- [Narrator] What is up, EWU crew?
Today, we're covering the
extremely disturbing case
of Missy Bevers.
Missy was a 45-year-old wife
and mother of three daughters.
She had been married to
Brandon Bevers since 1998.
She was the daughter of
James and Norma Strickland
and had two brothers, Clint and Clifford.
Missy led a fitness class
called Camp Gladiator,
which was held early in the morning
at Creekside Church of
Christ in Midlothian, Texas.
Midlothian is a small city of 27,000,
located 25 miles southwest of Dallas.
Like most cities in America,
it has had its fair share
of issues over the years,
but generally speaking, it
is a safe decent small city
full of hard-working families
just going about their daily lives.
A lot of people live there
and commute to Dallas
or Fort Worth for work.
People like it because it is
located in a mostly rural area,
which is a nice quiet change
from the hustle and bustle
of the nearby big cities.
Prior to 2016, there hadn't been a murder
committed in that city
in over seven years.
That quiet environment was
shaken up early one morning
in April, 2016.
Early in the morning of April 18th, 2016,
students of Missy's fitness
class began arriving.
It was around 5:00 a.m.,
they found Missy on the
floor and unresponsive,
And it was at that point
that calls began pouring in to 9-1-1.
When police arrived, they
found Missy was deceased
and had multiple wounds
on her head and chest.
None of Missy's belongings
or the church's belongings
had been taken.
The medical examiner later revealed
that Missy died from a
sharp blow to the head.
Almost immediately detectives
began reviewing footage
from the church security cameras.
What they saw would
become the central focus
of the investigation from that point on.
At 3:50 a.m. footage showed a person
dressed in what appeared
to be SWAT-type gear
walking and down a
hallway inside the church.
Cameras did not pick up
the suspect arriving,
but it is known they broke a
window and entered the church
through a side door shortly
before they are seen on camera.
They were wearing a black helmet
and swinging what appeared to be a hammer.
It was impossible to determine
if the person was a man or woman,
because they were covered
head to toe in SWAT gear,
including a heavy vest
with the word Police
on the front and back.
At 4:16 a.m., surveillance
cameras show Missy
arriving at the church
and entering the building.
That is the last time
Missy was seen alive.
She had arrived early to start
setting up for her class.
Suspect.
Detectives put together the
best profile of the suspect
that they were able to
with the footage they had.
He or she was between 5'2" and 5'7"
and walked with an unusual gait.
The feet turned slightly outward,
mostly on the right side.
Detectives began looking for individuals
who had injuries or other conditions
that caused them to walk like this.
Some have theorized that maybe the walk
was due to the boots being too big,
which leads some to further speculate
that this is a woman wearing
boots made for a man.
The very creepy church
surveillance footage
that police released to the public
is a little over two minutes long
and can easily be found online.
Every second has been
researched thoroughly
by detectives as well as the
general public repeatedly
over the last four years.
In the footage, the suspect can be seen
walking along the hallways
of the church opening doors.
If they came across an unlocked door,
they would briefly look inside
and then go to the next door.
At one point early in the video,
they came across a locked door
and appeared to try to break in
before giving up and moving on to another.
They even appeared to go into the bathroom
and walk back out the other side.
At the end they appeared to be swinging
something like a hammer
to break a window and enter another room.
That is where the footage stops.
There is additional surveillance footage
that has never been
released by the police,
including potential footage of the murder,
which will never be released
for obvious reasons.
It is important to note that the suspect
never took a single thing
from any of the rooms they went into.
So, this isn't the case of
being caught in a robbery.
It seems clear that
they are walking around
looking for someone,
most likely: Missy.
It seems to be the entire
reason they were there.
This also suggests that
it was someone familiar
with Missy's routine and schedule.
They knew she would be at
that location at that time
to set up for her class,
and purposely arrived and disappeared
before any of the students arrived.
It's possible it was someone
who knew Missy personally,
but it's just as likely it
was someone who knew her
only through social media.
Another very disturbing
aspect of the footage
is that the suspect was
clearly not in any hurry,
whether or not they knew
others would be arriving at 5:00 or not.
They seem to be very casual
and calm about the whole thing
and don't seem to be worried
about getting caught.
There has been a lot of speculation,
regarding the costume
the suspect is wearing.
The general consensus is that the suspect
likely pieced it together,
possibly from items
that can easily be bought online.
