Evil Grandad: Don’t Click If You’re Watching Alone | True Crime Documentary

Hello, this is Dwayne Silverworth Roadside. How can I help you?  Hey, my name is uh Calvin Lee. I’m a special agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement out of the Gainesville area. And here we got a weird request. So, we are helping out the United Kingdom police with a missing person.

 Um, and looking through her banking records, it looked like she called your business for assistance probably 2 or 3 days ago and the payment was declined. Um, her name would have been Sonia Exelby. Is that ringing a bell?  Um, yes and no.  Okay.  Yeah, she broke down. I needed a tire change. Okay. Um,  was requesting to be transported the rest of the way to her location, but declined payments.

 We ain’t going to touch that.  Okay. So, she  paid for our services.  Right. So, she did. So, you did change the tire and the payment got declined or that payment went through and  we never showed up.  Oh, okay. Okay. So, she said she had a flat tire. Um,  yeah. And so before y’all show up there, y’all do um they have to pay over the phone.

 Yeah.  Okay. And that declined, so y’all never actually showed up,  right?  Did she say where she was wanting to go to her final destination?  Did not say.  Okay. Um  she was very uh she’s very very very very secretive about everything. I don’t know.  All right. Well, I appreciate it. Um you said you’re Dwayne, right? The owner.

Yeah.  Okay. What’s your last name just for my record? So I say I spoke with you.  Paul H L.  H A L L.  I’ve got just a ridiculous amount of money coming out this month for everything. And we haven’t even gotten to taxes yet. That’s probably next month. So it’s like I’m struggling really hard.

 I’m struggling financially and emotionally.  And I’m gone.   is gone. Sorry, but  but did you say   gone?  Yeah.  It’s October 11th, 2025. Somewhere in Florida, a phone buzzes in a friend’s hand back in England, and what she reads makes her stomach drop. The messages don’t come all at once. They come in pieces, broken and rushed, like someone typing with one eye on the door.

 A man won’t let her keep her own phone, the message says. He doesn’t trust her with it. She’s locked inside a house somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, and there’s no signal to call for help, even if she wanted to. He keeps talking about things no person should ever have to sit and listen to.

 And then one final message lands. Short, desperate, final. She says she’s terrified. She says she’s completely overwhelmed. She says she’s in more pain than she knows how to put into words. That message would be one of the last anyone ever heard from her. Days later, in a quiet, overgrown stretch of woods in Marian Oaks, Florida, search teams are working their way through brush and pine when something stops them cold.

 A patch of ground freshly disturbed, dirt that doesn’t match the dirt around it. And buried just beneath it, the body of a 32-year-old woman from England. A torn shovel label resting right beside her, a small, almost overlooked detail that would end up being one of the most important pieces of evidence investigators would ever recover in this case.

 Her name was Sonia Exelby, and the marks left on her body told investigators that her final days had been violent ones. But as horrifying as that discovery was, what came next. The messages, the videos, the years of secrets hiding behind a screen name would turn out to be even harder to comprehend. Here’s what makes this whole thing even more unsettling.

 Sonia had flown into Florida for what was supposed to be a quick 2-day trip, nothing more. She didn’t have family there. She didn’t have friends there. There was no business reason, no vacation plan, nothing in her life that explained why a quiet musician from the south coast of England would suddenly board a transatlantic flight to a part of the United States she’d never once mentioned to the people closest to her.

 So, detectives went looking for the answer the only place they could. Inside her phone, her accounts, her digital life, and what they found waiting for the men there had clearly been hiding in plain sight for a long, long time. Nearly two years of private messages, conversations buried inside corners of the internet most people never even know exist.

 And at the center of all of it, one consistent presence, a man known noble only by the username Dark Wolf. When police finally got him in a room, the story he told them sounded almost too strange to be real. He talked about a mysterious client, a hidden barn somewhere out in rural Florida packed with expensive cars.

 He even suggested that A-list celebrities, the kind of names everyone in this country would instantly recognize, were secretly storing their vehicles out there, far from prying eyes. But what investigators pulled off his phone told a very different story. It was a video. Sonia sitting in a chair inside a rented vacation home. Her hair is a mess.

 Her eyes are swollen and red. She’s holding herself together by a thread and barely. Real quick before we keep going, I genuinely love to know where in the world you’re tuning in from tonight. So, go ahead and drop your city in the comments, although along with what time it is right where you’re sitting.

