should’ve had better sense than to marry Edis.
She was a young nurse, working in Wilmington, when they fell in love. Rumor is he had come to the emergency room with gunshot wounds, courtesy of an “irate husband.”
If there were troubling signs, obviously Leila didn’t care. But her family never forgot.
Especially after the disappearance.
In 1941, when their daughter was 4, the Bryans were living at 214 Raleigh Ave. at Carolina Beach.
That May evening, Leila prepared Edis’ favorite dinner of roast beef and potatoes. About 9 p.m., she and Mary Rachel left in their 1935 Ford coupe to run an errand in town.
Mother and child were never seen again.
Police searched the woods between Carolina Beach and Wilmington, and the SBI dragged the Cape Fear. In 1942, the Raleigh News & Observer called the case “the most baffling mystery” the SBI had ever tackled.
Edis was a suspect but never charged. Smith says he remarried, moved to Florida, worked in real estate and later died.
Someone – maybe Edis, maybe not – got away with two murders.
How did Leila’s family – eight sisters and three brothers – endure the bitter injustice of this unsolved case?
It wasn’t easy, Smith tells me. Smith was born a year after the disappearance, the child of Leila’s sister Bessie. Growing up, he remembers his mother’s anguish over the mystery, and her bouts of depression.
He remembers his grandmother reading and rereading every newspaper clipping about the case, her sadness building.
Smith says the Lewis family has always suspected that Leila and Mary Rachel are buried under that house. On the day of the disappearance, Smith says Edis was building wooden forms, later to be filled with concrete, for a ground-level bedroom and bath.
If the results this week show evidence of human remains, it’s up to the SBI to go the next step – drilling a hole, dropping a camera down and testing the dirt for body stains.
Then – up with the slabs. (The current owners have given permission.)
Finding Leila and Mary Rachel won’t bring them back.
No, but they can be buried in the family cemetery near Bladenboro, says Smith, his voice cracking.
And, along with Leila’s parents, her brothers and sisters, her nieces and nephews, mother and daughter can rest, at last, in peace.
Source: charlotteobserver.com