Woman’s Vicious Murder Exposes Serial Killer in South Carolina

On maps, the stretch of highway from Travelers Rest into Greenville looks like a simple vein: a line that carries light and metal, coffee and errands, the clatter of late morning. In reality, it is all the interruptions—red lights, turn lanes, hand-painted signs, a fruit stand’s pyramids of oranges, the brief wink of a service station at the shoulder, the slow leans of pickup trucks with their every bolt visible. You can learn people from these roads. You can learn their patience, their hurry. You can learn when somebody’s day is larger than their body can hold.

On Friday, August 27, 2021, at 9:23 a.m., camera number four at a Food Lion off U.S. 25 caught the flattest truth a lens can know: an older woman—Edna Subtles—walked with the careful purpose of someone who still keeps lists on scraps of paper. She carried a canvas bag that had known many summers. Behind her, a man approached with a loose friendliness. He moved as if he wanted the world to think he had no weight. He had an easy talker’s face—open, eager, as if every second were an opportunity to share a small story that would make you trust him enough to hand him your docking station and a broken lamp. The clock said 9:23:32. The camera watched with an intimacy that doesn’t feel intimate until the replay.

Edna was eighty. She was not fragile. She would tell you so herself, laughing. She had good knees for her age and a dog that preferred the quiet corners of the yard. She had lived long enough to know the slope of grief and the small pleasures of a familiar grocery aisle. She also knew, precisely, where the yogurt lived, and that is where the story’s oddness began. The man—the one who would eventually become the name on headlines nobody wanted—had bought yogurt. A detail so common it threatens to be nothing. Nothing, except later.

He was a handyman called Daniel Prince to some, Dan to most, a person who had learned that in the polite ecosystems of suburban errands, a first name shortened was a gift: a hand extended, a signal that he did not require effort from you. He could do tile for a good price. He could hang drywall in four days. He could fix the kind of problems that feel bigger than their materials: water, weather, wood rot, bad contractors. He could talk, too—about Michigan, about the military, about his wife, about the way traffic thickens on I-85 like gravy somebody refuses to thin. He could talk a shape into your head: a story about competence, decency, history, and a second chance—a story people want to believe because every neighborhood would prefer its helpers to be exactly that.

Detective Greg Walter would later say, “He tried to make the room his living room.” The first thing he said to Dan in the interrogation room was, “My partner’s Greg. We work together.” He handed him water. He kept the room human because he knew that interrogation only works as a mirror when it gives the subject a face to see.

Edna had been generous with her trust in the way many older people are: the trust built from a lifetime of neighborhoods behaving like neighborhoods. She did not forget that the world can be cruel. She chose instead to remember that the world can be tended. So when she needed help—from ductwork to a deck—she accepted a number handed through handshakes. Somebody’s cousin knew a guy who knew a guy. In communities where yards meet at neat seams, that was the pipeline of small needs.

On the morning of the 27th, Edna would tell the man in Food Lion that she was nervous. She would tell him she didn’t trust a private investigator she had arranged to meet. She would say the man drove a black Ford with a flag and a dent. She would say, “He wants money, and he knows my car.” She would say all of this in the kind of voice that tries modestly to make another person understand the texture of fear without handing them its whole weight.

Dan talked smoothly about helping. He said he could be there. He said he could make sure nothing went wrong. He said everything in the tone of someone offering to help carry boxes for ten minutes, not to rearrange the furniture of a life. He told her to meet him at Food Lion and then at the Best Western if needed. “We’ll make sure it’s okay,” he said. The camera watched him check out, yogurt in his bag, shoulders slightly hunched as if from a long habit of listening for audible suspicion.

He would later tell Detectives Walter and Trinidad that he had met Edna at Food Lion to help her feel safe. He would say that her daughter was supposed to come, that the daughter’s absence had pressed Edna’s fear into a sharper shape, that he had agreed to drive her car to the hotel because the supposed PI knew her vehicle and he—Dan—wanted to confuse the line of sight. He would say that after he parked at the hotel he had wiped the car down because “people do strange things,” because he didn’t want his prints anywhere near trouble. He would say that then he walked across the lot near Little Caesars to his own car where Edna waited. He would speak this in the tone of a man who has practiced the shape of logic out loud many times and believes logic can bend camera footage if it is uttered slowly enough.