 And if you’re new to this channel, do yourself a favor and hit subscribe because this is exactly the kind of true crime documentary storytelling we dig into every single week. All right, let’s get back into it. In the fall of 2025, a young musician from England boarded a flight out of London Heathrow, bound for Gainesville, Florida.

 Just 2 days later, she missed the flight home. What happened to Sonia Exelby in the span of those two days is the kind of true crime documentary case that starts off shocking and somehow finds new ways to get worse with every detail that surfaces. And the full truth, the real truth, would only come to light through her own secret messages and a plan that had quietly been taking shape for years in some of the darkest corners of the internet.

 And I’m gone. Sorry, but did you say it is gone?  Yeah.  On the afternoon of October 17th, 2025, officers searching the Marian Oaks area zeroed in on that patch of disturbed earth. What they uncovered there was Sonia, a woman who just days earlier had been reported missing an ocean away.

 Her case was opened almost immediately as a criminal death investigation. And from that point forward, nothing about it would stay simple. Exactly one week before that discovery, Sonia had boarded a flight from her her home in Portsouth, England, headed for Gainesville, Florida. Her return ticket was booked for 2 days later.

 She never used it and by the time anyone realized something was wrong, she was already gone. To understand who Sonia Exelby really was, you have to start in Portsouth, a city sitting right along the southern coast of England in the county of Hampshire. It’s a place with history baked into every corner of it. The birthplace of Charles Dickens, a historic dockyard where preserved naval ships still draw tourists from all over the world.

 a commercial ferry port that’s among the busiest in the entire United Kingdom. It’s not a flashy place. It’s a working city full of working people. In the fall of 2025, it was home to a woman named Sonia Exelby. Sonia was a musician through and through, not in some vague hobbyist way. She was a pianist and a singer who wrote her own original songs and performed them live whenever she had the chance, sharing pieces of her work online for anyone who wanted to listen.

 She made her actual living teaching music lessons. Piano, guitar, flute, whatever a student needed.  So, um, the piece that I will play you today, um, it’s a bit different to what you might used to be hearing, but I hope you enjoy. If it’s true what they say, I will hear them. But if you ask the people who knew her best, singing was always where her heart really lived.

 It was the thing that made her her. She’d spent nearly 15 years in a relationship with her boyfriend, an artist named Stevie. The two of them shared a home together in South just outside the city center along with a cat named Merryill that both of them treated like an absolute member of the family. By every account from the people around her, it was a quiet, steady kind of life, the kind nobody expects to end up at the center of a true crime documentary investigation.

It was Stevie alongside other members of Sonia’s family who first sounded the alarm when she didn’t show up for her flight home. Hampshire police opened the case right away. And given the international nature of her trip, it didn’t take long before Interpol got pulled in, too. Stevie didn’t stay quiet about it.

 He went public on social media, calling Sonia the love of his life and pleading with anyone who might have information to come forward. He said he was terrified for her safety. He explained as carefully as he could that she’d been going through a genuinely difficult period in her personal life and that she was more vulnerable than most people around her probably realized.

 And here’s where things start to get strange. Sonia had originally told the people in her life that she was heading to London for a few days. That was the plan everyone knew about. Instead, without any warning to anyone close to her, she boarded a flight out of Heathrow and flew straight across the Atlantic to the United States.

 As far as her family and friends knew, she had zero connection to the state of Florida. No friends there, no business reason, nothing. Once Sonia’s family in Hampshire filed an official missing person’s report, investigators on the Florida side were looped in through Interpol, and they immediately started rebuilding her movements hour by hour, starting from the moment she landed at Gainesville Regional Airport on the evening of October 10th.

 And that’s where the timeline starts to splinter into something much darker. Digging through her banking activity, detectives noticed something odd almost right away. Just after midnight on October 11th, within a window of only about 10 minutes, seven separate attempts have been made to charge her debit card.

 Every single one of them got declined. Then the following afternoon at 1:10 p.m. on October 12th, a payment finally went through, this time on a different card. The amount $1,200. And both the failed attempts and the successful charge all traced back to the same business, a small roadside assistance company. For investigators, that was the first real thread to pull.

They tracked down the owner of the company, a man named Dwayne Hall, who it turned out was also the company’s only employee. When detectives first reached out to him, Dwayne’s explanation seemed simple enough on the surface. He said Sonia’s original payment had been declined, so he’d never actually responded to the service request.

