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ID's Dead Days of Summer is ready to return this week with a shocking new case, this time centering around 16-year-old Debbie Gama, a high school student at Strong Vincent in Erie, Pennsylvania. The young girl's death shook the small town as her body was found floating in a creek.
The upcoming episode of the show is titled Twisted Lessons, and it is slated to air on August 11, 2022. The synopsis for the episode reads:
"In Erie, Pennsylvania, hunters find the r*ped and strangled body of vivacious high school student Debbie Gama in a creek, and police interviews come up empty until new information reveals a dangerous world of s*x, drugs and bondage."
Read on for more details about the complex and heartbreaking case of Debbie Gama's murder.
Who was Debbie Gama?
Debbie Gama was a Pennsylvania native who became a tragic victim of a school teacher with some dark fantasies. Though the cause of her death was disputed, with the perpetrator presenting an alternate version of the events, the major cause and sequence of events remain the same.
On a hot summer day in August 1975, Debbie, who shared a close bond with her mother, got into a heated argument with her. Little did her mother know that it was the last time she was seeing her daughter. Debbie stormed out of her house and did not return for quite a while.
Though her family initially thought that the teenager ran away after the argument, a few days later, her body was found floating in a creek in Crawford County, Pennsylvania.
Her hands and legs were tied with copper wires and there was also a copper wire around her neck. Authorities determined the cause of her death to be "acute asphyxiation due to ligature." A coroner's report also hinted at assault.
Further investigation revealed that Debbie Gama was intoxicated with pills and taken to a nearby park where she was tied up and assaulted. Following this, she was strangled to death and thrown into the creek. The authorities chased dead ends for a long time before they made a breakthrough with some outside help.
Who killed Debbie Gama?
After the police failed to find legitimate leads for quite some time, Debbie's mother hired a private investigator who managed to find an important link. When the P.I. established a link between Debbie and her high school teacher Raymond Payne, police followed up on the lead and managed to uncover some proof that directly tied Raymond to the murder of young Debbie.
Raymond was arrested in September 1976, almost a year after Debbie's death. Though he claimed that Debbie's death was accidental and that the young girl consented to being tied by copper wires, a panel of three judges sentenced the teacher to life after he pleaded guilty to a general count of murder.
Raymond Payne died in 2020 after testing positive for COVID-19. He was in prison at the time.
