A Cruel Attempt to Hide DNA Evidence That Ultimately Sealed the Killer’s Fate

A Cruel Attempt to Hide DNA Evidence That Ultimately Sealed the Killer’s Fate

A woman was found dead in her bathtub with her throat cut and the water still running over her body. She worked for the local Sheriff’s Department and the people who found her were her own colleagues. But the detail that stopped every investigator cold wasn’t the wound. It was her fingernails. They had been clipped after she was already dead.

Not broken in a struggle. Clipped clean. Someone had stood over her body and removed them deliberately. Because they knew exactly what investigators would find underneath them. And that one decision is what led police straight back to the person who did it. Her name was Lindsay Nicole Lee. She was 31 years old and she lived on Haleywood Lane in West Columbia, South Carolina.

For six years she’d worked in the technology department at the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department. To the people in that building, she was one of the most important people there. To understand how she ended up in that bathtub, it helps to know where she came from. Lindsay grew up in a military family. She was born in Arkansas in 1985 to Steven and Deborah Pilkington and had a younger sister named Carista.

Because her father served, the family moved constantly. California, Germany, a handful of other states. They never stayed anywhere long enough to call it home. That changed in 2003. Lindsay was 18 and her family settled in South Carolina for good. She got her degree and took a job working with computers at a local bank.

Computers had always made sense to her more than most things did. And it was at that bank in 2008 that she met the man she’d eventually marry. A locksmith came in one day to work on the vault. His name was Jason Lee. He and Lindsey got to talking and he asked her to dinner. After that, by every account, the two of them were inseparable.

They got married in 2010. In 2011, Lindsey left the bank and joined the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department. And over the next 6 years, her co-workers came to think of her as family. By April of 2016, after about 6 years of marriage, Lindsey and Jason separated. Their divorce was still being worked out the following year, but at the time, everyone described it as amicable.

Jason told Lindsey she could keep the house on Haleywood Lane. He moved out to Simpsonville, roughly 85 miles away, to keep working as a locksmith there. Lindsey stayed on Haleywood Lane on her own. During the earlier years of the marriage, money had always been tight. The credit card debt crept up and along with it, both Lindsey and Jason had put on weight.

Lindsey had struggled with hers since high school and the added stress didn’t help. Around 2014, the two of them joined a gym together and started training with a personal trainer named Graham Hockley at a place called Muv Fitness. Graham later opened his own martial arts studio in Lexington and that’s where he introduced Lindsey to judo.

For Lindsey, it became something much bigger than a New Year’s resolution. She lifted weights. She tracked every meal down to the smallest detail. Friends would later remember her counting out exactly 24 almonds because that’s what her plan allowed for that day. She trained hard, competed in local judo tournaments, and lost more than 130 lb.

She also had a goal she didn’t talk about much. One day she wanted to work for the FBI. By the time she and Jason separated in 2016, Lindsay had become someone almost unrecognizable from a few years before. More confident, more disciplined. And after the divorce, she kept going. She moved back into the house on Haleywood Lane, started dating again, and kept training at Graham’s studio several times a week.

Everyone close to her said the same thing. She was doing better than she had in years. None of that was on Lindsay’s mind on the evening of Monday, March 13th, 2017. It was an ordinary day, like any other. She finished her shift at the Sheriff’s Department a little after 5:00 and drove to Graham’s studio in Lexington for her evening class.

She trained for about 2 hours. Just after 7:30, she told Graham she was going to swing by the store for groceries before heading home. That was their routine. She text him once she made it inside. She drove to the Walmart in West Columbia. The store’s cameras picked her up at 8:00 that evening in her gray hoodie, basket in hand, moving through the aisles at a relaxed pace.

 She wasn’t rushing. She wasn’t checking over her shoulder. She looked exactly like someone closing out a normal day. At 8:17, she paid and walked out to her car. By 8:30, she was pulling into the driveway on Haleywood Lane. What Lindsay didn’t know was that somebody had already gotten into the house that evening and was inside in the dark waiting for her to come home.

She pushed open her front door with both arms full of groceries. She had no idea anyone was there. The next morning, nobody at the Sheriff’s Department knew any of that either. It was Tuesday, March 14th. 8:00 came and went and Lindsey’s desk was empty. That alone was enough to worry people. She had the same routine every single day without exception.