Hello, this is Dwayne Silverwolf Roadside. How can I help you?  Hey, my name is uh Calvin Lee. I’m a special agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement out of uh the Gainesville area and here we got a weird request. So, we are helping out uh the United Kingdom police with a missing person.

 Um, and looking through her banking records, it looked like she called for called your business for assistance probably 2 or 3 days ago and the payment was declined. Um, her name would have been Sonia Exelby. Is that ringing a bell?  Um, yes and no.  Okay.  Yeah, she broke down. Needed a tire change. Okay. Um,  and was requesting to be transported the rest of the way to her location, but declined payments.

 We ain’t going to touch that.  Okay. So,  we have to pay for our services.  Right. So, she did So, you did change the tire and the payment got declined or that payment went through and  we never showed up.  Oh, okay. Okay. So, she said she had a flat tire. Um,  yeah. And so before y’all show up there, y’all do um they have to pay over the phone.

 Yeah.  Okay. And that declined. So y’all never actually showed up,  right?  Did she say where she was wanting to go to her final destination?  Did not say.  Okay. Um  she was very uh she’s very very very very secretive about everything. I don’t know.  All right. Well, I appreciate it. Um you said you’re Dwayne, right? The owner.

Yeah.  Okay. What’s your last name just for my record? So I say I spoke with you.  Paul H L A L.  Case closed as far as he was concerned. Except that explanation left a pretty obvious question hanging in the air. If he never responded to her shirt, why did $1,200 end up getting charged to a completely different card belonging to Sonia the very next day? At the very least, that discrepancy alone was enough for investigators to start looking at Dwayne for possible financial misconduct. And the deeper they looked

into his life and the more complicated things became  those efforts where they fraction of what they owed.  In the end, the fundraiser brought in exact$50 from a single donor.  I need to ask for everybody to try to donate to me and my wife. We’re trying to offset about $12,000 worth of medical expenses and moving expenses and everything else because she’s trying to get a a transplant.

 And of course, if anybody’s out there that’s been through the process before, you know, that involves about 10,000 doctor’s appointments and I can’t do doctor’s appointments with my wife and work. And I’d rather be with my wife than work any day of the week. And we’re asking everybody out there that sees this to try to do what you can to help donate to offset that $12,000 expense that we need help with.

 That financial desperation matters here. Because when detectives first sat down with Dwayne, he conveniently left out one very important detail, the fact that $1,200 had been pulled from Sonia Exel’s account just one day before she was scheduled to fly home. He also couldn’t give investigators a single solid detail about what kind of vehicle Sonia supposedly needed help with or where exactly this roadside emergency had taken place.

 I’ve got just a ridiculous amount of money coming out this month for everything and we haven’t even gotten to taxes yet. That’s next month probably. So, it’s like I’m struggling really hard. I’m struggling financially and emotionally. So, does anybody possibly want to help me save my company, my future, and pretty much everything that goes along with that? Because if you do, I could really use about 10K right now.

Otherwise, it looks like this might be the end of my company.  Dwayne and his longtime partner, a woman named Ginger Stein, who he often referred to publicly as his wife, had been through a genuinely brutal few years. Their history together went back decades. The two had first met when Jinger was only 16 years old and Dwayne was 26.

 And according to Ginger, the relationship turned romantic shortly after she turned 17. From there, they stayed together on and off for almost 30 years, eventually settling down together in Ocala, where they raised Jinger’s son together as a family. Money had been a constant struggle for a long time. But things took a serious turn when Ginger was diagnosed with a rare disease that caused permanent scarring in her lungs.

 In 2025, she underwent a double lung transplant, a surgery that ultimately saved her life, but one that also buried the couple in overwhelming medical debt. They tried everything they could think of to dig themselves out for people trained to spot inconsistency. That vagueness stood out immediately. Meanwhile, investigators were busy rebuilding the rest of Sonia’s trip piece by piece.

 her outbound flight, her transportation to Heathrow, and eventually an Airbnb rental she’d booked in the small town of Reic, Florida. When detectives finally made it out to that property, they found it hadn’t been cleaned at all since Sonia’s stay. Sitting in the trash was a receipt for a shovel, though the shovel itself was nowhere to be found inside the house.