There is no proof that it is
a legitimate SWAT uniform.
Missy Bevers had a very
active social media presence.
The night before she was murdered,
she posted about her class on Facebook,
reminding her students
that even though it was scheduled to rain,
they would begin their class
at Creekside Church of Christ
under the front awning at 5:00 a.m.
It also mentions that
she had another class
scheduled for 9:00 a.m. at
the Midlothian Civic Center,
possibly also due to rain.
Missy's Facebook was set to public
and she had hundreds of Facebook friends.
She had more than 1,400 photos and videos
all available to the public.
She was also very active
on Twitter and Instagram.
She posted a lot about
her life and her family,
but also started using it
to promote her Camp
Gladiator fitness classes.
In the months prior to her murder,
Missy had shared a lot
of personal information,
such as what car she drove,
her favorite stores and restaurants,
and at one point she even
posted her phone number.
Joseph Steinberg is the
CEO of SecureMySocial,
a tech company that specializes
in social media security for businesses.
In an interview with Yahoo
News about Missy Bevers'
strong social media presence, he stated,
"Sometimes, it's not the one
post that creates the danger,
it's the combination,
it's the one-plus-one-plus-one-equals-500
problem."
The outside cameras for the church
were not working at the time,
but detectives were able to obtain footage
from a business nearby.
A sporting goods store
called SWFA Outdoors,
located in close proximity to the church,
had outside surveillance
cameras on that morning.
Approximately two hours
before Missy was murdered,
a white Nissan Altima
was seen circling the
parking lot of the store
and at one point turning
the headlights off and on.
Detectives initially put
forth a lot of effort
to find the owner of that car,
but later stated they no longer believed
it was connected to Missy's murder.
Brandon Bevers, Missy's
husband of 18 years,
was 600 miles away on a
fishing trip in Mississippi
at the time of the murder.
Brandon has been very cooperative
with investigators from the beginning.
Even meeting with them weekly
in the early stages of the investigation.
He made television news
appearances pleading with people
to watch the security footage
and report anything they might know.
- As far as the perpetrator, I don't know,
we still don't know who he is,
but I ask everybody out
there to review the video.
I think you can get the video
on the Midlothian police
department's Facebook website,
look at the video.
The person has a very distinct walk,
there's just a very distinct
mannerism about this person,
that should be very
apparent to somebody, okay?
- [Narrator] Not long
into the investigation,
it was revealed that the
couple had been having marital
and financial problems.
Brandon said it wasn't anything
that 80% of couples haven't dealt with.
The difference being that
most people's dirty laundry
isn't put out for the whole world to see.
He said that they had been
working on their issues.
Police obtained text
messages sent back and forth
between Brandon and Missy.
Although the last one she sent
the night before her murder
was very sweet and told him
she was thinking about him
while he was away, there were ones before
that painted a somewhat darker picture.
The messages sent back and
forth between Brandon and Missy
in the months leading up to her murder
have never been released to the public.
However, we are told that
the messages include evidence
of the financial and marital
problems they were having,
including mentions of infidelity.
A lot of speculation was made
about Brandon Bevers' demeanor
while talking to reporters in
the days following the murder.
The reason for that is he was very calm
and didn't appear emotional.
He seemed to have a lot of trouble
looking directly at the camera.
He looked down or off to
one side or the other.
He might have been in shock
or just isn't a very emotional person.
He might have also been trying
to be strong for his daughters.
In any case, it's not enough
to consider someone a suspect.
Late in 2017, about a year
and a half after the murder,
Brandon announced he had
stopped looking for the killer,
so that he could instead
focus on his family's healing.
In 2019, Brandon spoke to Inside Edition.
He said the suspect with the unique gait
continued to haunt him every day.
"When I see similar
mannerisms with other people,
I actually follow those
people out to their car,
get their license plates
and turn them in," he said.
Evidence revealed that prior to her death,
Missy had been exchanging flirtatious
and intimate text messages with a man
other than her husband.
Police located the man
she had been talking to,
who admitted they had
started talking in January,
three months prior to her death.
Police were able to obtain the texts,
which had later been deleted on both Missy
and the man's phone.
The man is not a suspect in the case.
Despite the fact that Missy and Brandon
had been having marital problems,
finding out that Missy had
been flirting with another man
was a shock to her family.
Marcia Tucker, Brandon's mother
and Missy's mother-in-law,
told People magazine that the revelation
"knocked us down a little bit."
