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By Seamus McGraw

PAWLEYS ISLAND, S.C.   (Crime Library) — It wasn't just the fact that they came in droves, hundreds of them, loading up their plates with a pound or so of pulled pork and fixings last weekend, that caught Jeff Pelasara by surprise.

After all, in this sun-kissed corner of South Carolina, barbecue done in that distinctive Carolina fashion, slow cooked on the bone and drenched in vinegar is more than just cuisine, it's a cornerstone of the culture, and anytime you need to raise a crowd, well, all you have to do is toss a hog or two or three onto a pit.

No, what touched Pelasara was the fact that even after the hog ran out people kept coming, not for the food but simply to show that they cared about a stranger. "Down here in South Carolina , barbecuing the whole hog, people live and breathe that," Pelasara said. But even so, "a lot of people drove up in their car, handed out $100 check and didn't even want anything to eat," Pelasara said.

What they had wanted, he said, was to show their support for Jeff Pelasara's sister, Janet, the mother of slain Virginia Commonwealth University freshman Taylor Behl.

The pretty young co-ed vanished over Labor Day weekend, triggering a frantic search. That search ended Oct. 5, when he body was discovered. Her sometime friend, Benjamin Fawley, a photographer nearly twenty years older than she, claimed that she died during rough sex. Behl's family disputes that. Fawley is being held on unrelated child pornography charges while a grand jury will consider murder charges against him in January, 2006.

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