 Alongside that receipt were food wrappers, a coffee cup, some sandwich packaging, and a container of strawberries from a nearby gas station. All of it purchased using the same bank card. One neighbor mentioned to investigators that they’d noticed a black SUV parked outside that property that entire weekend, October 10th through the 12th, with a sticker on the back advertising emergency roadside service.

 And every single transaction connected to that Airbnb, every charge, every purchase led right back to one name, Dwayne Hall. Then there’s October 11th. The very same day those failed car charges were piling up. Sonia reached out to a close friend back home. The messages that came through were frantic, scattered, and at moments barely coherent.

 The kind of messages someone sends when they’re running out of time, and they know it. She said someone kept taking her phone away from her because he didn’t trust her to have it. She said she’d been questioned the day before and didn’t think she had any real way to push back. She said she was locked inside somewhere with absolutely no signal miles from anything resembling civilization and that the person she was with was occupied elsewhere in that exact moment, which is why she even had the chance to type at all.

 She said she believed this might genuinely be her last opportunity to reach anyone who could help her. She said she was scared. She said she was overwhelmed. She said she was in more pain than she could explain. And in her final lines, the words started to fall apart entirely. She said she wasn’t even sure what she was writing anymore, that all she could do now was wait and see what happened next.

 Nobody heard from her again after that. On October 17th, just one week after Sonia had landed in Florida, Dwayne and Jinger were driving to one of her medical appointments when deputies from the Marian County Sheriff’s Office pulled their vehicle over on the side of the road. It probably felt to them in that moment like a routine stop.

 It was anything but. Officers made sure Ginger still made it to her postsurgery treatment that day. Her health situation wasn’t something law enforcement was willing to interrupt. But while she sat in that hospital, investigators used the opportunity to start asking her questions. Specifically, where had Dwayne actually been during the weekend Sonia had stayed at that Airbnb out in Reic? 43-year-old Ginger told detectives what she understood to be true.

According to her, Dwayne had been away from home that whole weekend working on what he described to her as a secret project, restoring cars for a private client who’d supposedly paid him well above market rate on the condition that he signed a non-disclosure agreement before the work even began. Is  this the first time you know of him talking to the police or anything?  Well, no, not the not the first time regarding this, but he’d been talked to before.

 Um, he did have he had a he had a big  This is about the credit card stuff. Okay. Yeah.  He had a big job, I think, in Gainesville.  Mhm.  Um they wanted him to stay overnight and work on a whole bunch of different cars.  Okay.  And I guess they made him sign a non-disclosure agreement cuz they had a bunch of really expensive cars.

 Really? Okay.  And while they were gone, while he was gone is when he got the stolen credit card.  Okay.  Tried to go through and everything.  As far as Jinger knew, that was the full story. The only thing she’d personally been aware of was some kind of issue with a card payment connected to that same weekend.

 And even after detectives had already come by their home in the days following, nobody had filled her in on anything more. She was still recovering in the hospital during that visit. And Dwayne never volunteered a single additional detail to her then or later.  Anything about what all the cops were asking him or what they were talking to him about?  Just the card.

 Just  just about the card being declined and stuff. I guess there’s some uh I guess it was reported stolen.  Oh, okay. Oh, this might be okay. H and he didn’t and he didn’t have any  or he think he thinks it was  he thinks it’s stolen because it was declined and stuff that something  Yeah.

 And usually if a card’s declined, the cops don’t necessarily get involved. So  Jinger may not have understood why investigators were so fixated on one card transaction, but Dwayne, when he finally sat down across from them, already had an explanation ready to go. And it was a strange one, needlessly complicated, full of moving parts that didn’t quite fit together.

 Speaking with agents from Florida’s state law enforcement alongside officers from the sheriff’s office, Dwayne opened with essentially the same story he’d already given Ginger, a client he knew only by the name Harold, a name investigators suspected from the very beginning was almost certainly fake, had supposedly hired him to perform mechanical work on a handful of high-end vehicles.

 Okay. You look like a Middle Easter. In my brain, this is how I remember what he looked like. Okay. Mhm.  He was a tall Middle Easter, but his teeth were too big for his face and his smile was too big for his teeth.  Teeth were too big for his face. Smile was too big for his teeth.  Dwayne speculated almost casually that the cars in question might have belonged to celebrities looking to keep their business dealings private.

