Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Who killed Missy Bevers? Church murder unsolved a year later

Episode Date: April 17, 2017

Whoever murdered Missy Bevers inside a Texas church is still unknown and at large despite video recorded before and after the brutal attack a year ago. Security cameras captured the murderer walking the church hallways, carrying the hammer used to bludgeoned Bevers to death as she arrived to conduct a sunrise fitness class April 18, 2016. If investigators are close to catching the fitness instructor’s killer, it is a closely guarded secret. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. In the early morning hours of April 18th, Beavers, a fitness instructor, a mom and wife, showed up at this church to teach a class. Police says she was killed by puncture wounds to the head and chest. This is Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. This person intended to do exactly what they did, when they did it, and whom they did it to. The former Murphy police chief says the circle of people who may know what happened is likely very small. There has to be some link between her death and people in her past. Investigators have poured over Beavers' internet history and executed multiple warrants,

but say today the ID on this suspect will come from a tip they still haven't received. April 18, 2016. Missy Beavers, a beautiful young wife and mother of three little girls, up bright and early, even earlier than me. You know, I think I'm all that because I get up at 5. Uh-uh. She's up at 3 o'clock in the morning. Why?

Because she goes and teaches a gladiator type exercise class at a Midlothian church early, early in the morning for moms that need to then go to work, get their children to school on time, you name it. All the things that moms do in the morning. No offense, dads, but it's a lot. It is a lot. She goes into the Midlothian church like she always does, and she's never seen alive again. She is brutally murdered inside that Midlothian church, April 18, 2016. And today, I wonder, are we any closer to catching her killer than we were on that day? I'm Nancy Grace. This is Crime Stories, and we want justice. Don't you? This is not a statistic. This is not not entertainment this is not just a story we read about and then forget these are three little girls that no longer have their mother why with me is alan duke alan i gotta tell you it pains me to even think about it

because well so many levels but especially for those children. I mean, yes, they've gone on. Yes, they're going to go on. They're going to grow up. They're going to have a life, but it's not the same. And I know a lot of children grow up without a mom, but it's not the same. It's just not. Tell me anything, Alan. What do we know? Well, first of all, the children, three young daughters. She was 45 years old, Terry Missy Beavers. And I think it's appropriate that we're recording this pretty much at the one-year mark. I mean, we both got up early this morning to do this. And when you say that, it sent chills down my arms because, yes, she got up early to go and teach this class, this gladiators workout class, which I should be at one this morning, but I'm not. You know, I got to hand it to this woman because she looked awesome.

Yes. And that takes so much discipline and so much work on top of everything else she was doing but go ahead she goes to this midlothian texas creekside church of christ it's raining and she's going to do the class inside instead of outside in the parking lot as normal which she posts on facebook the night before the night before so did this, if they were targeting Missy, which obviously they were, this was not a theft, this was not a typical burglary. She was targeted by her killer. The killer came in to kill her, not steal anything.

The killer knew it had been moved inside, that there would not be an outdoors and easily visible murder. She pulls up to the church, parks in the parking lot, and it's kind of in a, it is a sort of a rural area. It's just outside of this town of about, what, 15, 14, 15,000 people. Oh, I'll never forget when I, what did I say, 3,000 in Midlothian? Some people in Midlothian got so mad at me. Right.

Dang. Actually, Missy's husband got upset. He said, you're saying it's so small anyway god bless him i came from i claim it was macon but it really wasn't alan as you well know it was outside of macon in a little area called rutland community i mean i've told you this but i lived on a red dirt road with a tree growing up in the middle of it in front of our house. My grandfather dug our well. Our water was often red as well. So the point of that is not to belittle it, but to say that the number of suspects should be narrowed down.

Here we are early in the morning, rainy day in Texas. There's this surveillance video of a car pulling into a gun store parking lot across the street and down this divided highway just a little bit. Wasn't it a Nissan Altima? Yes, it was. Light in color. Yes. Yes. color yes yes there are 17 security cameras at this this shop that captured the car pulling in and driving around the parking lot and parking for several minutes and then pulling away now i've made a lot of that i've made a lot of that because it's very difficult for me to believe, Alan, that the two are not connected. But they could be not connected.

