Authorities in South Carolina have arrested the daddy and stepmother of a 5-year-old boy who was strangled to dying in 1989.
The Berkeley County Sheriff’s Workplace introduced January 10 that Victor Lee Turner and Megan Renee Turner are charged with homicide within the dying of Justin Lee Turner, whose physique was discovered by his tearful father in a scene that authorities now say was staged.
Archival footage shot on March 5, 1989, by the native NBC affiliate WCBD confirmed Victor Lee Turner rising from a camper and sobbing in obvious grief after purportedly discovering his son’s corpse. At a information convention this week, Berkeley County Sheriff S. Duane Lewis advised reporters authorities now consider the Turners killed the kid inside their home, then moved his physique into the camper.
“Once you have a look at the scene, you possibly can assume by taking a look at it that it was considerably a staged scene, to make it seem like one thing that it wasn’t,” Lewis mentioned. “There’s lots of inconsistencies within the story.”
Lewis mentioned investigators have been working for at the least a yr and a half straight — and for a few years on and off — to resolve the chilly case. Lewis mentioned as a result of extra superior expertise, investigators have been in a position to accumulate extra bodily proof and submit it to forensic pathologists for evaluation.
Lewis advised reporters that originally, the Turners advised authorities that Justin bought on his college bus on the morning of March 3, 1989, and by no means returned. However Lewis mentioned that was a lie.
“Justin by no means made it to highschool that morning. He by no means bought on the bus, he by no means arrived in school. That is as a result of he had been murdered. And he’d been murdered by his stepmother and his father, and left in a camper behind their home,” Lewis mentioned. “I can not consider a extra tragic, horrendous homicide. A five-year-old boy.”
An lawyer representing Megan Renee Turner didn’t instantly reply to Enterprise Insider’s request for remark. BI couldn’t instantly attain an lawyer representing Victor Lee Turner.
