Case With The Most INSANE Twists You’ve Ever Heard | True Crime Documentary

On November 29th, 2001, 12-year-old Amanda Cope was found strangled to death in her own bed in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Sadly, her own father, Billy Cope, was the one to find her. He immediately went into a state of shock. However, when the police arrived to investigate, they found a very suspicious scene.

Who could have done such a thing to a sweet 12-year-old child? And who was the police’s main suspect in the case? This is one of the most twisted cases you’ve ever heard.  Hello, what is the name of the place and medical?  My daughter is dead. She just hung herself.  Sorry, did she hang herself?  No, she didn’t hang herself, but uh  How old is she?  Around her.

 You know how old she is? Uh 11 years old.  That chilling recording you just heard was the 911 call the 37-year-old Billy Cope made when he found his daughter, Amanda, dead in her bedroom in the early hours of November 29th, 2001 in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Billy Cope woke up with a start at around 3:00 a.m. and immediately knew something was wrong in his house.

 The hall light was on and he distinctly remembered turning it off before going to bed. His wife, Mary Sue, was out at her overnight job where she cleaned offices. So, it was just him and his three girls at home. Amanda, Jessica, and Kayla. Amanda was the oldest at 12 years old. While Jessica and Kayla were 11 and 7 respectively. A devoutly Christian family, they had missed the Wednesday church service they usually attended that night because Jessica was struggling with her math homework and needed some extra help to complete her assignment. Amanda, always

the caring older sister, had offered to help her and Billy agreed to let the two girls stay up as long as was needed to complete the work. The youngest daughter, Kayla, had gone to bed at 9:00 p.m. but Billy stayed up with the older two sisters till 1:00 a.m. helping them finish their schoolwork.

 Afterwards, they all headed to bed to get some much-needed rest. Billy turned on his CPAP breathing machine, which he used to keep his sleep apnea at bay before drifting off to sleep. Strangely, just 2 hours later, he was awakened by something, still half asleep. Billy went to check on his daughters. Amanda’s door was shut, and he concluded that perhaps she was the one who had turned on the hall light.

Maybe she’d gotten up in the middle of the night for a drink of water. The other bedroom door was open, and he saw his two younger girls fast asleep in their beds. With his mind more at ease, he returned to his bed, put his breathing machine back on, and quickly fell back to sleep. The following mo

rning at 6:00 a.m., Billy was awakened by the blaring of his alarm clock. He later stated that during those intermittent hours of sleep, he dreamed about the rapture. In his dream, Jesus had returned to take his followers home. He explained that in his dream, he saw Amanda being taken and him being left behind with her saying the words, “Bye, Daddy.

” Still feeling jarred from his intense dream, he quickly left his bed to check on his daughters. He was overwhelmed with relief when he saw his two younger girls still sleeping peacefully in their beds. But his comfort was short-lived as he tried to open Amanda’s door. It was caught on the open closet door behind it.

 After using force to get through the door, he witnessed an unbearable sight. Amanda’s body was lying limp on her bed. When he went to touch her, she was ice cold, and he knew that his nightmare had come true. He then covered her, and still in a state of shock, dialed 911. Within minutes, paramedics from the fire department arrived at the scene, but their life-saving gear was useless.

Amanda was indeed gone. Jason Dillon from the Rock Hill Fire Department asked Billy what he thought had happened, and Billy told them that he thought she may have choked on her blanket as she had a history of rolling in her sleep. Detectives arrived soon after they secured the house as an active crime scene and began an investigation.

 The detectives were immediately suspicious of Billy’s reaction to his daughter’s death. His calm demeanor seemed unnatural, and he did not display much emotion at all. Soon, dozens of investigators filled the tiny house looking for clues, but the house was a mess. With the family’s belongings cluttering every room, there were clothes piled on every surface, dishes overflowing out of the sinks, cockroaches scurrying into the corners.

In the midst of all this, Amanda’s body lay fully clothed on her bed surrounded by her books and recent school pictures that she had just gotten back from the photographer. When the body was examined, investigators found that she had been beaten and strangled to death after being assaulted.

 There were bruises on her body, and physical evidence was found on her clothes. The evidence was collected in the hopes that it could be used in identifying the killer. While processing the house for clues, police found another oddity. After examining all the doors and windows, they realized that there were no signs of forced entry into the home.

 All the entrances were locked from the inside. This indicated to investigators that the killer likely came from within the house. The detectives spoke to Billy and asked him how he thought Amanda had died. Billy claimed that she may have been strangled by her blanket in her sleep, which was not in line with the evidence of the crime scene.

 Detectives knew they needed to dig deeper. Upon looking into his background, they learned that two years prior, he and his wife had both pleaded guilty to neglecting the proper care of their children. This was the final piece of information that they needed, along with his emotionless reaction to her death.