It's just hard for me to believe. That small of a population. You've got a car that's, what did we figure out? X hundred feet yards from the church as the crow flies? Very close. If you go to the back, I've studied that aerial view so many times, if you go to the back of the gun shop and you walk from there through these trees, this densely wooded area, you're in Midlothian church parking lot in less than five minutes. Right. So about an

hour and a half after we see this car, that's when we see some other surveillance video. This is from inside the church. How long after we see the car? How long after we see the car? About an hour and a half. It's really not that long. But it was approximately 4.20 in the morning

when Missy goes into the church to set up her camp gladiator fitness class. And the killer is waiting on her. He or she, we don't even know what the sex is, appears in the video inside the church caught by several cameras wearing the SWAT-like police uniform, sort of a configuration of different pieces, and a helmet. You can't see the person's face. You can't even tell if it's a male or a female, but you see a distinctive walk. What nut job would

wear a helmet? It's like a motorcycle helmet, as Alan is saying, covered in tactical gear, all black. It looks like, to me, black tennis shoes, solid black tennis shoes. And carrying a hammer. And carrying a hammer, which they could have found within the church. There's controversy over whether that hammer came from inside the church or not. Yeah. The several minutes of video that the police have released from inside the church, it's very chilling video that shows this person wandering around the hallways of the church, checking, appearing to check doors and that kind of thing. When I say appearing, I'm wondering if this person is kind of putting on an act and pretending like this person.

Oh, it's so obvious, Alan. Stop wondering. I can tell you that. I can't tell you a lot, but I can tell you that I've watched it over and over. I mean, it's like the person's wandering up and down the halls and they get to a door and they go rattle, rattle and keep walking. And they never take anything. I mean, for Pete's sake, if you want money, go into the sanctuary. I hate to even say this, but I was going to say steal this crucifix. I mean, steal something made of gold, try to find the electronic equipment. They didn't do any of that. Nothing. If they wanted money, then use that hammer and bash open the doorknob to the office and look for money for Pete's sake. Well, it was very obvious these people weren't there to rob.

Well, you just said you didn't know if they were really. They're not. I can tell you they're not there to steal. My point was we don't know. It appears to me that they're acting as if they weren't familiar with the area. As soon as she walks into the door, from what we're told by investigators, and they're not telling us a lot, off camera, or at least a camera they're not releasing, this killer used that hammer to beat Missy Beavers to death,

puncturing her chest and just brutally killing her right there in the hallway the crazy thing is we've got all this video and my guess is there's a lot of video that you and i are not seeing because the police have not released it and there's been tons of search warrants there was a search warrant for the dry cleaner when the father-in-law... Which turned out to be sort of irrelevant. Yeah, I took in a bloody shirt. And he was very open at the time. He went, this is from my dogs got into a dog fight in the kitchen. And there was LinkedIn. There were cell phone tower searches, AT&T, Facebooks.

I'm just still wondering about back to that car. I mean, NASA can pick up a picture of a rock on the moon, a rock you hold in your hand. Why can't they get the tag number of that? Or have they? That is another baffling thing. And let me tell you what's been going on. There's someone I've been in communication with. They asked me not to name them, but this is just a civilian. This is just a citizen who is really getting into this. And this person has blown up every single frame of that parking lot video. And about every day, I get another one sent to me. What do you think of this? They're trying to see what's in the interior. No, tell me. me sorry i'm losing my voice

first john david got it for about a minute then lucy got it and somehow managed to wheedle her way into a day out of school and where i got to stay with her for hours on end and work on her poetry project now i've got it so that's my sack of rocks. Now I want to know what they're sending you. I want to see it. One of the more interesting things, and you and I have talked about this before is the license plate. You just mentioned the license plate on this car, this ultimate, if you blow it up and look frame by frame on the video, the full video has been posted online by the owner manager of the gun shop not by police but and only in December and of course we we sort of broke that back in January and we looked at it closely but if you

blow it up the suspicion here is that that video has been altered to blur out the license plate I mean I look at these frames and everything is clearer except you look and as you follow the car, it does look like maybe somebody has digitally blurred the license plate. So why did they do that? Well, that means to me that they must have found out who it was and totally ruled them out. Or they found out who it was from the license plate and didn't want us and everybody else all over them. We stirred up a hornet's nest back in January when we started talking about this. And there was huge interest in it. You and I both got phone calls and emails and text messages from people in Midlothian asking us not to talk about this case.

