Snapped: Women Who Murder - Lillie Mae Eubank

Episode Date: May 3, 2026

After returning from several tours of duty abroad, a soldier is found beaten to death on his own army base in Hinesville, Ga.Season 33 Episode 24Originally aired: Sun, Jun 30, 2024Watch full episodes of Snapped for FREE on the Oxygen app: https://oxygentv.app.link/WatchSnappedPodSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

A soldier's brutal murder shocks a Georgia military base. We had a deceased service member, and the circumstances around his death were unknown. He'd been so badly beaten that he actually had brain matter exuding from his skull. Witness accounts point to a suspect close to the victim. He wanted to go animal tracking. My uncle and my stepfather both wouldn't. into the woods.

Only one came out. She said he looked crazed in his eyes. But as the investigation unfolds, detectives sort through lies and misdirection to catch a ruthless killer driven by greed. Everything she said was a lie. Every emotion she displayed was fake. He went from fighting wars just to come home and die.

Like, that makes absolutely no sense. This is sweet. November 30th, 2013. It's the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and soldiers at Georgia's Fort Stewart Army base are enjoying a sunny afternoon with their families. Fort Stewart is quite large, and it's home to about 20,000 soldiers. But around 5 p.m., a shocking discovery at a park located on Fort Stewart's military base interrupts the community's weekend. plans. A 911 call came into the Fort Stewart 911 Dispatch Center, reporting a body, a male, found

just about 10 feet into the wood line. The victim was not conscious, but was alive and was struggling to breathe. The gentleman who called reported that he and other military members were rendering aid. He'd been so badly beaten that he actually had brain matter exuding from his skull. There was no identification on this victim. He had like army boots on. And so that led us to the thought that this was possibly a soldier. Police and paramedics arrive on scene and quickly transport the victim to nearby Wynne

Army Hospital. The victim did not survive the attack very long. He was pronounced dead. His skull was badly fractured in a number of places. He had a number of lacerations. The injuries were indicative of a homicide, and that's how we treated the case going forward. Because this was very apparently a purposeful assault,

First responders notify the Army's Criminal Investigative Division. The CID Criminal Investigation Division are what I would call the FBI of the military. They will investigate anything from felonies to misdemeanors. By the following morning, the entire base is working with investigators to identify the victim found in the woods. Every commander was instructed to perform a... a full accountability of his or her unit. The only soldier on the base that had not been accounted for was Specialist John Eubank.

Soldiers from Specialist Eubank's unit went to Win Army Hospital to attempt to identify the victim. I was able to identify John when they kicked the sheet back. His injuries were very severe, but I could still tell it was John. The last time I've seen this man, he was healthy, full of life, and to be reduced to land on the steel slab, be down like that, that's tough to deal with. Like, who would do this to him?

John Eubank was born on December 15, 1983, in the remote Alaskan town of Mountain Village. John's family were Yupik Alaskan natives, and his indigenous heritage was a central part of his identity. John was definitely big on his culture, being a Native American. He was always big on family and taking care of his family and always looking out for him as best he could. John was never scared to show that he loved his family.

He would talk about his family and how they would do everything together. Growing up in a town of less than a thousand people made John eager to see the world. So a few weeks before his 20th birthday, he enlisted in the Army. I served with John for two deployments. He was a goofball. And no matter what kind of mood you were in, he would always put a smile on your face. After basic training, John was deployed to Iraq in 2004, where he served as a heavy vehicle driver.

We were part of the same team. We provided transportation security. The thing that said to me the most about John are deployments. He tried his best to keep it cool and calm. He dealt with pretty much everything that you can imagine being shot at with. Because John was from Alaska, we gave him the nickname of the Alaskan assassin. Between 2004 and 2008, John served two deployments in Iraq. As much as he loved the service, he began dreaming of having seen.

someone to come home to. John was looking for someone that loved him as much as he would love them. But when it came to dating, the brave soldier was an unfamiliar territory. He wasn't given really a lot of opportunities to date, and John wasn't the biggest social butterfly. To help overcome his shyness, John tried to do that. online dating while deployed. He soon hit it off

with 34-year-old single mother, Lily Mae Wells. After a string of bad relationships and moving around, Lily was looking for another chance at love. John explained to me that Lily's background from what she told him was a little rough.

I guess she was abused. Lily would do a lot of pet rescue. She would nurse them back to health or get them back up to par and find them good homes. And that was something that she was very passionate about. Over the duration of the deployment, they would write back and forth, talk on the phone together. He couldn't wait to meet her when he got back. In the winter of 2008, John and Lily finally met in person when he returned home to Fort Stewart.

