This Case Will Send Shivers Down Your Spine. The Shocking Story of Eve Carson 

This Case Will Send Shivers Down Your Spine. The Shocking Story of Eve Carson 

Hey y’all, my name’s Eve Carson and I’m your student body president. It’s great to be in Chapel Hill. If you’re a returning student, can’t wait to see you again. If you’re a new student, welcome to the Carolina family. >> [music] >> She was 22 years old and by every measure, Eve Marie Carson was just getting started.

Raised in Athens, Georgia by her father Bob and mother Teresa alongside her younger brother Andrew, she was the kind of person people called fearless, restless, curious, never content to sit still. Friends would later say there wasn’t a room she walked into that didn’t feel a little brighter for her being in it.

While other students spent their summers relaxing, Eve was on the ground in Ecuador, Egypt and Ghana doing work that actually meant something to her. The kind of experience most people talk about wanting to have someday and never quite get around to. She wasn’t the type to watch the world from the sidelines.

She wanted to be in it, hands moving, making something better. That same drive pulled her 350 miles from home to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Pre-med, double majoring in political science and biology, inducted into the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society and one of a handful to land UNC’s most coveted academic honor, the Morehead Scholarship.

She still wasn’t done. Eve ran for student body president and won, telling everyone who’d listen that 2008 was going to be her year. A year of growth, of bringing people together, of proving that one person paying attention could actually change a place. >> I, Eve Carson, >> do affirm >> do affirm >> that I will serve, protect and defend >> This year will be a year of growth and inclusion and that this year will ultimately be about gracefully and creatively engaging with the issues which affect all of us. Look at all

these incredible students who will who will be barking upon a year of service to the university and to the student body. What an amazing year this is going to be. Thank you for having me. >> I really want to encourage all of you guys to take [music] advantage of the incredible opportunities that our campus offers.

 From campus-wide to Millennium Village Project to Student Television to The Daily Tar Heel to Student Government, there are so many incredible ways that you can get involved. I’ve really found that my experience has been enriched by the ways that we give back to our communities and to our campus. If I can help you or if I can help you figure out how you want to get involved on campus, please come by and and let’s talk.

>> If you’re tuning in to this true crime documentary tonight, go ahead and drop a comment letting us know where you’re watching from and hit subscribe. There’s a lot more of these stories coming. By every measure that mattered, Eve Carson was winning at life. And she had absolutely no idea that 2008, the year she’d promised herself would be about growth, would also be her last.

Chapel Hill had no idea, either. Nobody did. March 5th, 2008, 1:30 in the morning at 202 Friendly Lane, Chapel Hill. Eve’s roommates were headed out for the night and asked her to come along, but she passed. Too much on her plate and a quiet house was exactly what she needed to get through it. So, while they were out, Eve stayed in working through the hours alone on her laptop.

The kind of late-night grind familiar to any student trying to stay on top of everything at once. At 4:30 a.m., her roommate Justin got home. The front door was open. Every light in the house was on and Eve was nowhere to be found. For a moment, he probably told himself there was a simple explanation. It wasn’t completely out of character.

She’d sometimes head to her office on campus to keep working and sure enough, her car and her laptop were gone, too. She’d mentioned earlier that day she might need to print something off. Maybe that’s where she’d gone. But it was the middle of the night now and something about it didn’t sit right. Justin called her cell.

It rang. No answer. What he didn’t know yet was that just over 30 minutes later 911 dispatchers in Chapel Hill were about to get a call that would change everything. >> Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 5 hours, 8 minutes and 14 seconds a.m. >> Orange County 911 >> Yes, sir. >> screaming and three shots sounded like a young woman.

>> Okay, repeat the address to make sure that I have it correct. And you said you heard gun shots? >> three shots >> How long ago did this happen? >> three five seconds >> And you said you heard a female scream? >> three seconds, yeah >> Orange County 911, this is Rob. >> Hi, um I think I just heard ten shots outside.

