A Purple Heart Recipient Was Murdered While Delivering Milk in 1968

Following his service in World War II—for which he received a Purple Heart—Hiram “Ross” Grayam settled in Florida and worked as a milkman. But in April 1968, Grayam, then 47, was murdered while out on his milk delivery route. He left behind a wife and three children.

Grayam was killed in Gifford in Indian River County, and the Indian River County Sheriff’s Office investigated his case. Unfortunately, the investigation didn’t find answers immediately. Grayam’s murder eventually became the county’s oldest cold case.

In 2024, exactly 56 years after Grayam’s murder, the sheriff’s office announced it had uncovered the name of one of Grayam’s killers and would close the case.

On the evening of April 11, 1968, Grayam's boss reported that he hadn't returned from his milk delivery route. When Grayam was still missing the next morning, the sheriff’s office arranged an aerial search that spotted the milk truck in a wooded area. Investigators found Grayam’s body lying next to the truck. He'd been shot multiple times.

Witnesses said they’d seen Grayam talking to two Black men who got into the truck and drove off with the milkman. Another witness heard gunshots and saw two Black men in a ‘50s model Chevrolet racing away from the area where Grayam’s body was discovered.

“There was no money found on him, and according to his employer, he should have collected money that day on his route,” Lieutenant Michael Pierce of the criminal investigation division at the Indian River County Sheriff's Office tells A&E Crime + Investigation. About $70 was missing.

But Pierce shares that the motive for the milkman's murder was initially unclear. Grayam was white, and investigators heard from sources that Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, which had occurred one week earlier, may have motivated the murder. However, the sheriff’s office ultimately felt that robbery was the likely cause. In 1968, then-Sheriff Sam Joyce told the public, “This was not a racial crime. It was a robbery.”

Pierce says the crime scene contained little forensic evidence to help find the killers: “The bullets we recovered from Mr. Grayam were in such bad shape that we could not test them against any other firearms at the time.”

In 2006, the sheriff’s office and Grayam’s son, Larry, contributed to a local news article about the unsolved murder in the hopes of reminding the public about the case. The article came out on October 16. A couple of days later, a local news channel aired a segment about Grayam’s murder.

The following week, a letter to the editor about the case was published in the local paper. The writer said he'd been told he was a suspect in the milkman's murder and wanted to set the record straight that he wasn't the killer. The letter was signed by Thomas Williams.

Pierce explains that this letter prompted the sheriff’s office to re-examine the case files, which showed that Williams actually hadn’t been a suspect during the initial investigation. Investigators still decided to interview Williams. However, he told them that his military service meant he wasn’t in Florida when Grayam was murdered. At the time, he was dismissed as a suspect.

In February 2022, an inmate at Indian River County Jail who claimed to be related to Williams told detectives that Williams had confessed to killing Grayam. Pierce says that when investigators looked at Williams again and pulled his military records, “We learned that just prior to the homicide, he went AWOL.” Investigators also discovered Williams had died in 2016.

The sheriff’s office tracked down Williams’s ex-wife and spoke to her in late 2023. “Without being asked any questions, she just spontaneously said, ‘Is this about the milkman murder?’” Pierce says. She explained that Williams had confessed to killing the milkman, but he also told her no one would believe her if she shared what he'd said.

On April 11, 2024, Sheriff Eric Flowers announced that Williams had killed Grayam. “These folks said, ‘I would have never said anything to you before, as long as he was alive, he was a threat to me and my family, we would have never told you.’ But the fact that he is now dead gave them the courage to come forward,” Flowers said. “Two independent witnesses, who both say this guy confessed to killing the milkman to them, independent of each other.”

The case was officially closed. But Flowers added that the sheriff’s office knew another person was responsible for the murder and expressed his hope that someone from the community would come forward with additional information.

Pierce calls the resolution of Grayam’s case bittersweet. “We were glad that we were able to determine one of the persons that did the killing,” he says. “We weren't able to determine officially if there were any more accomplices, and the person that we were able to determine had since passed away. We would like to have been able to bring them to justice.”

And with dozens more cold cases awaiting resolution, the sheriff's office also doesn't have time to rest on its laurels. “All of our cold cases are important,” Pierce says. “We want victims’ families to know that their loved ones' cases haven't been forgotten.”