She had came from Florida. He had told me that he was extremely happy about it. Lily was just a way that she was online as in person. After months of a long-distance relationship, the couple couldn't wait to spend every moment together. He had moved into on-post housing, and it wasn't long before they got married. It was like it happened overnight.

happened overnight. He was telling everybody this was his wife and, you know, he was ecstatic to have somebody. John was equally excited by the idea of becoming a stepfather to Lily's children. When I first met him, I was not happy about it. I fought with him tooth and nail. But I warmed up to him pretty fast, I think. By the time John came into my life, I was already in my teens. He was about 10 years younger than mom.

He was young and he was still trying to learn what it meant to be a stepdad. I can understand now when I look back at it that he was just trying to figure out, you know, where he fit in the puzzle. You would make these really funny faces and there's no way you can not laugh. Over the next five years, John continued to work his way up the military. ranks, but his hopes for the future centered on his family. John was hopeful to have his own children, but on the same hand, he loved those children like they were his own children. But tragically, that future never came to be. After surviving multiple tours in combat zones, John has met an unimaginable fate near the military base he calls home.

We had a deceased service member, and the circumstances around his death were unknown. So it was our job to figure out how John Eubank was killed. Army CID initially processed the scene. They found some brain matter. They found teeth. It became clear to the investigators that this was the site of the actual assault. The crime scene provides few leads, but when investigators canvass the area, they learn that the killer may have made one costly mistake. One of the persons who was helping the victim told investigators she had seen a white or a gray pickup truck in that area,

and that the pickup truck was rolling very slowly and occasionally stopping as if it was waiting for something or hesitant to leave. Very shortly before that pickup truck left the area, a man came out from the wood line. She had provided a physical description of a white male with longish, maybe shoulder-length hair, average build, who was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved top. That could be the last person who had seen him alive, and we needed to find out who this person was. A grieving widow and her daughter share a disturbing firsthand account. I told them everything that I knew.

I didn't hold back anything. And investigators zero in on a person of interest. He had a very extensive criminal history. He threatened to kill her, choked her, and held her against her wealth. He was a ticking time bomb. The day after findings, soldier John Eubanks' body, military police are investigating their first lead after a witness reported seeing suspicious activity moments before his body was found. She had actually witnessed a man

come out from the wood line, walk around the back of the truck, and get in just before it departed. Unfortunately, the witness did not see a license plate number for the vehicle, so identifying the suspect will take more legwork. At that point, staff sergeants in Specialist John Eubanks' unit decided to call his dependent spouse, and that was Lily Eubank. Lily answered the phone and told them that she was actually about to call the MPs because she stated, her husband's specialist Eubank had not come home that night and that she had not seen him since the previous afternoon. The sergeant asked whether she had filed a missing person's report, and she said she had melanched. because she believed she had to wait 24 hours before she could do that.

Rather than deliver news of John's death over the phone, military police send a car to bring Lily in. The casualty assistance officer informed Lily that her husband's specialist John Eubank was deceased. She simply said over and over again, who would do this to him? Who would do something like this to him? Lily Eubank's response was puzzling and very suspicious in that she never asked what happened

because nobody had informed her of the cause or manner of death. Despite her grief, Lily does her best to answer investigators' questions. Lily Mae Eubank reported that she had last seen her husband on November 30th, around 4.30 at the Holbrook-Pond Recreation Area. He wanted to go animal tracking, so she and her daughter, Angel Wells, had dropped him off to go off into the woods. He had told her to just go on to head home, that he would walk home himself. John's body was found at 5 p.m. just 30 minutes later. Lily described her marriage with John as a good marriage.

She loved him very much. which he provided for their family, and he was the father figure to her two daughters. She was telling me about how she was texting back and forth with John, and he was saying, you know, things like, oh, yeah, we're having a good time, which caused the suspicion of who's we? She explained that he was referring to him being with the deer.

So these messages between her and John really gave me interest in what was on her cell phone. When I asked Lily to be able to search her cell phone, she seemed really open to the idea and not reluctant to share that with me. While CID waits for the analysis, they let Lily go home and continue gathering information

from friends and service members. We sent a team over to their neighborhood to campus their neighbors and ask them what they've seen. When officers passed the Eubank home, they noticed something surprising in their driveway. It was interesting for agents to see a silver pickup truck because eyewitnesses at Holbroke Pond had seen a white or a silver-in-color pickup truck slowly rolling past the location where John Eubank was found. When speaking with neighbors, they confirm that Lilly drives the truck. and also share another piece of information

Lily left out of her statement. Some neighbors reported that on the evening of John Eubanks' murder, which was November 30th, they saw a person they knew to be Lily Eubank's brother, Carl Swain, departing the residence. In her timeline, she never once mentioned that her brother had been in town visiting.