>> Okay, how many shots did you hear? >> four >> You heard four? >> I think four, yeah. >> Okay. All right, so we’ve notified the Chapel Hill Police Department and you can have one come by and speak to you if you’d like. >> Oh, um well, I wasn’t I’m not worried about myself. I was, you know, worried about whoever would be involved.

>> Yes, ma’am. All right, we’ve got another call on the dispatch radio. >> Oh, you do? >> Yes, ma’am. Okay. >> Great. Thanks. >> Thank you. >> Bye. >> A woman had been found in the middle of the road less than a mile from Friendly Lane. She hadn’t survived. And she had no ID on her. Nothing to say who she was or how she’d ended up there alone on a street she likely walked every day.

>> Good evening and thank you for joining us. A murder victim without an identity. Tonight Chapel Hill Police are searching for clues. >> Police found the woman’s body at the intersection of Hillcrest Road and Hillcrest Circle around 5:00 this morning. She’d been shot several times. >> The woman’s body was discovered early Wednesday morning about a half mile from UNC’s campus.

 Police say she’d been shot multiple times in the head. Her body was in the middle of this intersection in this usually quiet Chapel Hill neighborhood. >> At this point, the woman’s identity remains a mystery and in addition, officers don’t have a motive or suspect. >> of the murder spread across the campus of UNC Chapel Hill through the university’s alert system, it alarmed some students like Erica Littman.

 She initially thought a gunman was on the loose on campus. >> I was actually surprised that they sent it out over the alert because it made it seem like it was an immediate threat to campus. >> We received a couple of phone calls from students that thought that that uh description fits somebody they knew, but uh we’ve exhausted all those leads that we have at this point and uh have not uh been heard and it’s still not been revealed.

>> And investigators have sent the victim’s body to the medical examiner’s office here in Chapel Hill hoping that that might help in some way with her identification. Meanwhile, Pam, they’re asking anyone with any information in this case to give them a call. >> Mike Charbonneau live in Chapel Hill this evening.

>> By 2:00 a.m., Eve’s roommate, Anna, couldn’t wait any longer. Something felt wrong and she wasn’t going to sit at home not knowing. She drove to the Chapel Hill Police Department and told them what she knew. Eve hadn’t come home and now she was missing. No one had seen her car, either. A 2005 Toyota Highlander, nowhere to be found.

>> The woman is said to be a white female, blonde hair, around college age, between 18 to 25 years old. She wasn’t carrying any ID. >> Anna gave officers a description and almost as soon as she finished, she was asked to do something no one should ever have to do. Identify the woman found in the road as her friend.

It was Eve. She’d been found in middle of an intersection, just 4 minutes from her own front door. Close enough that on any other night, she could have walked it. The injuries she’d suffered were fatal, more than one. In an instant, Anna went from waiting up for a friend to confirming the one thing nobody wants to confirm.

Investigators traced Eve’s cell phone to a wooded area, and not far from there, they found her SUV, abandoned about a mile from where she’d ultimately be killed. Sitting there as if she’d simply stepped out and never come back. Inside the car, on a bank receipt, investigators found something small but significant. A partial shoe print.

 The kind of detail that looks like nothing until it becomes everything. >> We talked with a neighbor who lives right across the street from where Carson’s SUV was found earlier today. Uh he said he’d seen that vehicle parked there the last couple of days. Police are telling us tonight though, they believe that someone drove the vehicle to that location at North and Hillsborough and left it.

 Tonight, Carson’s SUV is the focus of this murder investigation. >> This intersection of North and Hillsborough in Chapel Hill provided a key lead for detectives working the investigation into the murder of Eve Carson. This is where investigators found her blue 2005 Highlander that’s now being processed for evidence.

>> We would be particularly interested in talking with anyone who may have seen this vehicle between the hours of 1:30 a.m. yesterday and midday today. At this point, we’re still very early into the investigation. We feel very hopeful that in finding the car and finding it in good shape is going to give us some more leads that we can pursue tomorrow.

