Jocelyn Denise Branham was born in the early afternoon of Monday, October 13, 1969, in Morgantown, West Virginia. Her parents, Bill Branham and Joyce DeHaven, had met in high school and were married in 1968. After a long labor at University Hospital, Jocelyn arrived with dark brown hair, measuring about eight and a half pounds and twenty inches long. She was “a big surprise. Bigger than expected,” her mother Joyce recalled.
Bill, who was a biology major studying vertebrate embryology at West Virginia University at the time, looked at his daughter and thought the shape of her head wasn’t exactly right. The medical staff told him not to worry, that it would straighten out fine. But the first-time father couldn’t help fretting about it until time worked its wonders and put his mind at ease.
By the first of the following March, Jocelyn accomplished a one-handed, two-kneed crawl. Three months later, she was walking. She learned to brush her teeth one month after her first birthday. Jocelyn was a bright and exceptional child. She potty-trained early and rarely got into mischief. Needless to say, Mom and Dad were proud.
Once Bill received his master’s degree, his Air Force ROTC obligation sent him and his family to Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas. He went through basic training and took advantage of every opportunity for a family trip. They even went to Six Flags and spent the day at the kiddie rides watching their daughter’s eyes sparkle with each new thrill.
After three months in Texas, the family spent two months at Vandenberg Air Force Base, situated in California between Los Angeles and San Francisco. In between Bill’s training to be a Titan Missile Crew Commander, the family visited Disneyland, Universal Studios, and San Francisco. They then traveled back east to Little Rock Air Force Base in Arkansas, where Bill worked as a Missile Launch Technician.
In February 1974, when Jocelyn was four and a half, the family grew by the addition of a second daughter named Laura. Jocelyn was enchanted with the idea of having a baby sister and proud of her role as big sister—a responsibility she took seriously all of her life.
Jocelyn and Laura had an exemplary sibling relationship from the earliest years. They watched The Smurfs together and made friendship bracelets; Jocelyn even let her little sister ride on the handlebars of her pink Huffy bike. They razzed and teased each other, but always with love.
The year of 1976 was one of upheaval for the Branham family. Bill left the Air Force and he and Joyce divorced. For a while, the two separate households both remained in Little Rock, but eventually Joyce and her daughters moved back to Martinsburg, West Virginia.
Jocelyn’s and Laura’s lives were divided into two parts: the school year with mom, and the summers with dad. Bill would drive down and pick them up when school let out for the year, then bring them back to their mother two and a half months later. At Christmastime, Bill traveled to West Virginia for visits at their mother’s apartment and at Bill’s parents’ home.
The summer trips were full of carefree travel with Bill, though the arrangements, while enjoyable for the girls, would be frowned upon today. Bill had a camper on the back of his pickup truck with a mattress on the floor. In between the cab and the camper-topped truck bed was an inflatable, rectangular rubber access point that they used to pass things back and forth from the front to the back—and sometimes the girls crawled through it. The girls had room to play and hardly noticed the passing miles.
They took off in the truck for a lot of tent camping, canoeing, and hiking, often in the company of Bill’s friends and their children. The girls and Bill enjoyed nature hikes, looking for bugs, wildflowers, and wildlife. They visited Willow Springs Water Park. The girls loved to play in the water and were crazy about the waterslide with a little cart that planed out over the water at the bottom of the descent. They also traveled to Lake Sylvia Recreation Area, northwest of Little Rock in the Ouachita National Forest, and Queen Wilhelmina State Park due west of Little Rock.
Woolly Hollow State Park was also a favorite with the girls where they could swim and ride the paddleboats. The Woolly Cabin, the log-constructed home built by the first settlers, added a historic context to the visit. One year, Jocelyn reached down at something sparkling in the grass and pulled out a diamond ring. Before leaving the park, they stopped at the office and left their contact information in case anyone reported it missing. No one ever did, and Jocelyn got to keep her found treasure.
Each summer, Bill would take the girls with him for one day to the scientific lab where he worked. He would introduce them to the new co-workers and greet the ones they’d met in previous years. Each time, he’d have a fun day of science planned. One year they played with soap, dry ice, and water; another they observed the necropsy of a rat—no matter the activity, Jocelyn and Laura loved their days at work with their dad.
One year, Bill and his daughters saw a commercial on television about making ice cream with orange soda and condensed milk. Bill pulled out his father’s old manual ice-cream freezer and they got busy. Bill put the rock salt and ice in the hand crank bucket. Jocelyn and Laura took turns working it until it got too stiff for them to manage and then their dad took over. They had so much fun with that, they experimented with different flavors every week including grape soda, root beer, and cola. They all agreed that orange and grape were best.
Once they went to a spaghetti supper fund-raiser at a friend’s rural Catholic church. Gambling games were set up with a wheel like roulette. Bill gave money to each of the girls and let them play. Jocelyn couldn’t stop winning—she came home with an armload of stuffed animals including a three-foot-long stuffed carrot, a toy that was a favorite with the girls for years. Bill worried that he’d contributed to a dangerous lesson and was concerned that Jocelyn would think that gambling was an easy way to riches. Still, when they went to Six Flags in St. Louis with Joyce’s family, he didn’t object to Jocelyn playing a ringtoss game—the lucky girl won a teddy bear bigger than she was.
Another favorite activity was attending the games played by the Arkansas Travelers, an AA baseball team affiliated with the St. Louis Cardinals. The small ballpark was a safe, enclosed area where kids roamed freely, exploring and playing together. Sometimes Jocelyn would go outside of the park with a group of other kids waiting for foul balls to come over the fence, and Bill would sit up in the back where she could see him and give her a competitive edge by pointing in the direction that balls were headed.
Jocelyn was an athletic girl from a young age. She played tennis and volleyball, and was on the all-star softball team as well as the Berkeley County softball league during her high school years. In her freshman year, on the basketball team, she played point guard. She was the team’s star shooting guard, averaging twenty-four points per game in her junior year and twenty-nine in her senior year. She was team captain and the first to earn an all-state honorable mention. Laura often tagged along to basketball practice, softball games, and some of her older sister’s get-togethers with friends.
In her spare time, she earned a black belt in karate.
Jocelyn graduated from Hedgesville High School in 1988, and with the help of a four-year full athletic scholarship, she went to West Virginia University where she was a member of the Mountaineer women’s basketball team from 1989 to 1992. She was one of the university’s best three-point shooters ever, despite her average height, and once tried out for a spot on the women’s basketball team for the 1992 Olympics before graduating in 1993 with a double major in economics and marketing. Coach Kittie Blakemore told 48 Hours, “Her smile, her hard work, her motivation to help her teammates will long be remembered.”