 His bizarre explanation of how she died, and the fact that there were no signs of forced entry into the house, it seemed to the police that Billy was clearly the prime suspect in their case. They immediately took him downtown to the police station for more intense questioning. Over the next few days, detectives grilled Billy mercilessly.

 He faced over 17 hours of interrogation over the next 4 days. On the first day of interrogation, the 29th of November, 2001, the same day of the murder, Billy was questioned for 3 and 1/2 hours by detectives. As a result of this initial questioning, detectives had no doubt that he had committed the terrible crime.

 All they needed from him was a confession. But on that first day, Billy insisted that he was innocent again and again, over 650 times, according to the recordings of the interrogations. He told the police that he loved his daughters, and that there was no way he would have ever harmed Amanda. He claimed that the only reason he didn’t hear anything that night was because the machine he used for sleep apnea was very loud, and it drowned out any outside noise.

This seemed unlikely to the investigators, who continued to probe Billy to see if they could get a confession out of him. However, Billy would not admit to the crime. They tried to use his faith against him, saying he’d burn in hell for what he did. They also tried to tell him that when the physical evidence they had collected came back as a match to him, he’d have nowhere to hide.

 Yet no matter what they said, Billy continued to deny any involvement in the murder of his daughter. Finally, as they entered the fourth hour of questioning on the second day, Billy asked for a polygraph, a lie detector test, believing it would be what finally convince them of his innocence. Unfortunately, this would be where it all began to unravel for Billy.

Not long after beginning his polygraph, the individual conducting the test slammed his hand down on the table and told the detectives that they had enough to end the test. He looked Billy in the eye and told him he had failed. Billy was devastated. Following these results, detectives pressed Billy further, wanting to know why he had done this terrible thing to his daughter.

 Slowly, Billy began to talk. Billy eventually confessed, yet he seemed unsure of his own statements. The first confession ended with him signing a written statement of what he had done, admitting to killing his own daughter. But that would not be all. By the end of the fourth day of the interrogation, Billy had given a total of four different confessions to the police, and none of them matched each other or aligned with the evidence at the crime scene.

In one, Amanda was beaten with a broom, but this was not mentioned in any of his other confessions. Some confessions included a dream, yet in other statements, the dream was excluded or a very different version of the dream was told. None of the details from each individual confession lined up with one another.

Regardless of this, detectives accepted them as the truth, even though they believed Billy to be severely mentally disturbed. The fourth and final confession was a video reenactment, where the police took him back to his house and taped him as he went over what he did the night of the murder.

 Eventually, due to his many confessions, Billy was charged as the sole perpetrator in the murder of his daughter. However, after these long interrogations, Billy would tract it all of his confessions and again protested his innocence in court. Nonetheless, the damage was done and Billy was sent to prison with no bond or any form of bail.

 It seemed like the case was done and dusted. A year had passed since the murder. Billy had confessed to the crime, and many people, even those who knew him, were now convinced that he was indeed guilty. But, Billy himself was once again professing his innocence. Phil Betty, a private attorney from Rock Hill, was now charged with fighting this case in court for him.

Phil admits that the first time he met Billy, he thought he was guilty. His strategy for the case was to try and get Billy the best plea deal possible, and simply put the case to rest. However, after speaking to Billy about the process of his interrogation in the initial days after the murder, Betty was disturbed by what he had heard.

 When his court-assigned public defender, B.J. Barraclow, had arrived at the police station, the police did not allow him into the interrogation room to see Billy, a clear violation of his rights. They produced a note that Billy had allegedly signed, which stated that he did not want to see his attorney at that time. When Barraclow argued that they could have coerced him into signing this note, they simply refused to let him ask his client himself.

 It was only after the fourth confession that his defense attorney, B.J. Barraclow, was allowed to see him. When he asked Billy why he had signed the confession, Billy replied that the police had told him he would get the death penalty if he didn’t sign it. Betty was shocked at the clear violation of Billy’s rights.

 However, since the confessions had been written and signed, he was unsure if this information would aid in his case. In an unexpected turn of events in late 2002, Betty got a call from the prosecutor’s office asking for a meeting. Believing this was in regard to a deal for his client, he agreed to meet with them, but he could never have expected what they were about to tell him.

 As they sat him down, they explained that the DNA found on Amanda’s body had finally been processed, and to the surprise of everyone, the DNA was not Billy’s. Betty was shocked, but also relieved to hear this news because it now meant that his client was innocent, and he had a real chance to win this case. But what they would tell him next would shock him even more.

 He was told that the police had been aware within a few weeks of the murder that the DNA was not a match to Billy, but had kept this information to themselves for over a year. This infuriated Beaty to no end. He could not believe such a grievous miscarriage of justice had been carried out, and that no one had thought this information was important enough to inform Billy’s lawyers about before this time.

