How a Simple Oil Change Unravelled Her Mother’s Decade-Old Murder

How a Simple Oil Change Unravelled Her Mother’s Decade-Old Murder

A young mother was found dead inside her own salon, hanging from a water heater, a strap pulled tight around her neck. The man who did it looked a witness in the eye that same night, and walked away. For 10 years, he lived a few miles from where it happened. He got married. He had a daughter. And then on an ordinary afternoon in 2005, a young woman pulled into an auto shop for something that had nothing to do with any of this, a routine oil change.

That one stop would end up solving what a decade of police work couldn’t. Her name was Dana Satderfield. She was born on November 16th, 1967 in Spartanberg, South Carolina. People who knew her used the same words over and over. warm, kind, easy to love. After high school, Dana trained as a hair stylist.

 She had a talent for it and she loved the work. For years, she saved every dollar she could and eventually she opened a salon of her own in a small town called Robuck, right next to Spartanberg. She built it inside an old mobile trailer just off the highway. It wasn’t much to look at from the outside. But her clients kept coming back and some days she stayed open until 9 or 10 at night because she could never bring herself to turn a customer away.

 She married a man named Mike and they had two children together, a daughter named Ashley and a son named Brandon. By the summer of 1995, Dana and Mike had separated. Though they hadn’t divorced, they were still on good terms. They were still trying. The night before everything changed, the four of them were together at the same house.

They ate dinner and watched television the way they always did. July 31st started like any other Monday. Dana went to the salon early, the way she always did. At around 6:30 that evening, a door-to-door saleswoman named Diane Harris stopped by the salon. She sold cleaning products around town, and she knew most of her regulars by name.

She sold Dana a bottle of cleaning fluid and left to keep working her route. A little after 8, Harris walked back past the salon. She looked through the window and saw Dana inside cleaning up, getting ready to close for the night. Everything looked normal. By 8:30, Harris was back in the parking lot out front, waiting for her ride home.

The blinds were down, but the lights were still on inside. Then she heard a sound, a dull thump, then another one. She turned toward the building in time to see someone drop to the ground in front of an open window. A man. His shirt was pulled up around his chest like he’d fallen hard. He climbed to his feet and ran.

 Harris ran too in the opposite direction toward a nearby business. The two of them circled the building from different sides and came face to face for a single second. She would remember that moment for the rest of her life. He looked at her. She looked at him. Then he kept running. Harris didn’t own a cell phone. She ran into a nearby store and asked someone to call the police.

A deputy arrived at the salon a short time later, expecting a break-in. He stepped inside with his flashlight. The front room looked untouched. Nothing seemed out of place. Then he moved toward the back into a small room that served as both a bathroom and a laundry area. He found Dana there. She was hanging from the water heater.

 a strap pulled tight around her neck. Her body had been left suspended just above the floor. Her clothes had been pulled away from her. Her face and hair were covered in blood. The deputy called it in immediately. Because Robuck was such a small town, he recognized her the moment his light landed on her face. Word spread fast that night, the way it does in a place where everyone knows everyone.

Investigators processed the scene for hours. Robbery didn’t fit. The cash register hadn’t been touched. Nothing in the salon had been taken. Whoever did this hadn’t come for money. Diane Harris gave a statement that night. She described a young white man, brown hair, wearing a light colored t-shirt and jeans.

 From her description, police built a composite sketch and put it out across the county. It didn’t lead anywhere. Harris knew most of the people in town from her sales route. This man wasn’t one of them. Investigators looked at Dana’s husband first. That’s almost always where police start when a married woman is killed. Mike told them he’d been home that night watching their two children.

His son and daughter, eight and six years old, backed him up. He also didn’t match the sketch. He was a big man and officers had a hard time picturing him fitting through that window at all. When his fingerprint turned up on the water heater, it seemed for a moment like it might mean something. But Mike explained he’d installed that water heater himself just two months earlier. It was his trade.

He agreed to a polygraph test without hesitation and he passed it. Investigators moved on. They found a second print in the salon. This one left in blood. Testing confirmed the blood belonged to Dana. Whoever left that print was almost certainly the killer. But the print wasn’t in any database and it didn’t match anyone close to Dana.

 It was a dead end with a name nobody knew. An autopsy came back a few days later. Donna had been strangled. Her body showed bruising consistent with being struck repeatedly. Investigators also recovered biological evidence that told them their killer had assaulted her before he killed her. In 1995, DNA testing existed, but there was no national database to search against.

All investigators could do was take a sample from a suspect and compare it by hand, one name at a time. They started collecting samples from men across the county. None of them matched. A new witness came forward. A man named Michael Crook told police that as he drove past the salon that night, he’d noticed a man standing near a blue and white Ford Bronco parked outside a neighboring business that had already closed for the day.

