On March 18, 2012, a man named Robert McCaffrey, who went by Bob, called police from his West Ashley home near Charleston, South Carolina, to report his wife missing around 5 p.m.
He said the two had gone out to dinner the day before around 2:30 p.m. When they returned home, they got into an argument. When Gayle refused to speak with him, he got into his truck and drove four hours away to Easley, South Carolina. He drove back in the early morning hours of March 18 and received a speeding ticket in Travelers Rest. He told police that when he returned home, his two children were in bed, but Gayle wasn’t in the home. Bob said he found his wife’s checkbook and wedding ring on a counter. On the printer, he said, was a typed letter from Gayle. Police took the two children, ages 4 and 10, into protective custody.
A Devoted Wife and Mother
Thirty-six-year-old Gayle McCaffrey was a devoted member of the First Baptist Church in downtown Charleston, where she often rang the hand bells on Sunday mornings. An avid reader, she had earned her master’s degree while working at military academy The Citadel, receiving promotions along the way that took her from being a temporary employee to a director of finance for its facilities. When she went missing, Gayle stood around five foot two and weighed 155 pounds. She had reddish brown hair and brown eyes.
Bob McCaffrey had worked as a government contractor in the past, but his employment record was spotty. He was a carpenter who picked up home remodeling projects and other odd jobs.
The family had their reservations about Bob early in the couple’s relationship, according to one of Gayle’s sisters, Debbie Pearson, who recently spoke to a local news station in Charleston. Gayle’s mother was worried because Bob wasn’t a Christian, but they still welcomed him into the fold. The two were married on December 20, 1997. He was a fun uncle to his nephews. But he could also be verbally abusive to Gayle, and her mother said she was afraid of him.
Pearson said Bob liked to go behind Gayle at night when she would lock the doors. He would unlock the doors and left a window pane displaced for months while he remodeled their bathroom. He did this because he knew a person or an animal could climb into that window and that it would bother Gayle. Pearson described Gayle as the stable presence in the family home, the one who brought home a steady paycheck, and Bob was often out of town a lot working on home remodeling jobs.
A Sister’s Recollection
On March 17, 2012, Pearson said she invited Gayle to go out on their boat with the two women’s families. Gayle declined, and said she wanted to stay home and fix a St. Patrick’s Day dinner for her husband and an aunt and uncle that lived in the nearby West Ashley Area. This story conflicts slightly with the story Bob told police, that he and Gayle had an early dinner at 2:30 p.m., which is an odd time to eat dinner. He also didn’t mention meeting up with that aunt and uncle.
On the night Bob said drove out of town after arguing with his wife, he was pulled over for speeding by a Traveler’s Rest, South Carolina police officer around 2 a.m. He was clocked at driving 65 miles per hour in a 45-speed zone. When the officer approached his car, he was reportedly speaking to someone on the phone. Bob told the officer he was visiting a woman he’d been seeing on the side after an argument he’d had with his wife. The woman had refused to see him, he said, and he was rushing home because his two children were sleeping in the home alone. Bob did point out a handgun he had in his glove compartment while he was digging for his registration and insurance papers.
It appeared early on that investigators with the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office thought Bob knew more than he was sharing about Gayle’s disappearance. They began searching the marshy areas surrounding the couple’s neighborhood. They told the media they had identified a person of interest. On March 23, they searched the McCaffrey home and removed several bags of evidence to be analyzed. They utilized search dogs to see if they could pick up on Gayle’s scent. They searched an area around Highway 61 and Bees Ferry Road in West Ashley but turned up no leads.
When investigators from the sheriff’s office looked at records from the couple’s cell phones, they were led to wooded areas off S.C. Highway 61 near their home on Limestone Boulevard. They couldn’t find any clues to Gayle’s whereabouts, though.
Police Fear Gayle McCaffrey Deceased
In early May, The Charleston County Sheriff’s Office announced they had upgraded Gayle’s missing persons case to a homicide investigation. They named her husband, Bob McCaffrey has a suspect, although they said they didn’t have enough evidence at the time to make an arrest.
Sheriff Al Cannon said Gayle’s bank account showed no signs of activity. He believed the letter Gayle supposedly left behind was fake. Bob McCaffrey had told investigators he went to Easley the night his wife went missing but they had been in contact with the woman Bob was seeing and lived in northern Greenville. Bob had told investigators he’d gotten home around 6 a.m., but they believed it was much earlier than that. Also, if you’ll remember, he told the police officer who pulled him over in Traveler’s Rest that he was speeding because he was trying to get home to his children, who were alone. How did he know they were alone if for all he knew, Gayle was still at the house?
On May 3, a group of more than 150 people, including 50 employees at The Citadel, searched a plot of private property off Highway 61. With the help of an aircraft, they traversed a 100-acre but again, turned up no leads.