Detective Walter watched the video with the tired patience of someone who understands that truth sometimes refuses to be a train and becomes instead a slow procession of bicycles. On screen, the Jeep backed into a space. On screen, Dan exited alone. On screen, Dan wiped down surfaces with the thoroughness of a person whose anxiety has an object. On screen, Dan crossed the asphalt toward Little Caesars. On screen, the Jeep sat, lid-like, closed against anyone else’s presence. On screen, minutes became proof. Later, the Jeep did not go home. Later, the antique shop camera did not record it turning into Edna’s driveway. Later, the time stamped all of that.

Edna had a daughter and a son. Families are inelegant systems—love forced into the shapes of schedules and memory. The daughter had troubles; the son carried the kind of protective fervor that seems noble until it is complicated by the angry policies of bodies that carry their own old injuries. They did not agree about enough things to call their disagreements insignificant. This is a detail that matters and doesn’t, both. In the interrogation room, Dan pointed to these as if they could serve as reasons why a person might disappear on a Friday. “She was very upset,” he said. “Depressed.” He said she had talked about men online, about a younger lover from years ago, about places she liked to walk, covered bridges. He spread the map of her life on the table like someone laying out evidence that does not exist.

Detective Trinidad was the quieter one. He held the map while Dan traced invisible roads with a finger. “Was it this driveway?” “Maybe that shoulder?” “A fruit stand?” The map was a topographical print that turned the county’s curves into nested lines. Dan said “steep,” “turn,” “south.” He did not say “grave.” He did not say “farm.” He did not say “buried.” Not yet.

When Walter said, “She’s missing,” Dan replied, “You think I did something.” He said it lightly at first, like an echo he wanted the room to absorb and return without meaning. He pulled the talk toward other suspects: the PI with the black truck; the son-in-law; the unnamed men from the internet. He gave ages and hair colors and road names the way a magician offers cards. He wanted the detectives to pick one. He wanted them to pick any card except the one that had his face on it.

He said he was a history buff. He said he watched the History Channel. He said he had worked on helicopters in the service, had stood at gates with five rounds in his rifle, had refused to let a general onto base without ID. He said he liked doing things the right way. He said he had PTSD. He said his knee was scraped from a fall on a slippery ramp. He showed the scab. He showed the tender pride some men carry about small injuries that seem to explain why they limp. Walter nodded because he had learned a long time ago that nodding is the only way to navigate a river of words when you do not yet know whether that river’s water conceals a weapon.

When Walter read him his rights, Dan recited them as if they were a song he had sung since adolescence. He took off his jacket. He asked for water. He asked whether he was under arrest. He asked whether he was in possession of a “CO”—a correctional officer—because he preferred not to be in cuffs near inmates in case the optics made him feel smaller. Walter said no. Dan’s relief was always measured in little sighs, the kind you think you can’t hear until somebody points them out.

The detectives did something that good detectives do: they let the room breathe. They waited. They watched Dan fill space with charm until his own words began to be a net. When the net tightened they pulled the line gently. The hotel footage. The wipe down. The absence of Edna’s Jeep from home. The absence of Edna’s body from anywhere anyone could see.

Dan tried to shift the story’s spine. “I did drop her off,” he insisted. His voice had the insistence of a person who believes volume can change verification. “She needed her medication. She talked to her daughter. She lay down. I left.” He looked like a man who had practiced the sentences in slightly different orders to make them seem new. Walter watched him closely because he had learned to identify when rehearsals begin to crumble at their edges.

It is easy to think that the moment when a story breaks is one moment: a crack sound, a confession, a teary pivot. Sometimes it is a slow leak. Sometimes it is the long recitation of a phone number from memory—864-834-0253—that a man offers to prove that he is good with numbers. Sometimes it is the repeated invocation of “daughters,” “PI,” “black truck,” until the detectives begin to notice that specificity is being used to hide precision. Sometimes it is a refusal to take a polygraph coupled with a willingness to sign away phone-search consent. Sometimes it is a knee injury that bleeds too long and looks like a scrape and nothing like a fall into brush near the lip of a shallow grave.