My Uncle Carl was a little off the wall. I asked her why my Uncle Carl had even came here, and she had told me that my Uncle Carl wanted to try to rebuild their relationship. Nobody really had a relationship with him because he's literally been at and out of prison my entire life. When investigators confront Lily, she says that Carl was in town for Thanksgiving, but she took him to the bus station that evening. He didn't live there, and so she took him to the bus station to send him back home. Agent Cicero demands to know why Lily Eubank wouldn't have mentioned that her brother has been in town.

Lily responds that she was actually just trying to protect her brother, Carl. She had purchased his ticket to travel from Alabama to Savannah and back. And the explanation that Lily gave was he had some sort of criminal history that would prevent him from traveling outside of the state. Investigators ask Lily to give her full statement again. When asked to now tell a truthful statement, Lily said that she was not truthful when she said she dropped John Eubank off at Holbrook Pond to go animal tracking by himself. She said that in reality she and her daughter Angel had driven John Eubank and Carl Swain

to Holbrook Pond and had dropped them both off that afternoon to supposedly go animal tracking. That John Eubank had gotten out of the truck and departed with a slingshot and that Carl Swain had a wooden baseball bat. Lily says the men took the weapons to fend off any wild hogs they might run into, so she didn't think anything of it at the time. She and her daughter ran some errands, then returned a few hours later to pick them up. Lily and Angel come back, and as they pull around, they see Carl up in the woodline with the

baseball bat hitting something repeatedly. Shortly thereafter, Carl comes down from the woodline and gets in the vehicle with them. He is exactly. He was desperated, has blood on him and the baseball bat. Had blood on it. Lily inquired to Carl, hey, what happened? And Carl said that they were scared or spooked by a hog, and he was up there beating the hog, and John ran off like a little bitch.

My uncle and my stepfather both went into the woods. Only one came out. She said he looked crazed in his eyes. and still a little amped up. Lily claims she took Carl's explanation at face value when it happened. But investigators are quick to challenge her story. As I continue to interview Lily,

I kind of lay out all the facts to her of, okay, your husband went missing yesterday. You saw your brother beating, quote unquote, a pig in the woods. Your husband is deceased. Common sense would tell you that the likelihood that it was Carl who killed your husband is high. And she continued to claim ignorance. She believes that she's simply a sort of victim in all of this and that she never knew that was going to happen.

Investigators keep pressing. The agents didn't believe her. They pressed her on that story. And ultimately, Lily admitted that she had seen Swain was beating something and it wasn't a hog, that it was actually the body of John Eubank. Lily Mae Eubank has just confessed to seeing her brother, Carl Swain, beat her husband to death. We knew she was involved, but we didn't know the extent of how she was involved at this point in the investigation.

But now, Lily is involved. willing to work with investigators to help build a case against John's killer. She agreed to make a surreptitious recorded phone call to Carl Swain that CID would listen in on. We ask her to ask Carl about what happened to the bat, to try to get Carl to make some sort of admission. So of course, Carl's very suspicious when he gets a call from Lily. He puts together the fact that he's probably being overheard on the phone. He told her, I don't know what you're talking about, and that was about the extent of that conversation.

Lily is not apprehended at this point, but was very clearly a person of interest. With Carl thwarting the attempt at self-incrimination, investigators work with the FBI to try a different route. Lee Eubank placed her daughter, Angel Wells, at the crime scene. We then had to interview Angel to verify not only her mom's story, but also try and put the pieces together of what actually happened that day. During her interview, Angel corroborates everything her mother told police. When we were coming back to pick him up, I saw Uncle Carl swinging the back towards the

ground. Then he stopped and he came out the woods and he got in the truck. He had blood splattered on his face as if you would if you took spaghetti sauce on a spoon and splattered it on a wall. He said that he had hit the wild boar in the head, one and busted his head open. I did not believe Carl. I asked Carl to see the bat. He handed it to me. There was hair still in the back, splintered in the wood.

Angel says she felt like she knew what really happened. But like her mother, she was afraid Carl might kill her too. I had no idea why my uncle would do that. My granny said that he was a ticking time bomb, and he had anger issues. When investigators check Carl's police record, it confirms Lily and Angel had good reason to fear him. He had a very extensive criminal history.