 And he went so far as to name a couple of major Hollywood figures known for guarding their personal lives closely. According to him, he’d been staying at the house out in Reic, a property he believed belonged to this mysterious herald. And every morning, someone would supposedly drive him out to an unmarked plain looking storage barn at a location he claimed he could no longer recall.

 He wasn’t permitted to bring his own phone along on these trips, he said, which conveniently meant there was no record, no proof, nothing investigators could check against his story.  I was I was out out there on a different type of job.  Okay. I’d gotten hired. No, I ain’t telling you anything about this because I signed an NDA for the client.

 Okay.  Okay. But if it comes down to it and we need that information, we desperately need that information, I’ll break that NDA. But the reason why the NDA was there is because there’s high profile client that has cars for people like Travolta and like that on his property.  Tell me more about that.

 It’s pretty important.  I can’t I can’t tell you more about that.  Tell me why it’s more important  because it’s different from what you told before.  Yeah, because I wasn’t asked these questions before.  Well, now we’re asking them, so that’s why.  Okay, so basically what happened was dude had a bunch of cars out there, old My favorite one was the 33 right route, the 33 rat rod with the big 355 sitting down in it, all crimemed out.

 And uh he basically had me out there doing maintenance on them. He said he chooses a different company every year and uh basically if he gets a he goes through Yelp or whatever to find a small company and then he has if he likes if they know what they’re doing cuz he’ll sabotage his car on purpose to see if they know what they’re doing.

 And I had his car fixed when he did that for me in like 2 minutes. Okay.  I walked up and off now.  Do you remember what he did to sabotage it?  He just unplugged the wire. Oh, okay.  Yeah. He unplugged the wire that was kind of hidden down in there.  Yeah.  I said, “I’ll try it now.” And I hooked my box up to it.

 Box said everything was good. And I reached out and I started looking and just come unplug it.  Okay.  Okay. You know  what w and I’m not as familiar with cars. What wire would cause the whole car not to start like that? Was it  ground wire?  Oh, okay.  If you unground the vehicle, you can’t start the vehicle. Don’t forget that.

 Got it.  The new cars are a little bit different. You have to unhook about half a dozen of them. But the old school ones, they have one major ground and if you unhook it just enough or make it loose in there and it won’t ground and it won’t go.  Okay.  And it’ll cut off while you’re driving.  Gotcha.

 Learn something new every day.  Yeah. I’ve been doing this for I’ve been doing mechanics since I was five.  Yeah.  So almost 50 years history and experience in that. So anyway, he had me come out there and then he had me sign the NDA and he paid me a ton of money  and uh basically he was getting all his cars ready for like the big car shows that happen this time of the year for like the spooky Halloween drives, etc.

, etc. At least that’s what I was told.  Dwayne claimed he stayed at that house working in that barn day after day right up until Sunday evening, October 12th, when he was finally told the job was complete. At that point, he said he was given a card number and asked to process a payment of $1,200 for the weekend’s work.

 After that, according to him, he packed up and started the drive back home. But on that drive, Dwayne claimed something unsettling happened. He said he noticed a vehicle following him, and that this wasn’t actually the first strange thing he’d run into during his dealings with this so-called Harold. According to him, every trace of their communication, every call, every text message, every email had simply vanished without explanation, almost like it had never existed at all.

To test whether he was actually being followed or just imagining it, Dwayne said he deliberately turned off the main road and onto a remote dirt trail, hoping to draw the vehicle out and confirm his suspicions one way or the other.  These transactions and interactions with this individual were taking place, they disappeared.

I didn’t know even  I literally have three calls listed for I think it’s Sunday. Three. It’s either Saturday or Sunday. There’s three calls compared to 20 30 a day  that come into my phone.  So, did the calls come in and you were having those conversations and it wasn’t logged or you weren’t getting calls at all?  Calls were coming in, they vanished.

They vanished out of the call. text messages, emails, everything. Everything regarding and relating to that service that I did out there vanish gone like it never happened.  How’d you pay it?  Pay man card.  Okay.  Pay with my card.  Okay.  Red card numbers off to me and I programmed them in and I got paid.

 Okay.  I got paid $1,200  for like 36 hours of my time. Mhm.  And then I went home that Monday that Sunday or I tried to go home that Sunday.  Mhm.  But I was being followed.  How so?  I I was being tailed.  Tell me more about that.  It was uh I can’t really tell you too much because I never got close enough, but it was either it was along the lines of because they got these stupid ass new colors nowadays.