It was after midnight when a deputy in a county one east of Greenville stood in a field under a hard moon and listened to the sound his shovel made. It was not a scratch. It was not a thud. It was something in between. The soil there had a different smell than soil four feet away. This is the kind of thing bodies do to the earth: they teach it how to remember them. The deputy lifted looser earth. He lifted it carefully because caution is ritual. He lifted it as a person who had spent half his life helping his father plant winter rye and knew the way dirt becomes a story.

They found Edna Subtles buried on a farm near Dan’s home. The phrase “on a farm” is large enough to hold a picture of a fence and a barn and a tractor, but what it held was something else: a person who had lived eighty years and who had met a man who had convinced her he was a reasonable kind of guardian for a morning, who had eaten drugged yogurt perhaps without knowing it, who had been suffocated with a plastic bag, who had become someone else’s secret agenda, who had become for a day at least a name on the kind of posters families do not wish ever to know the shape of.

They found other bodies, too. Two at first. The suggestion of more under chemicals turned into the bitter certainty of the phrase “disposed of,” then into the uncertain phrase “unknown if there are still victims unaccounted for.” Law enforcement has a vocabulary for grief that tries to be precise. It often fails. There are only words like “victim,” “remains,” “decomposition,” which turn a human into evidence because evidence is how courts work.

By then, the interrogation room had stopped being a living room. It had become a place where Dan expected a charge like grand larceny—something he could hold in his hand and look at and find a strategy for. He was relieved when he thought the detectives were not calling him a murderer. He told them he could sign extradition waivers. He told them he could speed processes along. He told them their matrix had flagged him because of an old kidnapping conviction, because of “violent crime,” because “boxes have to be checked.” He told them he understood how systems work because he had once worked near systems and had once dreamed of being a judge. He told them “corporate law” and “criminal justice classes” and a senator’s name from Michigan he had contacted to correct a discrepancy on his discharge. He told them all of this because when a person can’t find the line he usually pulls between responsibility and guilt, he often begins to make new lines with old rope.

The jury did not have to do much, later. It took them the amount of time the press calls “decisive.” Dan pled guilty the same day. Life imprisonment. Federal system. No parole. He waived his right to challenge his conviction or sentence. He waived, in the end, the future that his voice had tried so hard to talk toward. He waived everything because sometimes the weight of evidence makes even a practiced talker discover that silence serves as an acknowledgment long before it serves as a strategy.

Detective Walter slept for four hours the night after the plea. He woke into the kind of quiet that a house offers a person who has recently learned something too solid to ask the morning to soften. He thought about the Food Lion camera. He thought about Edna’s canvas bag. He thought about yogurt cups. He thought about the word “handyman,” which feels neighborly and which, in this case, had been used like a key that opens doors people think are locked by trust. He thought about backgrounds and checks, about habits and safety. He thought about how much we ask from the small word “hire.”

He walked into his kitchen and made coffee. He opened the window and listened for something regular: a garbage truck, the neighbor’s car, a bird of a kind that does not care about human trials. The coffee was bitter. He drank it anyway. The morning felt like an apology he could not receive. He called Trinidad and asked whether he wanted to get breakfast. Trinidad said no. He wanted to sit in his yard with a book and pretend books could be boat hulls. “Text me if you want pancakes later,” Walter said. They did not get pancakes later. It felt wrong to celebrate anything about the day when the day had taken someone away forever and had returned her as a list of facts in a courtroom.

Edna’s daughter did not say “closure.” She said “thank you” to what could be thanked. She said “okay” to what had to be accepted. She added cameras to her own home and then realized she had to learn how to sleep anyway. She changed her routines because our bodies feel safer when circumstances have been reset. She stopped going to the covered bridge except once when she needed to tell the bridge she was not angry at it. This is how grief often looks: telling objects they are not to blame.