The most blaring was an assault against a former wife where he threatened to kill her, choked her, and held her against her will. They wanted to make sure they got him into custody as soon as possible. With Lily's help, authorities are able to track Carl to an address in Alabama on December 6. They took Swain into custody really without any incident. The agents then went into the warehouse. where Carl was living and they looked for any items of interest that might tie him to the murder of John.

In the furthest reaches of the crawl space, they found John Eubanks military C-bag. And when they opened it, they found a pair of blue jeans and a pair of cowboy boots that they submitted to the lab. Carl denies having anything to do with John's death, but results of the forensic. tests show otherwise. It was determined that the genes contained the DNA of both Carl Swain and John Eubank.

Carl is charged with first-degree murder and extradited to Georgia to face trial. Three weeks after the arrest, on December 27th, John Eubank's loved ones gather for a memorial service. It was tough. When I had to hand his mother that flag at the funeral, that was the other thing ever did in my life. But when John's fellow service members learn how he died, they're immediately suspicious. Nobody had ever heard of him going hog hunting before.

We kind of had a gut feeling that something just didn't seem right. After the funeral, John's comrades share their concerns with Army CID. They said that John was very good about managing his money before he met and married Lily, but that after he married her, he always was needing to borrow money. We were concerned because of the financial struggle, because of the way he was not associating with us

the same way as he did before he got married. There's a culture in the military that you don't show weakness. Number one, you don't go around airing your problems to everybody. John's friends say they were confused by the sudden change until they discovered the reason for it. Lily took over his finances when they got together. There were a lot of times where she would write out checks that were bad.

She had no control when it came to. money. Mama seemed to be really bossy and if she didn't get a response back from him really quick, she seemed to get really upset. And his fellow soldiers say John finally decided to do something about it during his last deployment. He was bound and determined to get the divorce when he came back home because he had had enough. All John Eubank wanted was somebody to be nice to him and to care about him. And when he came to the realization that Lily Eubank was never going to do that, and that all she wanted him for was his

money and a roof over her head, he was bold enough, finally, to broach the topic of divorce. But once he did that, he was worth more dead than alive. Coming up, phone records reveal the details of a murder for hire. Each day involved a new type of a new type of a new type of plan to kill John Eubank. But can detectives prove who was behind it? She seemed relieved almost that she finally was done with hiding all the facts.

Six days after John Eubank's body was discovered bludgeoned to death on Fort Stewart Army base, investigators have arrested Carl Swain for his murder. But they suspect John's wife Lily was involved as well. There were too many red flags such as Carl not being included in her story from the beginning. And we're starting to believe that Lily is a subject in this case versus a grieving widow. To help investigators prove Lily is responsible, John's friend Tamisa records several conversations with her, hoping she'll slip up. I didn't care if I needed to use my cell phone or.

wear a wire, where a recording device, I was going to find out what had happened. Oh, no. So we could stop it. It's not really pure insane. I had to think strategically because I really wanted to make sure that I didn't do anything to alarm her. She tells to Misa that she and her daughter

live in fear of Carl, despite the fact that he's been arrested. Why would he go after you guys? The witnesses. You're headed to witnesses, nobody can testify against it. The tapes are turned over to the FBI, but there's nothing incriminating enough to make an arrest. When agents confront Lily for the third time, she admits there's more to the story, but says it's not what they think. Lily's story is that she was experiencing marital difficulties

claiming that he had physically assaulted her and that he was verbally and emotionally abusive. Lily claims she turned to her brother for help. Lily Eubank told me that she asked her brother Carl to rough up her husband, to scare John into acting a person. appropriately to her. Swain was only supposed to beat John up with his fists,

and instead he went wild and out of control and murdered him with his baseball bat. But with all the lies leading up to this, investigators are no longer inclined to believe her. At this point, Lily Eubank has changed her story three times. We couldn't find that there was actually abuse happening. The investigators that I was working with and myself all found this very problematic.

It's clear Lily isn't going to tell them the truth, and so far Carl has remained silent as well. But while he's in jail awaiting trial, Carl makes a crucial mistake. He told two detainees in the Chatham County Jail what he had done, that he had beaten John Eubank to death. Swain had confided in them that he had done this at the behest of his sister, Lily Eubank,

because she was going to get $500,000 after the murder as the grieving widow, and that he was going to be owed $160,000 for his part in the murder. Service members are covered by something called the Servicemen's Group Life Insurance Policy, SGLI. Lily Eubank was the beneficiary of those life insurance benefits. Every emotion Lily Eubank displayed was fake. Lily Eubank cared about nothing other than Lily Eubank. When investigators receive the analysis for Lily's phone records, they find further evidence of a murder plot.