 They can’t just be silvering gray. Okay. But it was it was on color spectrum type from like a a silvery tan color. You know what I’m talking about, right? When they the vehicle color that gets that it gets out of that tan cream color and more into the charcoal color, the gray color. It was it was somewhere it was something like that or maybe a silver color sedan.

 So it kind of depends on how the light shining.  Uhhuh. Yeah. He told investigators he pulled over, parked, and sat there watching the road for close to an hour while the same vehicle circled the area nearby. And then, in maybe the strangest detail of the entire account, he claimed that vehicle eventually pulled directly into the wooded area where his own car had just been sitting moments before.

 It was a long, winding, increasingly bizarre story. And with every new layer Dwayne added to it, the investigators sitting across the table found it harder and harder to take seriously. talk more about that.  I got off like I was going to get off to go home and I went past the entrance to where I would normally turn to go to my house and I came back.

 I U-turned and come back because it’s like there’s no way there’s coincidence. Maybe he’s just getting off. Maybe he’s going out through here. And I went I came back and then I noticed that they U-turned too. So I dipped into a side little spot. I sat there for a few minutes until they left and until I thought they left and then I zipped and took some back roads and I sat there and waited and I seriously sat there and now I don’t know what the address is but I have my phone but at the same time I sat there and I waited for an hour

and they kept making passes on the main road. I know they could see the back of my vehicle but I didn’t care about that. They kept making passes on me and then I left. And when I left, they pulled in and stopped right where I was.  What day was that again?  Sunday morning.  Sunday morning. Okay.  Sunday morning.

 Where were you parked for an hour?  I was out in the back of Marion Oaks.  Okay. Was that  While Dwayne continued working through that account during what would stretch into hours of questioning, a separate team of officers was already out combing through the wooded terrain around Marion Oaks.

 There was a growing unspoken understanding among investigators that whatever had happened to Sonia, the answer might be buried somewhere in those woods. At the same time, detectives moved quickly to secure search warrants for both Dwayne’s phone and his home, determined to check every piece of his story against whatever evidence they could actually get their hands on.

What they found inside his garage did not help his case. A shovel matching the exact same model that had been purchased on October 10th, the same day Sonia had landed in Florida. sitting near it, paracord, 50 f feet of rope, and a set of supplies typically used for cleaning a firearm.

 And inside his SUV, parked outside, investigators located a handgun. None of it lined up with the story about quietly restoring cars in a barn for a wealthy anonymous client. And underneath all of Dwayne’s contradictions and a half explanations, one question kept coming back into focus for the investigators working this case. Where did Sonia Exelby actually fit into any of this? While Dwayne sat there in that interrogation room, slowly building out a story that grew more tangled with every passing hour, a separate team of investigators was working a completely

different angle, quietly piecing together a much darker picture of who Sonia Exelby really was once you look past the surface of her everyday life. They spent hours on the phone with her family and friends back in England trying to understand exactly what kind of emotional place she’d been in over the past couple of years.

 And what they learned wasn’t easy to hear. Even a full year before any of this happened, messages on Sonia’s phone had already raised serious concern among the people who loved her most. Those conversations pointed to her connecting with strangers online. People who, according to what investigators later reviewed, had expressed a clear willingness to put her in serious danger.

 At one point in 2024, a planned in-person meeting tied to those conversations was actually stopped before it could happen. After someone close to Sonia discovered the alarming messages in time. Following that scare, Sonia got help. For a while, things genuinely seemed to be turning around. People around her noticed the difference.

 She seemed calmer, more present, more like the woman they’d always known her to be. Her family allowed themselves to believe she’d finally pulled away from those dangerous corners of the internet for good. that the worst chapter of her struggle was finally behind her. But underneath all of that visible progress, for nearly two full years, Sonia had also been maintaining a much smaller, much more private connection.

 One with a single user who went only by the name Darkwolf. Their conversations were dark from the start and only grew more disturbing with time, built around scenarios where Darkwolf would have complete control over her, with outcomes that escalated in severity the longer their relationship continued. When investigators finally peeled back that username and confirmed the identity behind it, the answer was a name they already knew well.

Dwayne Hall.  You know, I’ve been speaking with people who know her and know things about her and um we know that she was communicating with people over here. We also know that you were one of the people that were communicating with her.  What was her screen name?  What does that what does that matter?  I communicate with a lot of people.