The black Ford with a dent had never been a black Ford at all. The private investigator had been a person who had done work but not the work he had been described as doing that day; he had not planned to meet Edna that morning, not at the Best Western, not in the lobby, not in the parking lot. He became a figure in a story told by the wrong mouth in the wrong room, and what he did become in the end was one more man who lives with a memory he did not want, one more person who discovers that the mention of his vehicle can be a shadow placed near the shape of harm.

There are details nobody will ever know: how long Dan stood over Edna after the bag was placed; whether he whispered something; whether he believed at any moment that he could step backward and turn the day into something else; whether he felt the weight in his stomach that is the body’s last protest against being a predator; whether he remembered anyone from his own life who had offered him kindness and whether that memory faded when he touched the shovel. These are not details that a court can use. A court can use only proof.

In the weeks after, the little grocery remained a place where people go to buy milk and bread and fruit and small conversation with cashiers who know how to smile into the ordinary. The camera remained affixed to its high corner. It kept watching; cameras always do. A hundred little mornings unfolded beneath it. The camera turned them into hours and minutes and seconds and nothing more. This is both comfort and complaint. We live under watch and still have our lives not kept by anyone’s lens.

If you walk into the Best Western lobby with the case in mind, you will feel odd. You will expect a memory to push back against you. It will not. The carpet will be the carpet it has been for years. The clerk will ask you whether you want one bed or two. You will think of a Jeep in the parking lot with its surfaces wiped clean by a man who believed that wiping clean would be proof of choosing caution over involvement. You will think of the fact that clean surfaces can be evidence too. You will think about the notion of “being careful” and how often it is offered as a defense by people whose behavior is precisely not careful—only cunning.

Nobody wanted the interrogation to be interesting. The footage is. It has those little pivots that make other people’s lives temporarily fascinating: the sudden shift from talk to panic, the relief when a charge sounds small, the quick humor when a cop offers water. It has the little brags people carry about themselves: numbers memorized, military stories, scraped knees that feel like honorable proof of continued effort. It has the small embarrassments too: the wrong word for a legal term, the misremembered road name, the awareness that this room holds more practiced calm than your own voice possibly can.

In the end, the story is simple and not simple. It folds into the usual shape of predation: a man who finds an older woman whose trust can be read as a map; a pretext; a substance slipped into a yogurt cup; a parking lot; a bag; a shovel; a farm; a room where the man will say he did not do it; a video that says he did something that leads the mind toward the doing.

The day after the plea, Walter went to Food Lion with his wife. They walked past the yogurt aisle lightly because grief does not want bowing at altars in grocery stores. He saw a woman with a paper list. He watched her stand briefly, eyes scanning for something mundane. He felt sudden, hot gratitude for the quiet freedom of this scene. He wished he could protect it: every older woman’s list in every grocery store; every handshake at every hiring; every casual sense that windows are for looking out, not for looking in upon another human body you do not have the right to own.

The county held a small vigil weeks later where neighbors light candles for names the newspapers have amplified. Edna’s name was printed on a thin card. People read it into the evening. The vigil had its own small politics: who got to speak, who got to carry the box of candles, who got to thank the police for their work. Trinidad stood far back and watched because he felt that his seat belonged to those who had lost more. He left early because he prefers quiet to microphoned sorrow. He drove home with the windows down and let night air do what night air does: remind a person he is alive and then ask him to spend that fact without waste.

If the world were fair, the story would end with a sentence like “and now everyone has cameras and background checks and the era of trusting strangers is over.” The world is not fair. Trust is not a relic. It is a way of living. People still hire people because houses still have problems and because labor is still a shared version of hope. People still go to Food Lion. People still meet in parking lots for deals that do not end in harm. The error in this story is not trust itself; it is the manipulation of trust by a person who understood its vocabulary too well and used it as an instrument.