Up before dark, gym, shower at the department, at her desk by 8:00. She hadn’t asked for time off. She hadn’t told anyone she’d be late. Her administrator and close friend, Lieutenant Olin Sexton, called her. No answer. He texted. Nothing came back. By 9:00 in the morning, the worry in the department had turned into something more urgent.

They reached out to Deputy Shannon Lovell who lived a few miles from Lindsey and had known her for years. He and his girlfriend had gone on double dates with Lindsey and Jason back when they were still together. They asked him to drive over and check on her. Lovell pulled up to Haley Wood Lane and saw Lindsey’s car sitting in the driveway, engine cold.

He knocked on the front door. Nothing. He walked around to the back of the house. The door frame was splintered. The door was sitting slightly open. He backed away immediately and called for backup. When he went in with the other deputies, the house was completely dark. No lights on anywhere. No sound at all except for running water somewhere down the hall.

They moved through the den into the kitchen and down the short hallway toward the bathroom. The shower curtain was drawn shut. Lovell reached out and pulled it back. She was laid in the bathtub, he said later in court, almost coffin style. I immediately saw the water running and cut off the water. Her head was turned a little bit and I could see a deep gash in her throat.

Lindsay Nicole Lee was dead. Sheriff Jay Koon made the call within the hour. His department couldn’t investigate the death of one of their own. They were too close to her, all of them. He called the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, known as SLED, and handed the case over completely. Once SLED’s crime scene unit took over the house, they started working through it piece by piece.

And almost everything they found told a story. The grocery bags were scattered across the foyer floor. Whatever happened to Lindsay had started the second she walked through that front door, hands full with no time to react. There was blood in the foyer. There was blood in the bathroom. In the tub, she was lying with her arms at her sides and her head against the back wall.

She was wearing black gym shorts, nothing else. The wound across her throat was 6 inches long and it had cut through her trachea. Across the hall, in the washing machine, investigators found Lindsay’s gray hoodie, still wet. Her wallet was in the pocket, cash still inside. Someone had put it there and someone had run the cycle.

Her Fitbit was sitting on the bathroom counter. She wore it constantly, day and night, even to track her sleep. She wouldn’t have taken it off before bed. And scattered across the floor in different rooms were three small pieces of blue latex. Torn off from the fingertips of a pair of gloves. Then came the detail that stopped everyone in that house.

Lindsay’s fingernails were gone. Cut down to nothing after she was already dead. The medical examiner later confirmed. Lindsay had fought back, hard. And whoever did this knew that kind of fight could leave DNA under her nails. So, they made sure it wouldn’t. Nothing in the house had been taken. Cash was still in the bedroom drawer.

Lindsay’s phone was still there. Her purse was untouched. This wasn’t a robbery. And out in the driveway, in the glove box of Lindsay’s car, investigators found something else. A bag of marijuana. Lindsay didn’t do drugs. Everyone who knew her was clear about that. So, the question wasn’t just who had done this.

It was why someone would go to the trouble of planting something like that in her car. And whose DNA might be on the bag itself. That question would have to wait. Because while the crime scene unit worked the house, another team was already moving through Lindsay’s digital life, hour by hour. Lindsay always had two things on her.

Her phone and her Fitbit. The Fitbit had recorded steady activity for days, then stopped completely around 9:00 that night. She wore it to track her sleep. It shouldn’t have stopped. Her phone showed missed calls and texts starting just after 8:30 that night. Several of them were from Graham. At 8:57, he’d sent her a string of messages asking if she was okay.

She never answered any of them. SLED reached Graham quickly. He told them everything. The gym routine, the text when you’re home arrangement, her telling him she was stopping for groceries. He handed over his phone without being asked. He gave a DNA sample voluntarily. His story held up completely. And his DNA, which investigators did find inside Lindsay’s house, had a simple explanation.

She’d hosted a gathering there months earlier, and he’d been a guest. Graham wasn’t their man. But going back through Lindsay’s contacts, investigators found something that had no easy explanation at all. Saved under her own home address was a name. Hungry money. Whoever had given themselves that nickname in his estranged wife’s phone was the person they needed to talk to.