Yeah, I don't understand that. Like some people just want the case to go away. Or they think that somehow discussing it or us independently investigating it, as we have been doing in many different ways, is somehow going to hurt the investigation. Well, it looks like nothing's happening on the investigation. I think we need to start talking about this case more because it has been one year. I say because it hasn't been solved. The police have not been giving any interviews, have not been returning calls.

They don't have to, Alan. I know that. Did you go to, quote, journalism school? No, I did not. I was a political science major. I was going to go to law school. What happened to that? I actually worked in a law office, went in to jailhouse interviews, all of that kind of thing. Well, that's enough to turn you off from the law right there. Well, I enjoyed that. You know, did title search, all the small stuff.

I wish I didn't even know that. I worked for a judge. But then what happened was I got a job at a radio station in Carrollton, Georgia, and, you know, playing Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn. Playing Hot Stacks of Wax? Yes, yes. Please tell me you didn't really say that, Hot Stacks of Wax. No, I never did that.

No. And then I started doing news there. And, you know, riding around with the cops and doing all that in a small town of Carrollton, Georgia. And I just fell in love with that. And somehow you landed in the lack of luxury in L.A. with all your Hollywood friends. That was many years later. Many years later.

Still where you landed. I'm just saying. Okay, you know what? Enough of why you didn't go to law school. Let's get back to Missy Beavers. I don't blame you. If I had interviewed a lot of criminals behind bars, that would have totally turned me off.

I would have forgotten the whole thing and run for the hills as if I had seen a monster. Okay, now back to Missy. We were talking about why everybody's clamming up. Well, they are. One of the reasons, actually, we got some communication from Brandon Beavers, who said that he didn't like us talking about it because he was afraid we would anger the killer who's still out there, which is a really good point because it's a small town. He's got three young daughters.

He's worried about their safety. But he's worried that the more publicity this thing gets, it could anger the killer who is still out there. No one has released a statement. No word since May 2016. That was a month after Missy was murdered. They released the image of the Altima that was a month after missy was murdered they released the image of the ultima that was driving around the swfa gun store which is very close to the church at 2 a.m the perp is in the church about an hour later i say that's just no coincidence two hours after

the ultima is driving around in the gun store parking lot, Missy's murdered. Now, we were all told this was not a suspect vehicle, but it was possibly one. Well, I recall the police saying it was not a suspect vehicle, but that police were interested in speaking to the owner that maybe they saw something that morning. Brandon Beaver spoke out then he was caught in his driveway he spoke again he spoke with his dad there was a press conference there was a release an image of the Altima was released see to me if they had ruled the car out why release the image long story short we still don't know a darn thing there was all the speculation the killer was a woman but i still say if they had done the stingray data dump and figured out what cell phones were in the area

and active between one and four o'clock in the morning we would have learned a lot of course the killer may have known to cut the cell phone off, remember? Yeah, cut the phone off, take the battery out, do all of those things, or not even bring a cell phone with you. You know, you don't have to post on Facebook necessarily as you're killing somebody. Now, also, it was reported to the police, digital evidence seen in the Altima linked the car to the church. Digital evidence can be seen in the Altima linking it to the church. I do know if you blow up the images, and we can share some of these blown up images that have been shared with me, you will see the form of different things inside the car that could be, you could be interpreting things used, well, like a fireman's tool. That's one theory that if you look in the back seat, you see a fireman's tool. Well, does that mean it's linked to the church

in that it looks like the same weapon? I think so. Yes. You can see different boxes, but I really don't know that you can draw a conclusion. I have squinted and looked at these images. I think somebody with better eyes will have to figure that out than me. I don't see it as conclusive. seat and the mallet that you're describing that they believe police believe was a murder weapon and another tool seen on the back dashboard the police midlothian police state they were not aware these items existed in the vehicle and reinforced the surveillance video was completed back in may well you know they're claiming they don't have the ability to enhance it any further. Well, can the feds? I mean, for Pete's sake, you can get better video than that enhancement at Walmart. There is, again, this person I was telling you, a private citizen, has been really pushing the police to do just that.

This person has spent a lot of time in doing that. There's an organization that does this that has offered to help Midlothian police do this. And from what I understand, they've not taken them. Are you talking about the Center for Media Forensics? Yes. Yes. Man, they should give it a crack for Pete's sake. And they have a grant from the feds, the DOJ. Maybe this is happening all behind the scenes and we just don't know about it. Could be. I mean, they helped with the Boston Marathon bombings, didn't they? Yes, yes, I think so.