 But then he stopped and asked why they had decided to tell him this information now after all these months if they had known it was not Billy’s DNA all that time ago. And that is when the final piece of information was revealed to him. He was told that the reason he was being informed of all this now was that the police had found a match to the DNA in the system, and they knew whose it was.

It belonged to a man named James Sanders. There’s not much information known about James Sanders’ past, where he came from, or what he was doing prior to 2001. All that is known is that he was a career criminal who had committed a variety of crimes before this horrific one. He had been released from prison and moved into the same neighborhood as the Copes only about 2 weeks prior to him killing Amanda.

He lived in a house only two blocks away from where Billy and his family lived. There’s no evidence that the two men knew each other, and they certainly would have made an unusual pair. Billy Cope was, in the words of his lawyer, a socially isolated 385-lb white man. He was also a devout Christian and aspiring preacher.

James Sanders, on the other hand, was an African-American career criminal and drug addict who had recently gotten out of prison. In the 6 weeks following Amanda’s murder in November 2001, Sanders committed or attempted to commit four more sexual assaults in the neighborhood. Now that his attorneys knew there was another man whose DNA had been found at the scene of the crime, they realized that Billy was factually innocent.

 They then questioned him seriously as to why he had provided false confessions to the police. When he was interrogated right after the murder occurred, Billy told his lawyers that when he was questioned by the police in the hours following the murder, he had been sure of his innocence. But he had also been in a state of shock, having just lost his daughter in such a traumatic manner.

Due to this, he may have appeared emotionless to them. He also told them that he had provided false confessions in an effort to confuse the police. He believed that his confessions would not carry any weight unless the police were able to prove them. And he didn’t believe the evidence would point to any of his confessions being legitimate.

However, in this matter, he was wrong as the police were willing to accept his confessions even though none of them matched each other or indeed the evidence found at the scene. Despite Sanders being identified as being present the night that Amanda was killed, Billy was still charged with a crime. The case went to trial in 2004 and the trial was centered around both sides trying to prove what had actually taken place the night of the murder.

While Billy’s lawyers argued that Billy was not involved in his daughter’s death in any manner, the prosecutors found a simple explanation for both Billy’s confessions and the new DNA evidence that had been found. They said that the only logical explanation was that both men were in on it and had carried out the crime together.

The prosecutors alleged that this is why there were no signs of forced entry into the house as Billy had let Sanders in and then locked up again once he left. Cope’s attorney said prosecutors were just trying to present the evidence in this manner so they could cover up their inappropriate interrogation tactics.

They argued that Cope had mental issues and was so devastated by his daughter’s death that detectives were able to manipulate him into confessing to a crime he did not commit. The defense was also not allowed to present crucial evidence to the jury due to Judge John C. Hayes the third and not allowing it on the grounds of it leading the jury to a logical fallacy.

The evidence that was excluded was the fact that in the forced sexual assaults that Sanders had committed or attempted in the weeks following Amanda’s murder there was never any sign of forced entry which certainly suggests that Sanders was a master at breaking and entering and left no evidence for even the most seasoned of detectives to find.

Another key piece of evidence the defense lawyers were not allowed to present to the jury was the testimony from a jailhouse informant who claimed he had overheard Sanders say he had raped and killed a little girl in Rock Hill. These sorts of testimonies are often allowed by courts when they help prosecutors but in this case when it could have helped the defendant it was not allowed.

While it may seem clear to you that Billy was not involved in his daughter’s death at all this is not how the jury ended up seeing it. Both Sanders and Billy were convicted and charged with conspiracy which means they collaborated with each other to commit the crime. They were each given life sentences without the chance of parole in 2004 in April 2009 the verdict was appealed and a three-judge panel from the South Carolina Court of Appeals reversed the conspiracy conviction ruling that there was no evidence that

Cope and Sanders knew each other. However, the South Carolina Attorney General appealed this decision soon after. And the decision was overturned. In 2013, the state Supreme Court upheld Cope’s conviction. And the US Supreme Court refused to hear his case. Despite all the evidence seemingly pointing towards Billy’s innocence, he remained behind bars.

On February 9th, 2017, at the age of 53, Billy Cope died of natural causes in state custody. He never got to see the outside of a jail cell after being charged with the murder of his own daughter. Whether or not he was actually guilty, we leave for you to decide. And there we have it, folks.

 The tragic tale of the murder of Amanda Cope and the nightmare ordeal that followed for her father, Billy. What do you think of the case? Do you think Billy was innocent or guilty? More importantly, was justice served for Amanda Cope? Let us know your opinions in the comments down below. And if you enjoyed the video, please like, share, and subscribe to the channel.

 Until next time, stay safe, and thanks for watching.