She went on to say, "I mean,
as bad as it is on the girls,
especially the older ones,
for Brandon to lose his wife
to murder and then find out
about the flirtatious
remarks to other people
has got to be devastating to him."
Missy was very active on the
social media site LinkedIn.
A friend of hers told law enforcement
that less than three
days before the murder,
Missy showed her a private message
she had received on LinkedIn
from a mysterious man.
Police obtained a warrant
and accessed the account,
finding the message in question and more.
The warrant stated that
the message was from a male
unknown to them both and they both agreed
that the message was creepy and strange.
The friend could not remember
the name of the account
from which the message had been sent.
Police have never revealed
what the message said,
if they found the owner of the account
the message was sent from,
or if said person is
a suspect in the case.
Very little information is
publicly known about that message
or if it's tied to the
murder suspect in any way.
At the time of her murder,
Missy was the mother
of daughters: Hannah, 15,
Allie, 13, and Sarah, eight.
Prior to starting her
career as a fitness coach,
Missy had been a stay-at-home mom
who homeschooled her
daughters for many years.
Naturally, the loss of their mother
has been the hardest on them.
It's been made even worse by the fact
that some people still
continue to blame their father.
In 2019, Hannah told Inside Edition:
"I've had people on
Facebook message me and say,
'Your dad did this, your
dad killed your mom.'
My dad loved my mom and I know that 100%."
Randy Bevers is Brandon's dad
and Missy's father-in-law.
He has been a point of
focus with the public
more so at the beginning,
but is not an official
suspect in the case.
Randy was in California
at the time of the murder.
A few days after Missy's death,
Randy took a blood-stained
woman's XXL t-shirt
to the dry cleaner super
center in Midlothian.
He claimed, the blood was from his dog,
who had been in a fight with another dog.
The cleaners contacted the police,
who were able to corroborate the story
with the dog's veterinarian.
The blood on the shirt was tested
by the University of North
Texas Science Center laboratory
and it was confirmed that
it was not human blood.
Kristi Stout, Missy's
sister-in-law, told NBC 5,
that the dog fight occurred in her kitchen
between two chihuahuas that
had belonged to family members.
Randy tried to break up the fight
and then carried the
wounded dog to the vet,
hence all the blood on the shirt.
The other dog died in the fight.
The bloody t-shirt is not the
only thing about Randy Bevers
that has raised eyebrows with people.
The way he walks has also been a subject
of a lot of speculation.
Many have said his gait
resembles that of the suspect
on the surveillance video.
Despite this, police have
never found sufficient evidence
to make Randy Bevers a suspect
in his daughter-in-laws murder.
In December, 2016,
police obtained a warrant
to search the home of a man
named Bobby Wayne Henry.
Bobby was a former police officer
in nearby Lancaster, Texas.
He worked in tactile, and told officers
he kept some of his old gear,
but it didn't fit him anymore.
He had a second job working
as a security guard.
Bobby Henry attended the same church
as Missy and her family,
the same church where she was murdered.
He was familiar with the
building and the area.
It has been said that he worked security
at the church the day of Missy's funeral.
Another notable thing about Bobby Henry
is that he walks with a
limp and a unique gait,
like the suspect.
However he is over six feet tall.
Police obtained the warrant,
because of the Missy Bevers' case
but found little to go on,
besides what had been mentioned.
They took some electronic devices
and spent months analyzing them.
While he was in jail,
Bobby Henry was interviewed by WFAA News.
In that interview, he was
asked about Missy Bevers.
He denied even knowing who she was.
He had an alibi which checked out.
He also passed a polygraph test.
Bobby Henry was cleared as a suspect.
On November 10th, 2012, 23
year-old Christopher Eric
was found dead in the Midlothian home
he had been living in with his grandma.
At the time, police determined,
that he died of natural
causes in his sleep
due to a congenital heart defect.
It was only after an autopsy was performed
at his mother's request,
that it was revealed he had
been poisoned with cyanide
and had suffered two heart attacks
within the two days prior to his death.
This and the other evidence
led the case to be ruled
as (static hisses).
Christopher's mother is strongly convinced
that her son was actually murdered.
There is also a lot of evidence
to back this up as a possibility,
but at this present time
the death is still being
ruled as (static hisses).
What does this have to
do with Missy Bevers,
besides the fact that both
deaths occurred in the same town
three and a half years apart?