That name pointed investigators toward Lindsay’s ex-husband out in Simpsonville. SLED already knew Jason Lee was Lindsay’s ex-husband, that he worked as a locksmith in Greenville County, and that he was living about 85 miles away in Simpsonville. Two lieutenants, Jeff Kindley and Gene Donahue, drove out to find him.

They located him at work and pulled him aside. They told him Lindsay was dead. Jason cried out. He wailed. He asked what had happened. And then, before either of them had asked him a single question, he started explaining where he’d been the night before. His foot had been hurting. He’d taken a pain pill, watched some TV, fallen asleep.

He said it all in one breath, like he’d already gone over it in his head. Then Kindle noticed the scratches, long vertical marks around Jason’s nose and mouth. He asked about them. Jason said he’d cut himself shaving. Later, when investigators spoke to one of Jason’s coworkers, a man named Kendall Haskett, they heard a completely different story.

Haskett said that when Jason walked into the office that morning, the marks were the first thing he noticed. “He came in the door and it kind of took me aback.” Haskett told the jury. “I said, ‘What happened to your face?’ And he said his cat had scratched him. He had a cat sleeping on him, his alarm went off, and the cat scratched his face.

” Two stories, two different people, the same set of scratches. Then there was the car. Jason told investigators his blue Kia Rio had vanished from the parking lot overnight. He figured it had been repossessed since he was behind on the payments. SLED found it not long after, sitting in a Walmart parking lot near his apartment.

No license plates. They asked him to come in the next day with his phone and a DNA sample. He agreed. They also asked to search his work van, and he agreed to that, too. The van’s GPS confirmed it hadn’t left Greenville County all night. But before the lieutenants left the office, Haskett pulled one of them aside and mentioned something Jason had muttered after SLED had finished talking to him.

“I might leave here in handcuffs.” That line didn’t mean much on its own, but it was enough for investigators to start looking a lot more closely at Jason Lee and at the marriage and Lindsay had left behind. What they found started filling in a picture nobody outside the family had really seen. Graham Hockley, when he was eventually asked about it, remembered the very first time Jason had ever brought Lindsay up to him.

He said he was worried about her and he wanted her to get skinny, Graham said. He was not happy about her weight. As Lindsay kept improving over the following years, losing weight, training in judo, growing more confident, Jason didn’t keep pace. He came to the gym less and less. And according to Lindsay’s father, it had started to look like Jason had grown jealous, not just of what she’d achieved, but of how close she’d become with Graham.

There was something else, too. At some point, Jason had told Lindsay he wanted to start having kids. She didn’t. She’d only just started feeling like she had her own life back and she wasn’t ready to give that up. The disagreements over it never really resolved. And in April of 2016, Lindsay asked him for a divorce.

But in February of 2017, just a month before Lindsay died, Jason drove down and spent over $5,000 of his own money renovating the bathroom in that house. The same bathroom where she’d later be found. He was hoping it might bring them back together. Lindsay let him do the work. It didn’t change anything for her.

While investigators were learning all of this about the marriage, SLED’s computer crimes unit was already going through Jason’s phone. His phone had been completely off from around 6:00 in the evening on March 13th until 6:00 the next morning. 12 hours, nothing. No calls, no data, no signal. His Fitbit showed the exact same window.

Removed and inactive for 12 straight hours. An expert who later reviewed his Fitbit history said a gap that long had never shown up before. Not once. His call log had been deleted entirely. Two full months of it. From mid-January through March 14th. His browser history had been wiped too before he ever handed the phone over.

But he hadn’t gotten everything. Investigators recovered a handful of searches from March 15th, the day after Lindsay’s body was found. Jason had looked up criminal defense attorneys in Greenville. He’d pulled up the Zillow listing for the house on Haley Wood Lane. And he’d read through article after article about Lindsay’s death.

And still sitting in his phone under her home address, was that same name. Hungry money. The van’s GPS hadn’t moved all night. But the van had never really been the question. The question was where the blue Kia had actually gone. The answer was on camera. SLED agent April Sykes pulled surveillance footage from the Walmart near Jason’s apartment and from the businesses around it.

A Days Inn, a Walgreens, the lots in between. At 5:17 in the morning on March 14th, Jason’s blue Kia pulls into the back of that Walmart lot. A man matching Jason’s build gets out and walks away from the store heading toward his apartment complex about a mile off. 15 minutes later, Jason’s work van pulls into the same lot and parks right next to the Kia.