>> Chief Kern says Carson was an extremely busy woman. It wasn’t uncommon for her to head to her on-campus office in the middle of the night. Police say Carson was shot multiple times in the head. They believe the crime happened in the vicinity of where her body was found, but tonight police have no suspect or motive.

 We should know a little bit more what crime scene technicians found inside that SUV tomorrow. Chapel Hill police have scheduled another briefing at 12:30 p.m. [music] >> Then came the timeline, and it was chilling in how tight it was. The last activity on Eve’s laptop was logged at 3:37 a.m. By 3:55, two transactions had already gone through on her bank account at a Bank of America ATM at University Mall in Chapel Hill.

 That narrow window combined with her car sitting abandoned told investigators a story. Eve had likely been walking back to her SUV, maybe to grab something, maybe to head to campus and work late when she was forced inside her own vehicle on a street she thought she knew. The first withdrawal came to about $700, the maximum her account allowed in a single day.

At 4:44 a.m., there was another attempt, $200 this time, from a Bank of America ATM at Northgate Mall in Durham. 20 minutes after that, Eve was found dead. Whoever did this wasn’t finished, either. The next day at 12:39 in the afternoon, her card was used twice more at the Morehead Mini Mart in Durham. Two days after that, on March 7th at 1:00 in the morning, two more attempts hit her checking and savings accounts at the Carolina Food Mart, also in Durham.

Those last ones failed. By then, the bank had already frozen her cards, cutting off whatever they were still trying to take. Every one of those swipes, though, was another timestamp, another camera, another piece investigators could use. Whatever this was, whoever did it wasn’t exactly hiding. They were leaving a trail practically everywhere they went, almost daring investigators to catch up.

UNC’s Board of Trustees, a group Eve herself had sat on, put up a $25,000 reward for anyone with information. While investigators worked their way through ATM footage, a break came from an unexpected place. A fellow UNC student named Harper came forward with something crucial. She told detectives that at 3:30 that morning, just minutes before Eve was taken, she’d seen two people in dark clothing standing near a dumpster right outside Eve’s house.

Something about it spooked her enough that she backed her car out and got out of there without a second look. 10 minutes later, Eve was gone. An estimated 10,000 people turned out for Eve’s memorial service at the Dean E. Smith Center. It’s hard to overstate what her death did to that campus. Students were shaken, uneasy, and there was a weight hanging over Chapel Hill that nobody could shake off.

The sense that if it could happen to her, it could happen to anyone. While all that grief played out, investigators were quietly building their case. They’d pulled two images of whoever had been using Eve’s card, one from inside a convenience store, another from a bank ATM. Both were grainy, low resolution, the kind of footage that hides more than it shows.

A photography expert, William Mathis, took the original black and white ATM image and enhanced the color, pulling detail out of the shadows frame by frame. And when he did, he noticed something in the background, a dark shape that didn’t belong to the person standing at the machine. It looked like someone else was there, too, presumably sitting with Eve in the back seat, hidden until that moment.

 That changed the whole picture. Investigators weren’t chasing one suspect anymore. They were chasing two. The one they had the clearest image of, the one in the driver’s seat, was described as a young African-American male, late teens to early 20s, hood pulled up, wearing a cap that looked like it had a Houston Astros logo on the front.

Police put the images out to the media, and it worked. >> Is there a second person in the back of this SUV? That’s the question police in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, want to answer. >> This is our strongest lead right now, and we are hopeful that we’ll be able to get this guy identified. I don’t want to release what time they were used at this this point.

 These are questions that we would ask in an interrogation. >> Investigators also say the car he was driving looks very similar to Carson’s blue Toyota Highlander. Police are calling the man in the photos a suspect. The ball cap he’s wearing appears to have a vintage Houston Astros logo. Investigators hope the public can help them answer the question who he is so that he can answer their questions about Eve Carson.

