Gladys Brown began looking for her daughter at 10:15 that morning, driving the neighborhood, knocking on doors, asking neighbors and passing motorists if they had seen the girl. An hour later, the Shelby Rescue Squad organized a formal search. The wooded lot was 150 feet off South Lafayette Street, close enough to home that Brenda Sue might have been visible from her own block. Her body had been covered with freshly cut tree limbs, leaves, and brush. The red and white dress she had been wearing that morning was folded neatly and placed on top of the brush. A bloody rock lay nearby. The autopsy would conclude that the rock was the murder weapon. Her skull had been fractured in twelve places. She had not been raped.

Robert Roseboro lived a few hundred yards from where Brenda Sue's body was found. Investigators believed he had done it. Detective Smith, decades later, would still say so. But Roseboro refused to answer questions, and in 1966 the investigators did not have the physical evidence to charge him. Two years later, on June 22, 1968, a mother and daughter walked into Mary's Cannon Towel Outlet on Dixon Boulevard in Shelby and saw a woman lying on the floor inside, covered in blood. Police arrived. Robert Roseboro walked out with his hands up. Mary Helen Williams was nude, beaten, and stabbed with a pair of scissors. Roseboro went to prison. When detectives visited him there in 2005 to ask about Brenda Sue, he would not talk.

In 2005, almost forty years after the murder, Brenda Sue's sisters, Patricia Buff and Mary McSwain, asked the Shelby Police Department to reopen the case. Officers told them the files were lost. The sisters did not accept that. After four days of searching through storage, the original files were found in an unmarked box, sitting next to the files for the Mary Helen Williams murder. Much of the evidence was missing: the dress, the underwear, the shoes, the compact she had argued about that morning, the rock, two vials of blood, fingernail scrapings, branches, a hair sample. According to police records, the last person known to have held that evidence was Sheriff Allen, who had retrieved it from the State Bureau of Investigation in Raleigh in August 1966. Only a bloody palm print taken from Brenda Sue's shoe survived.

On May 15, 2006, Brenda Sue's body was exhumed from the Spring Hill Church Road Cemetery in Lillington. The wooden casket had disintegrated; only a few bones remained. On May 21, a public memorial service was held, and Brenda Sue was reinterred at Sunset Cemetery in Shelby. Meanwhile, a woman named Lori Lail had come forward. Her grandfather, Earl Mickey Parker, had told her on his hospital deathbed that he needed to get something off his chest before he could move on. He described, in detail, how Brenda Sue was killed and named Thurman Price as his accomplice. Parker and Price had been indicted together in 1954 for the assault of a twelve-year-old girl in Patterson Springs, North Carolina. They had pleaded guilty to assault with intent to commit rape and received suspended sentences.

On February 12, 2007, Shelby police arrested Thurman Price, then 79, on a first-degree murder charge. He was released on $50,000 bond and denied any involvement. On May 10, 2007, Earl Mickey Parker's body was exhumed from Sunset Cemetery to test his palm print against the print from Brenda Sue's shoe. The hands had deteriorated too much for results. Thurman Price maintained his innocence until his death on August 4, 2012, while still awaiting trial. The forty-year fight that Patricia Buff and Mary McSwain had waged for their sister never reached a courtroom verdict. What it did produce was the recovery of the case file, an indictment, an exhumation, a deathbed confession, and a public acknowledgment that the eleven-year-old who walked her younger sister to Head Start one summer morning in 1966 was a person whose disappearance and death the town would not be allowed to forget. Brenda Sue Brown rests at Sunset Cemetery in Shelby.