The same man gets out. And for a few minutes, he moves back and forth between the two vehicles like he’s transferring something from one to the other. Then he crouches down at the back of the Kia. It looks like he’s removing the license plate. He gets back into the van, drives around to the front of the Walmart, goes inside, makes a couple of purchases, and leaves.

The Kia just sits there. No plates, abandoned. Investigators went straight to that lot and there it was. Exactly the way the footage showed it. With a warrant in hand, they had it towed and started going through it. They were still working on it when Jason showed up in the parking lot yelling at them demanding to know why they were touching his car.

The same car he’d told them less than two days earlier that he had no idea where it was. On the floorboard, beneath the seats, forensic investigators found fingernail clippings. DNA testing matched them to Lindsey. And on those clippings, there was blood. Jason’s blood. At his apartment, investigators found a backpack.

Inside it were blue latex gloves, the same type as the torn pieces found at the crime scene. Those torn pieces came back from the lab with a clear result. Lindsey’s DNA was on the outside of every one of them. Jason’s DNA was on the inside of every one of them. And the marijuana, the bag planted in Lindsey’s car to make this look like something it wasn’t.

Only one person’s DNA was on it. Jason’s. With all of that laid out, investigators could finally put together what had most likely happened on the night of March 13th. Jason had driven the 85 miles down from Simpsonville to Haleywood Lane. He He got into the house through the back door quietly using the same trade he’d worked in for years.

 The same trade that had brought him and Lindsey together at that bank back in 2008. Then he waited in the dark for her to come home. When Lindsey walked through her front door with her arms full of groceries, he attacked. She fought. During the struggle, she scratched his face. The same scratches he’d later explained two different ways.

He overpowered her, choked her, and cut her throat in the bathroom. Then turned on the water. Afterward, he moved fast. He clipped her fingernails not knowing his own blood would end up on the clippings. He put her hoodie in the washing machine and ran it. He took her Fitbit off and left it on the counter. He planted the marijuana in her car.

And the nail clippings ended up on the floor of his own car where they sat until SLED found them. All of that explained how. The why came down to where Jason was standing financially in March of 2017. He had one credit card and it was maxed out. He had about $100 in his bank account. He was about to be evicted from his apartment.

His Kia was on the edge of being repossessed. And on top of all of it, he owed Lindsey $1,300 by court order due on April the 1st. One of his co-workers later testified that Lindsey had told Jason directly if he didn’t pay, she’d have him put in jail. He had her home address saved in his phone as hungry money.

Lindsey meanwhile was getting ready to sell the house on Haleywood Lane. Estimates put the proceeds somewhere between 30 and 50,000 dollars. Money she’d keep entirely. Because during the divorce negotiations, Jason had agreed to give up his claim to the property. He’d already spent 5,000 dollars of his own money renovating that bathroom, hoping to win her back.

Now he stood to walk away from the sale with nothing at all. And then there was the detail that more than anything else explains the timing. South Carolina requires a full year of separation before a no-fault divorce becomes final. Jason and Lindsey had separated in April of 2016. Their divorce was due to become official in April of 2017.

On the night of March 13th, when Jason drove down to Haleywood Lane, the two of them were still legally husband and wife. And under South Carolina law, if a married person dies, even if they’re separated, their spouse inherits everything. Lindsey died before the divorce went through, which meant the house was Jason’s.

The day after her body was found, he called his girlfriend and told her his financial troubles were over. He was getting the house. He never got the chance to enjoy it. On March the 17th, 3 days after Lindsey’s body was found, SLED agents arrested Jason Donley at his apartment in Simpsonville. He was charged with first-degree murder and first-degree burglary.

Bond was denied. Lindsey’s family was stunned. They’d always seen Jason as harmless, gentle even. They believed the divorce had been amicable, just like both of them had said it would be. But once investigators laid out everything they’d found, piece by piece, that version of Jason became almost impossible to hold on to.

It would take 2 and 1/2 years for all of it to be laid out properly in front of a jury. Jason’s trial began in November of 2019 in Lexington County. It lasted a week. He pleaded not guilty. His defense team called no witnesses. Jason himself chose not to testify. Prosecutors built their case piece by piece, laying everything out for the jury.