 Okay. Do you communicate with a lot of people about suicidal ideiations? We we talk about we have a lot of I communicate I used to  used to  used to communicate with a lot of people that it was a porn site.  Mhm.  And there was a lot of fantasy role play that happened there. But if you tell me your screen then maybe I’ll have a better idea what you’re talking about.

 Which uh porn sites?  Motherless.  Okay.  Yeah.  So you communicated with her on motherless?  I don’t know. But if you saying that I communicated with her, there’s a good possibility that’s where it was. And if you tell me which one it was, then if you tell me the screen name, I’ll be able to confirm or deny.

 We have  You have us at the same time. You have witnesses that we were there at the same time  and devices that put you there at the same time.  Okay. We have processed that house  and when those results come back  because again forensically and you’ve already told us you were all over that house.

 We know that she was  we are going to put you guys at that house and so she came over here with the intention of carrying out these role playing scenarios. We know that she documented it. She she sent a she actually sent a like letter to herself while she was on the airplane talking about meeting somebody and what the outcome of that meeting was going to be.

 Once that connection came to light, everything about Dwayne’s story shifted again. And this time it shifted hard. Faced with the evidence, he finally admitted that he and Sonia had in fact been together at the Airbnb that weekend and that there had been a physical relationship between them, something he’d flatly denied just hours earlier.

He tried to frame the two years of messages between them as something closer to mentorship, insisting he’d mainly served as a kind of support system for a woman going through a genuinely hard time in her relationship and in her personal life more broadly. By the time Sonia actually landed in Florida, he claimed his own feelings had changed entirely.

He said his wife’s life-threatening medical crisis had forced him to take a hard look at his own choices and the direction of his life was heading, and that whatever darker impulses had once fueled those years of online conversations had supposedly faded away by the time she arrived. Through every single version of his story, though, no matter how many times the details shifted underneath him, Dwayne held under one unwavering claim, that Sonia was alive and well when he left that Airbnb.

The evidence investigators were assembling told an entirely different story. On Dwayne’s phone, forensic examiners eventually recovered a video. It would go on to become one of the most disturbing pieces of evidence in the entire investigation.  Is that what you want?  No, we want you to be honest with us.

 We want us to tell you, we want you to tell us the truth. We don’t want you to make anything up or just tell us what you think we want to hear.  She did get in the vehicle with somebody else.  There’s a certain point she did get in the vehicle of somebody else that happened after.  Okay.

 The fact that I didn’t want to have anything to do with the whole thing to begin with, it’s the whole reason I tried to sleep instead of bed.  Okay.  Okay. I did end up being in the same bed as her on the other side of the bed from her. Okay. And what happened?  Yeah. What do you think happened?  Well, I know what happened.

 Like I But I need you to tell  happened.  I can’t read mine.  The clip had been deleted within seconds of being recorded, but a full forensic extraction of the device, managed to bring it back from the data underneath. In it, Sonia is seated in a chair inside the rental property, still dressed in the same floral outfit she’d worn boarding her flight out of Heathrow days earlier.

 a small detail that ended up playing a major role in helping investigators lock down in the exact timeline of everything that happened after she landed in the country. She looks exhausted, visibly shaken. She rarely lifts her eyes toward the camera, and when she does speak, her voice comes out quiet and careful, like someone choosing every word with real hesitation, afraid of what might happen if she said the wrong thing.

 In the background, Dwayne’s voice can be heard, asking her question after question, pressing her to confirm that what was happening was something she wanted. her responses come across the way they do when someone no longer feels like they have a real choice in the matter at all. For the investigators who watched that footage, it became the clearest window they had into the fear and control Sonia had likely been living under during the final days of her life.

Dwayne later told detectives he deleted that clip almost immediately because Sonia wasn’t behaving the way he wanted while the camera was rolling. A comment that once it came out only deepened how disturbing the entire case had already become for everyone involved.  I just don’t believe you.  Okay, that’s fine.