>> Crimestoppers got more than 200 calls in just a few days. Before long, investigators had two names. Demario Atwater and Lawrence Lovette Jr. Both of them already familiar to law enforcement. 21-year-old Demario Atwater had a record. Robbery, assault, trespassing, marijuana possession with intent to sell. Just 2 weeks before Eve was killed, he’d been arrested again.

This time for illegally possessing a firearm while on probation. He’d posted a $10,000 bond and was due back in court. But a scheduling error pushed that hearing back, leaving him free on the streets when Eve was killed. Lawrence Lovette Jr. had a juvenile record, too. Breaking and entering, larceny. He was only 17, also on probation when Eve was killed.

And it would come out that he’d also be charged in the killing of another student. Duke graduate student Abhijit Mahato, shot dead back in January. A state review later found serious failures in how Lovette had been supervised, including officers who never even ran his criminal record. He was out on the streets despite already facing a charge that serious, free to do it again.

As word got out, people started coming forward, including someone who knew exactly what happened. A friend of Lovette’s, Jason McNeal, told investigators that Lovette had called him on March 4th asking for a ride to Chapel Hill for both himself and Atwater. Jason was busy that night. Then, on March 12th, Lovette called again.

This time asking for a pickup, saying he needed to get out of the area because Atwater was going to tell. That’s when Jason gave investigators the full picture. He said Lovette and Atwater had been parked on Friendly Lane in Lovette’s mother’s car, watching, waiting for the right moment. When Eve walked to her SUV, they made their move.

Lovette got behind the wheel. Atwater climbed into the back with Eve, threatening her while they drove her from ATM to ATM. And through all of it, Eve never lost herself. She stayed calm. She told them clearly that they didn’t need to do this. They could take whatever they wanted and just let her go safely. She didn’t panic.

 She tried to reason with them, the way you’d hope anyone could in a moment like that, but so few actually can. At one point, she even asked if they would pray with her. In her final moments, by every account, she showed nothing but grace and kindness to two men who were about to take everything from her. It didn’t matter. Lovette later said the real reason was simple.

 She’d seen both their faces, so she had to go. All that composure, all that courage, and it came down to that. Investigators were now certain both men were responsible for Eve’s death. There was more evidence stacking up, too. Lovette’s phone had connected to a cell tower less than half a mile from Eve’s home around the time she disappeared.

And inside Eve’s SUV, investigators found Lovette’s DNA. Evidence that would be almost impossible to argue away. On March 12th, after weeks of tips, surveillance photos, and a rapidly closing net, police arrested Demario Atwater and charged him in Eve’s death. Lovette, the 17-year-old they now believed had been behind the wheel, was tracked down a day later and charged as well.

Both men were indicted on more charges beyond murder. First-degree kidnapping, first-degree robbery with a dangerous weapon, felony larceny, possession of a firearm by a felon, and possession of stolen goods. Atwater faced an additional charge for possessing prohibited weapons, plus a set of federal charges.

 Carjacking resulting in death, using a firearm during that carjacking, being a felon in possession of a firearm, and possessing an unregistered shotgun. Prosecutors made their intentions clear. They were going after the maximum sentence allowed by law against Atwater. For Lovett, that wasn’t on the table. He was only 17. As mentioned, Lovett wasn’t only facing charges for Eve’s murder.

He’d also been charged in the killing of a Duke University graduate student, Abhijit Mahato, found dead by friends in his Durham apartment in an earlier, separate incident that had left that community searching for answers of its own. >> Good evening, everyone. I’m Larry Stogner.

 The jury of the Lovett trial took a break today while attorneys held up evidence hearing. The state’s key witness says Lawrence Lovett admitted he is a killer. >> While Lawrence Lovett maintains his innocence in the shooting death of Duke grad student Abhijit Mahato, the state’s key witness says otherwise. >> It was said that he had shot the man, but he put a pillow to the gun.