 The man looked nervous. He stared at Crook in a way that stuck with him until Crook drove on. It was around 8:40, right around the time of the murder. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Police began looking for that vehicle, checking every blue and white Bronco they could find registered nearby. Months passed.

 The leads dried up one after another. In a small town like Robuck, not knowing weighed on everyone. People still called the police anytime they spotted a Bronco that looked close enough. Even Dana’s children learned to watch for it. Almost 2 years after the murder, the case finally moved again. An inmate called investigators with a tip about his cellmate, a man named Russell Quinn.

According to the inmate, Quinn talked about Dana constantly, said she was beautiful, kept a photograph of her, and at one point admitted he had killed her. It was worth checking. Quinn had been free at the time of the murder. He was currently locked up for a different sexual assault, one where he tied his victim to a tree.

 The parallel to the water heater was hard to ignore. He also drove a similar vehicle and resembled the composite sketch closely enough that investigators put together a photo lineup and showed it to Diane Harris. She picked Quinn without hesitation. This was him, she said. This was the man from that night. Investigators sent Quinn’s DNA to the lab, certain they finally had their answer. It wasn’t a match.

 One of the investigators later put it simply. Science doesn’t lie. They were back to square one, and this time it hurt more because for a moment, they’d believed it was over. After that, the case went quiet in a way it hadn’t before. Weeks became months. Months became years. Dana’s children got older without her. Her family stopped expecting a phone call. 10 years passed like that.

 By 2005, Dana’s daughter Ashley was 18 years old and starting college. On an ordinary afternoon, she pulled her red Honda into a local Express Lube for an oil change. She came back a few weeks later for the same thing. One of the mechanics working there noticed her both times. His name was Michael Pace.

 He mentioned it to a c-orker, just making conversation. And the coworker told him who she was, Dana Satderfield’s daughter. Pace hadn’t even known Dana had children. He couldn’t stop thinking about it after that. Not because he had anything to do with what happened to her mother. Because he might have known for 10 years who did.

10 years earlier, on the afternoon Dana was killed, Pace and a friend from school had been sitting at the snack bar of a bowling alley where Pace worked, watching people pass by. His friend brought up a woman named Dana. Said he was going to ask her out that night. Pace laughed because the idea seemed absurd.

His friend was years younger than her and she was married even if separated. His friend didn’t find it funny. He got defensive, almost sharp about it. Later that evening, his friend gave him a ride home and mentioned he was going to get a haircut, late as it was. Then he added, “It wasn’t really about the haircut. It was about her.

By 9:00 that night, Dana Satderfield was dead. When the news broke and police started asking about a blue and white Ford Bronco, Pace put it together. His friend drove one just like it. He couldn’t bring himself to believe it. Not at first. Then his friend confronted him and told him in plain words that he would kill him if he ever told anyone what he’d said that day.

 Pace called the sheriff’s office anonymously not long after. He gave them a name. He wouldn’t give them his own. He called again a year or two later and again after that. Four times over 10 years. Always the same tip. Always anonymous. Always too afraid to sign his name to it. His friend’s name was Jonathan Vic. Investigators had actually looked at Vic close to the time of the murder.

 His mother owned a blue and white Bronco. Deputies stopped that vehicle more than once in the months after the killing and asked his father to bring him in for a DNA sample. He never came in. Somewhere along the way, a note ended up in the file that read, “Jonathan Vic has been cleared.” Years later, the sheriff at the time would say that note was a poor choice of words.

“He was never cleared,” the sheriff said. They just couldn’t prove or disprove that he’d done anything. Without a name attached to Pace’s tips and without physical evidence tying Vic to the scene, investigators had nothing solid enough to force a DNA sample. A judge wouldn’t sign a warrant on an anonymous phone call alone.

So, the case sat. Now, in 2005, Pace called one more time, and this time, officers told him plainly, “Unless he was willing to give his name and make it official, there was only so much they could do.” Pace thought about Dana’s children, about what it must have been like to grow up without her, waiting a decade for an answer that never came.

 He gave them his name. With a real statement behind them, investigators finally had enough to go to a judge. This time, the warrant was signed. Jonathan Vic would have to give a DNA sample whether he wanted to or not. By then, Vic was 27 years old and living in Greenville, about 30 minutes from where Dana was killed.

He’d spent time in the United States Marine Corps, though he hadn’t left with an honorable discharge. He was married now with a young daughter. He’d struggled to hold down steady work, moving through job after job, clashing with co-workers and supervisors along the way. He had two prior arrests, one for domestic violence and one for vandalism.

Both times the charges had been dropped. The DNA results came back not long after. The match was overwhelming, 900 million to one against it belonging to anyone else. Officers arrested Jonathan Vic on October 24th, 2005, 10 years almost to the season after Dana’s murder. As they walked him toward the car in front of the cameras that had gathered, he said one thing.