Graham Hawkley took the stand and described watching Lindsey transform over the years and Jason’s reaction to it. He told the jury about that first comment Jason had made years earlier about wanting her to get skinny. That was how Jason had introduced his wife to the man she’d end up trusting more than almost anyone else in her life.

Graham said something else, too. Quieter than the rest. If I had taught her more self-defense, she might have had a chance. We talked about it, but we didn’t actually get to do it. I didn’t think she needed it, to be fair. The medical examiner, Dr. Janice Ross, walked the jury through the autopsy. Bruising on Lindsey’s hands, arms, neck, back, and head.

Round bruises on the back of her left shoulder, consistent with someone’s arm wrapping around her neck from behind. The marks around her eyes that come from strangulation. Defensive wounds on both hands from trying to stop a blade. Ross confirmed what the wound to her throat had already shown. The cause of death was blood loss.

Kendall Haskett took the stand, too, and told the jury what Jason had said after SLED left the office that day, “I might leave here in handcuffs.” The jury heard all of it again. The maxed-out card, the eviction, the repossession, the $1,300 he owed Lindsey, what he told his girlfriend the day after Lindsey’s body was found, the surveillance footage, the Fitbit gap, and the searches on his phone.

In closing arguments, Deputy Solicitor Shawn Graham pointed toward the bathroom on Haleywood Lane, the room where Lindsey had been found. “Who had pictures of the remodeling project in that bathroom?” he asked the jury. “Jason Lee did. He remodeled that bathroom to win her back, and it didn’t work.” Then he said, “Would a complete stranger inflict that kind of violence on Lindsey Lee? No.

But Jason Lee did.” The defense had one argument that carried real weight. Jason’s DNA hadn’t been found on the washing machine dials. Someone else’s DNA had been, and it had never been identified. His attorney, Jim Snell, told the jury that was as close to proving innocence as it gets. Prosecutors had an answer ready.

Jason had worn gloves the whole time. The torn fragments proved he’d still had at least one mostly intact glove left when he ran that washing machine. The absence of his DNA on those dials didn’t clear him. It confirmed exactly how careful he’d been. Closing arguments ran almost 2 hours. Then the jury went out.

They were back in just over an hour. The case went to them at 12:30 in the afternoon on November 22nd, 2019. By 1:32, they had their verdict. Guilty of murder. Guilty of first-degree burglary. Before the judge handed down the sentence, Jason stood up and addressed the court himself. The only thing I have to say is I didn’t do it.

And I will be appealing this. I am an innocent man. I did not murder her. And I will prove my innocence. And I don’t care if it takes 20 years. I will prove my innocence. Judge Thomas Cooper sentenced him to life in prison on both counts with no possibility of parole regardless. Then Sheriff Jay Koon spoke. Not to Jason.

To everyone else in that room who had carried this case for 2 and 1/2 years. We’ll just remind you that the defendant in this case handed down three sentences that night. He gave Lindsay a death sentence. And he gave two life sentences. One to her immediate family. And one to the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department family.

And we’ll be living with that for the rest of our lives. Jason filed an appeal in 2023. It was denied. He’s serving his sentence now at Kirkland Correctional Institution in South Carolina. What’s left mostly is what the people who knew Lindsay had to say about her once it was all over. SLED agent April Sykes, who built the digital case that helped put Jason away, said something afterward that stuck with a lot of people.

We tell women, when you leave, it’s the most dangerous time. This is what Lindsay was doing. Lindsay was leaving him behind. Olin Sexton, the man who’d sent a deputy to check on her that morning, said it most plainly of all. I think Jason saw a happy, well-adjusted, empowered woman that he could no longer control.

She didn’t need him. She had left him. She was able to take care of herself. And his life was falling apart. And without her, he didn’t have anything. So, he decided no one else was going to have her, either. After Lindsey’s death, Olan and her family started the Lindsey Pilkington Memorial Foundation. It offers self-defense training, firearms education, and mental health support to women, especially women in dangerous relationships.

It’s still running today. And in the judo community, Lindsey was given something else after she died. Her black belt. The one she’d been working toward. The one she’d very nearly earned before the night Jason got into her house and waited for her in the dark. She would have gotten there on her own. Everyone who knew her already knew that.