>> Shenita Lovett was a key player in the Eve Carson case, the former girlfriend of Lovett’s co-defendant Demario Atwater, says her relationship made her privy to Lovett’s conversations. Here, she describes driving to work after the Mahato murder with Lovett in the car. >> When we were passing by um when we were going down Edison, the apartment complex is on the left-hand side.

And so, we looked in Well, he looked in that direction, and we all basically kind of looked, and he said that there was like no no activity as far as a crime scene. >> The jury would hear none of this testimony as both sides await a decision from the judge. Prosecutors are hoping to portray Lovett as a killer on a crime spree before and after the murder, but the defense is fighting to keep Shanita Love’s testimony out saying her story changed under police pressure.

>> But when that case went to trial, Lovett was acquitted. For Mahato’s family, there’s been no resolution. His murder remains unsolved to this day. It was almost time for Eve’s case to go to trial. Two years of waiting, of hearings, for a family that had already lost so much. But before it ever got there, in May 2010, Demario Atwater pleaded guilty.

First-degree murder, robbery with a dangerous weapon, first-degree kidnapping, and possession of a firearm by a felon. That plea took the death penalty off the table. Instead, Atwater was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Plus a concurrent 23 to 29 years for the robbery, kidnapping, and firearms charges.

He apologized in court. His lawyer said that if a death sentence could have brought Eve Carson back, Atwater would have accepted it without a second thought. A year and a half later, it was Lovett’s turn to stand trial. >> The first question is, has the jury reached a unanimous verdict as to each charge? >> Yes.

State of North Carolina versus Lawrence Alvin Lovett. We, the jury, announce to find the defendant Alvin Lawrence Lovett to be guilty of first-degree murder on the basis of malice, premeditation, and deliberation. >> In December 2011, a jury found Lawrence Lovett Jr. guilty on every major count. First-degree murder, first-degree kidnapping, first-degree armed robbery, felony larceny, and possession of stolen goods.

>> It does not involve the death penalty. It is a class A felony and the defendant is required to uh serve his life in prison without the possibility of parole. >> He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole plus another 14 to 19 years on the remaining charges. The judge didn’t mince words, saying he saw no chance that the now 22-year-old Lovette could ever be rehabilitated.

When Lovette spoke, this is what he said. You know, people make mistakes. Nobody’s perfect. I’m not the monster that you made me out to be. I know that this has been a traumatic deal for everybody involved. For that, I send my condolences to everybody who’s been affected by it. If it means anything to anybody, it means something to me.

He did try to appeal, at one point even winning a new sentencing hearing because of his age at the time of the crime, with the courts required to weigh who he was as a 17-year-old against what he’d done. But when it was all said and done, the outcome never changed. Life without parole, again. Today, at UNC Chapel Hill, Eve’s memory is still very much alive.

She was a daughter, a sister, a friend, a student, and by every account, a natural-born leader. The university still marks her birthday every year, remembering her as someone who genuinely believed she could make a difference, and who spent every day trying to prove it. The Eve Carson Scholarship has been running for almost 20 years now, helping students fund summer experiences and get through their senior year.

UNC also built the Eve Marie Carson Garden on campus, a quiet space meant for reflection, for reconnecting, for peace, tucked into the same campus she once crossed every day, laptop bag on her shoulder, running late for something that mattered to her. Eve Carson believed she could make the world a little better, and everything she did pointed toward that.

 Helping, leading, donating, raising awareness, volunteering. At just 22, she’d already left a mark that’s still felt on that campus today. Admired by generations of students who’ve walked the same path she did, most of whom never got to meet her, but all of whom know exactly who she was. That’s the kind of true crime story this is.

Not just about how someone died, but about how much they’d already given before that happened. If you want to support what we do here, and help us keep bringing you stories like Eve’s, stories worth remembering, worth telling right, do us a favor. Like this video, drop a comment, share it with someone who’d appreciate it, and subscribe for more.