The last time Walter spoke with the prosecutor about the case, he asked a question he had never asked before: “What do we do about the ones we’ll never find?” The prosecutor said the thing prosecutors say, because the job requires they say it: “We keep looking.” He said it without drama. He said it with the clean lines of the office behind him and the papers that folded neat. Walter knew the answer was both perfectly adequate and perfectly insufficient. He said thank you and left because saying more would have been out of place.

On some mornings, Trinidad drives out past the county line to where fields open themselves. He parks. He walks a bit. He stands still. He listens. He insists on the body’s right to quiet after a season of noise. He insists on holding a small inventory of trees. He insists on letting the earth remind him it is a ground, not a graveside. He insists on letting cases leave him for an hour.

On some nights, people who knew Edna—the grocery clerk who liked her wit, the neighbor who thought her dog was cute, the woman at the trailer park who said Edna was better at folding towels than she was—say her name aloud to rooms where nobody needs to hear it. They say it because names are candles too. They say it because the soul seems to remain convinced that the mouth is a lantern.

Dan will die in prison. The sentence says so. The court’s language is precise in the small way that justice can be precise when it cannot be whole: “Life imprisonment,” “no parole,” “waived right to challenge.” He will live a long schedule of breakfasts in plastic trays and the clicks of metal and the kind of therapy some institutions offer when they want to keep bodies behaved. He will tell stories to other men. He will talk about Michigan. He will talk about the east and the west sides, the auto industry. He will talk about a knee. He will talk about being good with numbers. He will talk about helicopters. He will talk, and his talking will become his only freedom left.

In the middle of the day, in a house built in 1992 with beige siding and a small laurel bush out front, a woman sits at a kitchen table and opens her mail. She looks at an envelope with a logo. She looks at the electric bill. She looks at a letter from her granddaughter. She looks at a thin flyer from Food Lion. She circles something lightly on the flyer with a pen. She writes “yogurt” on the list. She does not know the story. She does not need to. She will go to the store because people go to stores. She will trust the world enough to walk inside. She will look at the array of small white cups and she will select a flavor. She will pay. She will leave through the automatic doors, and the camera will record her as one more person who lives a life so ordinary that it makes the right kind of history: the kind nobody writes down because being unremarkable is precisely the gift.

The rest is coda:

In court, the sentences were read with that careful cadence that cloaks the heavy in the manageable. Families inhaled. Reporters wrote. The judge’s mouth became the tool through which a system insisted on its capacity to be responsible even when it cannot restore.
In a small office, a detective boxed a case file. He placed in it photographs that had made nightmares because they had bent the ordinary—parking lots, grocery aisles—into accelerants for grief. He placed the map that had been traced by a liar’s finger. He placed in it the kinds of memos that make policed procedure visible: phone data consent, warrant affidavits, chain-of-custody forms.
In a prison cell somewhere, a man with too many stories and not enough silence counted his days by numbers because numbers had always been his comfort. He counted, and his counting could no longer make the world bend.
In a county where fields still open and highways still carry errands and the morning still wears light like a loose shirt, people learned, quietly, gently, to listen a little more carefully when an older neighbor said, “I feel nervous.” They learned to stand in parking lots with friends for a few minutes more. They learned not to undo trust, but to fasten it. They learned to do the smallest version of safety—the kind that shares time like bread.

This is the story that begins with a camera at a Food Lion and ends with the other kind of camera—the one that sits above a courtroom door and watches the people walk out after a verdict and does not care about the tears because cameras never do, but which still manages to give the world a belief that if we notice enough—the way a lens notices without missing anything—the harm we can catch might be harm we can stop.

It is not a story interested in spectacle. It is a story interested in the fragile technology of kindness. It is a story about how arrest can be mercy, how maps can be lies, how yogurt can be poison, how wiping down a surface can be a confession without words, how the word “handyman” can mean both helper and hunter depending on the mouth that speaks it, and how even then, after the lights go off in the interrogation room and the chair is pushed back under the table, a county finds that its morning coffee still tastes like morning coffee. Which is what we call resilience. Which is what Edna’s name deserves. Which is what we owe—the living, the dead, the cameras, the roads, the bridges, the covered place where someone once liked to walk because it was quiet.