By mid-August, Bob told Gayle’s family he was in a new relationship with a woman he’d met in North Carolina. By this time, his children were confused as to why their father had not returned to them and they had continued living with Gayle’s sister and her family. A few months later, authorities organized the first searches with trained volunteers, K-9 uses, and a dozen horses in the upstate area of South Carolina, where they believed Bob might have been traveling from the night Gayle disappeared. These searches turned up no new evidence.
Bob McCaffrey never attended any of the searches for his wife, according to her sister.
Debbie Pearson and her husband later took in the children and adopted them. It appears as if Bob essentially abandoned the children after Gayle disappeared. She said he would make plans with the kids periodically and then fail to show up. The last time they saw their dad was in 2016. She said he never attended any of the custody court hearings for his children or even said goodbye. It’s taken a toll on both of the kids, who are now in high school and college.
The investigators continued to work on Gayle’s case and organize searches all over South Carolina in the two years following her disappearance. Then, on June 21, 2014, deputies announced they had arrested Bob McCaffrey on obstruction charges related to the homicide investigation of his wife.
The affidavit that led to Bob’s arrest stated that “Robert McCaffrey was not truthful in his initial report to responding deputies and detectives and that he knowingly impeded and provided misleading information, which hindered the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office in locating his missing wife.”
A Forged Letter?
In the supposed letter Gayle had left behind, she wrote that she had found a safe with $110,000 and a gun inside, stating she would use the gun if Bob tried to find her. She said she was having an affair, and that she would miss her children.
Bob told investigators Gayle must have found the combination to this alleged safe on his cellphone. But when they searched his phone, they saw found no evidence of a safe or a combination for it.
The day after his arrest, a judge set his bail at $100,000 and ordered him to surrender his passport. That bail was then reduced from $100,000 to $50,000 by the judge presiding over the case. Bob was released from jail after meeting his bail conditions despite the concerns of Gayle’s family.
During the course of their investigation, police had learned Bob was having an affair in the months before Gayle went missing, and she had found out about it.
An Extramarital Affair
On Valentine’s Day 2012, Bob was working a job in Brevard, North Carolina when he met a woman named Brandy Lee in a pub. Lee was going through a divorce, and Bob told her he and his wife were separated. However, Gayle learned of the affair and eventually texted Lee, asking her to leave Bob alone. Lee said she tried to call things off with Bob in early March.
When investigators learned of Lee’s relationship with Bob, they interviewed her. She willingly let them search her phone and agreed to try and talk with Bob. He was suspicious, though, when she tried to set up a meeting and he asked her if she was planning to wear a wire. He told her it was best if she didn’t explain their relationship to the police.
When Bob went on trial for the obstruction of justice charge in 2019, forensics experts testified about the contents of the letter Gayle supposedly left behind on the printer the night she went missing. These experts believed the language in the letter was more in line with the way Bob spoke, and not Gayle. They said the searched for a man named “Nicky” that she mentioned. Investigators were never able to find evidence of Gayle knowing anyone by that name.
A computer forensics examiner went through text messages between Bob and Gayle and determined she was trying to find them a weekend. Getaway cabin. Friends and former coworkers of Gayle’s knew she was searching for a way for the couple to get away after she’d learned her husband was having an affair. They also said Gayle was a devoted and would never have left her kids alone, or thought about leaving Charleston.
Unfortunately, although Gayle’s family and the investigators were suspicious that Bob had murdered Gayle, it was too difficult to get a murder charge to stick because there was no body.
Bob was found guilty of the obstruction of justice charged in 2014 and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was released from prison on May 1, 2023, and began a Supervised Reentry Program.
A probate judge officially declared Gayle McCaffrey dead in 2018. No other suspects have ever been named in her disappearance. But this is not the end of Bob McCaffrey’s story.
Bob McCaffrey Charged with Murder in New Jersey
Bob McCaffrey eventually settled down on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, in the town of Manteo. But this past week, a multi-state task force took the now 54-year-old into custody on April 11. He is being charged in a murder unrelated to his wife’s disappearance, one that took place in New Jersey in 1990.
He is accused of killing 27-year-old Lisa McBride, who disappeared from her home in the Highland Lakes area of New Jersey on June 23, 1990. Her skeletal remains were later found on October 20, 1990, by hunters in Sandyston. Police ruled her death a homicide, but despite an extensive investigation, they were never able to make an arrest.
Bob is also being charged with first-degree kidnapping and second-degree burglary. Police seized notepads, multiple cell phones, and a laptop located in a crawlspace underneath his home in Manteo. They also took several firearms, which he was legally prohibited from owning after his conviction.
On June 22, 1990, Lisa McBride ended a shift at a bank she worked at in Newfoundland and planned an evening out with three friends in Manhattan. They attended a country music concert and stopped by a pub in Newfoundland around 12:30 a.m. on the way home. Witnesses saw Lisa drink a few beers, chat with people she knew in the bar, and head out at 1:15 in the morning. She told people she had work the next morning.