Special Agent Fryman found a string of text messages between Lily Eubank and Carl Swain. From the text messages for investigators were able to discern that Lily Eubank had been planning to and attempting to kill John Eubank for much of longer than was initially suspected. Back in April of 2013, she had a conversation with one of her daughters about John wanting a divorce.

We can tell from Lily Eubanks' Internet search history, that's when she started planning his murder. Lily's content for searches conducted on her phone included how to drown somebody in a bathtub, as well as poisons that will not be identified on an auto. In September of 2013, Lily texted, I baked him a strawberry vanilla bean cake. Special Agent Fryman was able to uncover that vanilla bean was actually sort of a code word for a castor bean, which can be used to make ricin poison. She thought that by baking castor beans into a cake, she had created ricin and was going to effectively poison him to death.

death. The attempt to poison John failed, but tech's show Lily kept looking for solutions. One of the things that came up in discussion was a trip to Tybee Island. There was mention of John not being a good swimmer, and then so potential attempts at maybe a drowning. That plan didn't work out. The next day was Thanksgiving. And the day after sitting at John Eubank's Thanksgiving table, Carl Swain then invited John Eubank out for that walk. John never once probably knew it was coming because he assumed this is something that John and Carl were doing

to maybe bond to like get to know one another. After putting together the text messages, search history, and motive, we were able to have enough to charge Lily in the murder of John Eubank as well. On February 26, detectives confront Lily with the evidence, and this time she has a different reaction. She seemed relieved almost that she finally was done with hiding all the facts. Lily Eubank confessed that in reality she had not asked Carl Swain, to beat up John Eubank as retaliation for some sort of abuse.

It was simply an expectation of a $500,000 death gratuity. At this point, Lily was arrested and charged with murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and murder for hire. I was like, what the, do you mean she's been arrested? For what? Like, it didn't click at first. We were fortunate in that we had an, excellent investigation that had produced overwhelming evidence, but a prosecutor still never walks into a jury trial

thinking it's a sure thing. The defendant really has nothing to lose. After a three-month investigation, Lily Mae Eubank and her brother, Carl Swain, have both been charged for the murder of John Eubank. But as prosecutors prepare the case for trial, Lily tries to lay the blame entirely on Carl. Lily Eubank maintained that Carl Swain had demanded the money from her

and essentially had twisted Lily's arm to participate in this plan. Like her other claims, the evidence doesn't support it. Lily told us she purchased a bat a couple weeks prior to the murder with John for protection in their vehicle. In the event it broke down. Investigators went to Walmart to pull surveillance footage, and sure enough, they found footage at the self-checkout, where John Eubank was actually purchasing the bat

that was ultimately used in his murder. It just showed how just heartless she was. A part of me wants to believe my mom, but there's just so much other evidence that says otherwise. otherwise. Lily Eubank was incredibly cold and calculating throughout this murder plot, all the while pretending to be John Eubank's loving wife.

Lily manipulated Carl Swain's impoverished situation to entice him to come to Hinesville and murder her husband. Call was homeless and living on the edge. $160,000 would be a great motivator to anyone in his situation. Not even jail stops Lily from continuing her manipulation tactics. She didn't like being in the local jail, so she would make herself seriously ill such that she would have to be transported to a hospital facility.

When that behavior stopped working, Lily Eubank pretended to be absolutely catatom. The defense attorney for Lily tried to bring a defense of mental capacity. The ploy gets Lily what she wants, a psychiatric evaluation. But her plan backfires. The court found that she was stable enough to not only be charged, but go to trial if she chose to. She chose not to and took a plea agreement to conspiracy to commit murder.

Lily is sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In March 2015, more than a year after John's murder, Lily's brother Carl goes on trial. The evidence was just so overwhelming. I don't think there was much the defense could do here. Carl was found guilty on all three charges, murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and murder for hire. Each of those charges brings a mandatory minimum sentence of life in prison. So Carl received three life sentences, and he will remain there without any opportunity to be released.

I think justice will serve because they would never have the opportunity to be outside those walls again. Neither one of them deserve to have a life outside of prison. John should be remembered as a hero, a friend, and for just who he was to each and everyone. My dad did not deserve to die like that. He went from fighting wars just to come home and die. Like, that makes absolutely no sense to me. Carl Swain is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole at USP, Tara Although Lily was incarcerated in a Georgia women's prison, she secured a transfer to the federal medical center.