I love my wife and my daughter. That’s all that matters. He denied any involvement in Dana’s death. He kept denying it through every round of questioning that followed. While investigators prepared the case for trial, more came out. A cellmate of Vixs told authorities that Vic had said if he could take back any single day of his life, it would be the day he went to Dana’s shop.

 He told the cellmate he’d parked his Bronco across the street on purpose so no one would see it near the salon. He said he’d gone in that night, that something happened, and that he’d climbed out through the window because he was scared. He said he’d blacked out. When directly asked whether he’d killed her, he wouldn’t say yes and he wouldn’t say no.

Piecing together everything they had, investigators believed Vic went to the salon that night, using the haircut as a reason to be there. At some point, he made an advance toward Dana. She may have thought he was joking. She may have simply turned him down. Whatever happened between them, it ended with him attacking her, dragging her into the back room and killing her there.

 One detail never stopped bothering investigators. If Vic had just walked out the front door instead of climbing through that window, there’s a real chance no one ever sees him. Diane Harris wouldn’t have been standing where she was. There would have been no thumping sound, no face-to-face moment, no sketch.

 The decision that let him get away that night was the same decision that years later helped bring him down. The trial began in late November of 2006, more than 11 years after Dana’s death. Over 4 days, prosecutors called 32 witnesses. Diane Harris testified again, this time in a courtroom, describing the night she’d carried with her for over a decade.

She admitted something difficult on the stand. Twice over the years, she’d been shown photo lineups and picked out the wrong man each time. The defense leaned on that hard, arguing it showed how unreliable her memory of that night really was. The defense had one more card to play. A pubic hair recovered from Dana’s body didn’t match Vic’s DNA.

It didn’t match Mike Satderfields either. No fingerprints belonging to Vic were ever found inside the salon. His attorney argued the state was asking the jury to convict a man of the physical evidence in the room didn’t actually place there. The prosecution’s answer was simple. The salon bathroom was used by dozens of customers every week.

 A stray hair from any one of them meant nothing next to a DNA match with odds of 900 million to one. And Dana’s body had been dragged across a floor covered in hair from a full day of cutting and styling. One hair proved nothing. The seaman recovered from her body told its own story. Jonathan Vic did not take the stand in his own defense.

The jury deliberated for roughly 20 minutes. When they returned, they found him guilty on every count. Murder, kidnapping, criminal sexual conduct. Because Vic had been 17 years old on the night of the murder, he wasn’t eligible for the death penalty. The judge sentenced him to life in prison for the murder, plus two separate 30-year sentences for the other charges.

Before he was led away, Vic spoke to the courtroom. She did not get justice today. He said, “She will not as long as I sit behind bars.” Outside the courtroom, Dana’s family tried to find their footing again. Mike Satderfield, who had since remarried, held his children close. Their daughter, Ashley, now 20 years old, said she was glad he wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone else.

 Their son, Brandon, 17 by then, said simply that his mother’s killer had gotten what he deserved. Dana’s mother called his continued denial a slap in the face. but said she wasn’t surprised he’d said anything at all. At least he’s somewhere he can’t hurt anybody else. She said the sheriff, who’d spent years on the case, had his own final words for the man responsible.

He is an evil, evil person, he said, who found justice today. In the years since, Vic has stayed in trouble behind bars. In 2006, not long after his conviction, he assaulted a corrections officer and threatened to kill him and his family, adding time to his sentence. He remains incarcerated in South Carolina today.

 He’ll be eligible for parole in the year 2035 when he’ll be 57 years old. Ashley Satderfield, now known as Ashley Arowwood, grew up and became a victim advocate for the same county sheriff’s office that once investigated her mother’s murder. She works with victims of violent crime around the clock, sits with them through bond hearings, and helps them find the words to speak at sentencing.

 She started a program inside the local jail to show inmates directly what their crimes cost the people left behind. She said she hasn’t forgiven Jonathan Vic and won’t until he admits what he did. You don’t get over it, she said. You just learn how to live with it. There’s one part of this story that never got its ending.

Years before Dana’s murder was solved, Vic had been engaged to a young woman named Heather Sers. In September of 2002, she was dropped off at a family member’s house, planning to spend the night. Witnesses say she left with Vic instead. The two of them were seen together at a bar that night.

 No one has seen her since. Investigators have named Vic a person of interest in her disappearance for years. He has never cooperated with them. As of recent reporting, Heather Sers has never been found and her case remains open. Somewhere in South Carolina, a man sits in a prison cell, still insisting he’s innocent of a crime 900 million to one odds say he committed.

He was seen once for a single second by a woman running for her life. It took 10 years, a stranger’s memory, and an ordinary trip for an oil change before that one second finally caught up with him. Jonathan Vic still says he didn’t do it. The evidence says otherwise. What do you think? And what do you think happened to Heather Sers? Nobody has answered that question yet.

Maybe somebody watching this knows something they don’t realize matters.