Lisa McBride Disappears After a Night Out with Friends
Neighbors saw her return home around 2 a.m. But the next morning, she failed to arrive for work at the bank. A co-worker tried to call her repeatedly before contacting Lisa’s mother. Her brother went to Lisa’s home around 10 a.m. and entered using a spare key he had. What he found there made him pause. His sister’s bed had no sheets or blankets on it, the living room couch was pulled away from the wall about six inches, and the kitchen light was on. When he called the police, they found the telephone wire to the house had been cut from the outside. A window screen had two slits cut in it, allowing someone to reach inside and open the window.
Despite a massive search, police couldn’t find a trace of the five foot seven brunette. Then, on October 20, hunters found the naked body of a woman in an area near the Delaware Water Gap National Recreational Area. She was positively identified as Lisa McBride.
An autopsy performed by a medical examiner ruled the cause of death as undetermined, but she had a cheekbone fracture believed to be caused by blunt force trauma. Police interviewed numerous suspects, including a secret admirer who had left Lisa flowers and notes. But eventually the case went cold.
When the courts slowed during the COVID-19 pandemic, prosecutor Gregory Mueller said his office’s cold case unit refocused their efforts on looking through the physical evidence in the county’s six cold cases. They looked at Lisa McBride’s case files and knew they needed more evidence to move forward.
On March 9, 2022, investigators exhumed Lisa’s remains from a cemetery in East Hanover. A state police anthropologist and Sussex County medical examiner performed a new autopsy and collected DNA evidence from the remains, which were then delivered to a forensic laboratory in Virginia.
Bob McCaffrey’s DNA was collected when Gayle went missing and entered CODIS, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System. In February of this year, a CODIS match identified the DNA found on Lisa McBride as belonging to Bob. At the time of Lisa’s murder, Bob lived with his parents and brother about 13 miles from her in Franklin, New Jersey. Police are speculating Bob may have first come across Lisa while visiting the bank where she worked.
Bob McCaffrey Had Confessed to Murder
Additional court documents that have been filed in North Carolina revealed that in 1995 Bob McCaffrey admitted to an acquaintance that he killed Lisa McBride because she refused to go out with him. Mind you, two years after he admitted this, he married Gayle in Charleston. Bob told this acquaintance that he’d murdered Lisa in her home, and that a few days later, he tried to return to her house to retrieve something that would connect him to the homicide. Lisa’s friends and family do not believe Lisa knew Bob at the time of the murder and police believe she was stranger to him.
The documents don’t confirm whether Bob was able to get inside Lisa’s home after the murder and retrieve whatever evidence he felt was left behind. But investigators did locate his DNA at the crime scene and that’s what led to his recent arrest. Bob’s DNA profile was matched with biological material on an item of evidence recovered from Lisa’s headboard.
Other information available in this court filing revealed that Bob McCaffrey entered the US Navy on July 5, 1989. ON July 25, 1989, he was deemed unfit for service due to “impulse control issues.” Another psychological evaluation a month later diagnosed Bob with borderline personality disorder. He was dishonorably discharged from the Navy on September 28, 1989.
New Jersey State Police Detective Domnic Rubino said they are hoping to find a few different items from Lisa that were never found after her murder. These items include a black leather purse, her New Jersey driver’s license, and a set of keys featuring a custom-brass keychain with the letters “WEESA.” Rubino believes Bob may have kept these items as trophies.
Bob McCaffrey appeared for a hearing in Dare County on April 14, retained a public defender, and waived his right to contest extradition to New Jersey. Gayle McCaffrey’s family hopes this arrest is finally the break they need to learn what finally happened to Gayle.
Lisa McBride’s parents are both now deceased, but she still has a surviving brother. Gayle McCaffrey’s sisters still hope for a resolution in her case. Debbie Pearson says they haven’t given up, but know they might never know the answer.
She told the news outlet in Charleston, “I’m hoping that at some point our detectives can figure out how to get him to give up Gayle’s location, possibly bring him down here for a trial. We would like Gayle back, and so that would be my hope is that somebody can convince him, and he’s a narcissist so you probably can’t, to tell us where she is so we can get her back.”
Show Sources:
The Greenville News
May 19, 2012
Officer pulled over husband of missing woman
https://www.newspapers.com/image/127262842
The Index Journal
June 23, 2014
Woman’s husband lied to cops
https://www.newspapers.com/image/152095534
Arrested 8 p.m. April 10, 2026 in Manteo in connection with Lisa Marie McBride homicide case from New Jersey
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1362123175942128&set=a.296568382497618&locale=en_GB
https://abcnews4.com/archive/timeline-disappearance-of-marjorie-gayle-mccaffrey
https://abcnews4.com/archive/gayle-mccaffreys-husband-charged-with-obstruction-saturday