What's baffling to me on this first anniversary of Missy's murder is that we've not heard from Midlothian police in more than six months. They've declined our request for interviews. Now, I did get a response just yesterday from the husband, Brandon Beavers, to my invitation to him to speak to us. And here's what he wrote me in an email. The family has unilaterally decided not to do any interviews. We've elected not to memorialize the date of the event, but to celebrate her life in private instead. Okay, let's move on from the car. Let's talk about what else we do know. We know that either Missy and or Brandon

were romantically linked to other people. The police were not clear. They made it fairly obvious that it was Missy. We also know, and you know what? I'm not judging her. I'm not proud of everything I've ever done in my life either. All I care about is a felony. Everything else is a lifestyle choice, and I don't care. But I know that she was away the weekend before in Austin, and she was not

with her husband and children. Did she meet somebody there? Is there an angry lover or an angry spouse that has it out for Missy? I mean, you've got to look at the behavioral evidence as well when you run dry on scientific. So what do we know other than it's alleged she had affairs? They searched her iPhone 6. They searched her Facebook page. They searched text messages and that sort of thing. And they found, as you said, evidence of relationships. This is all in the search warrants. So this part is out in the open. But just because you have an affair with somebody doesn't mean that they're going to kill you or a spouse is going to kill you. It could have been something else.

But how could this be totally random when there's so much appeared to to be like somebody laying in way okay that's not random so we can quit talking about that wasting my breath wasting my breath what about brandon beavers who is not a suspect who is not a poi person of interest now he was out on a long planned fishing trip i think he tries to take it every year. Fishing slash gambling. Was it in Mississippi? Wasn't it? Biloxi. Yes.

And Christy Stout, his sister, had described that trip. But some research shows that there was not an American Airlines flight out of DFW headed to that location that day. Well, for all I know, it could have been a different airline. It could have been an hopscotch. I'm going to assume police have verified his alibi. I'm sure he was the first person they looked at. Yes, of course. I mean, that's the routine that you tell us about all the time. The first person you look at is the spouse, the boyfriend, right?

When you look at the charter company that was taking them fishing, they did, they do have one boat trip featured on their website. That's the trip Beavers was supposed to be on a year ago today. The group was described on the website as a group of guys from Texas. All right. That to me checks out to a large degree. You got to stick with the husband to a certain extent because that's always the prime person, the target police look at. But I found Brandon Beavers to be pretty open. He would come forward and speak. Have you noticed that when husbands, except for Drew Peterson, husbands that kill usually don't speak. They hide out. They don't come forward. Remember Scott Peterson?

I mean, I can give you a million off the top of my head. But Beavers didn't do that. He's out front and center from the get-go. Brandon Beavers was very outspoken early, but I can tell you he is not talking now. Wonder why? Why? He sent me an email, and we had a phone conversation. Basically, the bottom line being he does not want this to be publicly discussed. He wants this just to be investigated

by police outside of the public because he thinks the speculation is a danger to his family. He thinks that because of the speculation that the killer who's still free, obviously, I mean, we know that. That's one thing we know is the killer is still free. Okay, this is what we can do today. We can release the pictures that you have obtained on the CrimeOnline.com website. So everyone can look at them. We can release any other information, if possible. Some of it we cannot release because we promised we

wouldn't. Some we can. Let's do that, Alan. Having everybody looking at it may help. I don't understand why they've clammed up. I don't understand why they're not speaking. I find it hard to believe they can't enhance the evidence any further. What more can we be looking at now? Well, we can expect at some point, maybe on the anniversary, that at least Midlothian police will give us an update, will make some sort of statement. We will continue our investigation into the death of Missy Beavers. It's getting more and more difficult to call information from a group that are locked up tight and won't speak, and I don't really understand that. But on this day, we're thinking of the family. I'm thinking of Brandon Beavers, especially I'm thinking of those children, her three girls

that are left behind. Alan, what's our tip line? Call the Midlothian Police Department at 972-775-7624. If you want to be anonymous, you can leave a tip at this number, 972-937-PAYS, or 7297. And of course, you can always go to CrimeOnline.com where we have an anonymous email drop and phone number for you to leave information on this and other crimes. Missy Beavers, rest in peace because we are not giving up here on Earth. Nancy Grace, Crime Stories, signing off. Goodbye, friend. This is an iHeart Podcast.