 I think that  I already told the wife that nobody had ever believed that this happened.  I already know. I already knew which is why until the direct questions were asked, I didn’t even bother bringing it.  Why would I?  Why would I? I’m I’m gonna get  because you know because if you know what the end result is of this whole thing just be upfront with the information that you know you and indicated that you didn’t know her at all that you had never even met with her when this first came up and now you’re

talking about having sex with her recording things and then deleting them. And it I guess from my perspective if you can try to understand it it doesn’t look great.  I already know it doesn’t look great. I leveled at you about what happened.  Right. So, same thing goes for body, right?  Did you find her?  What I’m saying is  did you find her? I mean, but at the same time, I said I don’t really know what  I think when you give that story about you leaving Sunday and a car following you and you ducking in the woods for a

set amount of time and a car driving by.  Mhm. I think that’s you accounting for your your phone that you already knew at that point that we had we had your your locations and such.  And I think that you did something with her there at that spot. Eventually the search teams working through the wooded areas near location investigators atmosphere during the search exact pulled over against digital records the same unexplained stop that had already caught their attention well before they understood what geoloc’s

remains they recovered a torn shovel label it matched piece for piece the same shovel Dwayne had purchased at a local Walmart just days earlier and later kept stored in his own garage. When that shovel underwent forensic testing, biological material was discovered on it, and DNA analysis confirmed a match to Sonia Exelby.

 As if that weren’t enough, investigators also uncovered another stop Dwayne had made on his drive home that night, one he had conveniently left out during nearly 6 hours of questioning. Records placed him at a nearby Lowe’s, where he purchased a large plastic tarp. Combined with everything else investigators had already gathered, it painted the picture of a man who had planned for a lot more than he was ever willing to admit out loud.

 In the end, Dwayne never gave investigators a direct explicit admission about what actually happened to Sonia during those final hours. He  Hey, Dwayne.  Hey.  Did you need us for something?  Yes.  You got a minute. I’d like to talk to you more than than you. I did.  Okay.  What would what would you like to talk about?  I want to recant basically my entire statement.

 You want to recant your entire statement?  Yes.  Okay. Well, before we talked about  carefully sidestep that exact wording no matter how the conversation shifted or how many times his account changed shape. But by that point in the investigation, detectives didn’t need a confession to move forward.

 The digital trail, the physical evidence pulled from his garage and his vehicle, and the timeline reconstructed piece by piece, all spoke clearly enough on their own. One more thread in this case stood out above almost everything else. Messages between Dwayne and a longtime friend named Rick living out in Ohio.

 Just days after Sonia’s death, Dwayne had referenced something he called a special package supposedly shipped out from Florida along with instructions for Rick to hold on to it for several hours to open it. Inside investigators found a bracelet along with a knife featuring a 7 in blade immediately drew special attention from detectives not only because of its appearance but also the words itself.

 It had been  further testing confirmed that Sonia’s DNA was present on that item as well. When investigators eventually brought Rick in for questioning, he told them that Dwayne had described what happened to Sonia using much softer language, framing it in his own words as something closer to having helped her through a difficult moment.

 But Rick made it clear to detectives that he never had a single doubt about what those words actually meant. In his own account, he said he believed plainly and without hesitation that Dwayne was responsible for her death. Dwayne Hall has pleaded not guilty to charges of firstdegree murder and kidnapping. He remains in custody without bond and unless a plea agreement is reached beforehand, he’s expected to stand trial sometime in 2027.

The case has continued to draw significant attention from authorities on both sides of the Atlantic, given both its severity and its international scope. Prosecutors alleged that Dwayne used Sonia to act out the very same disturbing fantasies he’d spent two years building with her in private, fully aware the entire time of just how vulnerable she truly was, and that he deliberately took advantage of that vulnerability for his own purposes.

According to reports, British authorities held back key evidence from prosecutors in Florida until they received assurances that the death penalty would not be pursued in the case. If Dwayne Hall is ultimately convicted, he faces a sentence of the life in prison. Sonia Exobe is remembered by everyone who knew her as someone full of warmth, creativity, and quiet talent.

 A musician whose loss left behind a void that hasn’t gone away for the people who loved her. In December of 2025, her longtime partner Stevie ran the Portsouth Marathon in her memory, turning the race into a fundraiser for Cat’s Protection, an organization that had always meant a great deal to Sonia personally.

 For Stevie, it wasn’t just a physical challenge to push through. It was a tribute, plain and simple, to the woman he loved and never once stopped grieving.  I finally surrender. This is the story of Sonia Exovie, a true crime documentary case that shocked people not just because of what ultimately happened to her, but because of how long the warning signs have been sitting in plain sight, hidden inside corners of the internet most people never think to look.

 It stands as a sobering reminder of just how dangerous a stranger online can become and how easily trust can be misplaced when someone is at their most vulnerable.