Christopher's family owns
and operates the website ChrisErics.com.
They also control the Facebook group
Christopher Eric Memorial Page.
In November, 2018, they shared
information on the analytics:
visitors who had visited
ChrisEric.com on April 18th, 2016,
the day Missy was murdered.
What came up was chilling.
At 12:06 a.m. on April 18th, 2016,
a little over four hours
before Missy's murder,
someone from Waxahachie City
Hall visited ChrisEric.com.
Waxahachie is another small
city right next to Midlothian.
At 12:27 a.m. someone
from Waxahachie City Hall
visited the website again,
this time from a different computer.
At 6:41 a.m. there was a
visit from an IP address
belonging to an unknown
Midlothian police officer.
At 8:49 a.m. there was a visit from an IP
believed to belong to sergeant Tim Scott
of the Midlothian police department.
This visit was from a cell phone.
More about him in just a moment.
At 4:24 p.m., someone
from Waxahachie City Hall
visited yet again.
This time they stayed for 12 minutes
and clicked on eight links.
Sergeant Tim Scott was
the lead investigator
in both the Christopher
Erick and Missy Bevers cases,
but is no longer on either.
He has never been a
suspect in either case,
but there has been some
public speculation about him
from early on in the investigation.
Some of these are rumors
and may or may not be true,
but they are worth noting nonetheless.
As lead investigator, sergeant Scott
was naturally one of the
first officers on the scene
after the 911 calls were made.
He was there all through the
morning and into the afternoon.
So it seems peculiar that a cell phone
that belonged to him,
visited the ChrisEric.com
website at 8:49 a.m.
Was he trying to establish a connection
between the two cases?
Maybe, especially since he worked on both.
But it just seems odd that
he would take the time
out of the investigation,
which was only four hours old,
to visit that particular website.
It has been reported
that sergeant Tim Scott
and Missy Bevers went to the same church.
In March, 2016, sergeant
Tim Scott and Missy Bevers
were spotted sitting in a police
cruiser behind the church.
That same month they were also seen
having dinner together at
a restaurant in Mansfield,
another city close by.
There are eyewitness accounts
to these occurrences,
which were independently verified.
According to the Facebook group,
The Murder of Terry Missy Bevers,
sergeant Tim Scott was also
one of the administrators
of the fundraiser created
for Missy's daughters.
There isn't a lot known
about the students in Missy's class,
except that some of them were the ones
to find her body that morning.
Many of them were probably
badly shaken by the incident
and didn't wish to speak to the media,
which is understandable.
What is not widely known
is that there was a new guy
joining the class that morning,
as well as two women who were
scheduled to arrive at 4:30.
One of the women decided to stay home,
because it was starting to storm,
and the other woman wasn't
able to arrive early,
because she got a flat tire on the way.
The new guy was stuck
out in the parking lot,
because he didn't know how
to get into the building.
We know that surveillance footage
shows Missy pulling into the parking lot
and going into the building at 4:16 a.m.
Remember, by this point
the suspect had been inside the building
and wandering around the church hallways
for at least 30 minutes
before Missy even arrived.
It is impossible to
know with any certainty
what would have happened
if the students had arrived
when they were supposed to.
Since Missy was killed
shortly after she arrived,
it is possible they would
have walked in on it
and possibly become victims themselves.
It's also possible they might
have scared the suspect away,
saving Missy in the process.
However, that small space of
time between Missy's arrival
and the other students' expected
arrival begs the question:
did the suspect know about
the scheduled arrival
of the other students?
Did they strategically choose
that short window of time
to ensure they would be off the premises
before the students arrived?
Unfortunately, we might
never know for sure,
but it's something to think about.
One of Missy's students did tell CBS
that Missy had seemed
off and more distracted
right before her death.
She hadn't seemed like
her usual perky self.
This might be because
she was having marital
and financial problems, or
it might be because she knew
that someone was after her.
Conclusion: Missy Bevers
murder remains unsolved
over four years later.
The individual dressed in
possibly fake SWAT gear,
who committed that heinous crime
still walks the street to this
day as far as anyone knows.
To this day, it is even still unknown,
if they are a man or a woman.
Someone out there knows something.
We can only hope that one day
they will choose to do the right thing
and reveal what they know.
So Missy's family and
friends can finally begin
to have closure on their tragic loss.
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