Town note
Conway is one of the oldest towns in South Carolina.
about 0:06:12The story
Crystal Faye Todd was seventeen and lived with her mother, Bonnie Faye Todd, in a grey trailer home on the edge of Conway, South Carolina. On Saturday 16 November 1991 she had an early dinner with her mother's family in Marion, then went out with her best friend, Carla Allen, first to a party at a pond house and later to the go cart track. At the party a boy she had been involved with on and off, Sammy Bird, ignored her because he was there with another girl. Carla asked what she would do next. Crystal said she might get something to eat and would find someone to talk to. She had until 12.30 before her curfew. It was the last time she was seen alive.
He had dated Crystal for about a month in 1988 and still came to the family's house. That night he was at the go cart track with his girlfriend, Tammy, a fourteen-year-old who lived next door to the track. He was cold and wanted to leave, but Tammy wanted to stay for the last races. He left at about 11.15, well before his 12.30 curfew.
At 3.30 on the morning of Sunday 17 November, Bonnie Faye Todd called 911 in a panic. She said Crystal had gone to a party and had not come home. The dispatcher, Mike Hill, recognised the family and told her to call back when Crystal turned up so that a patrolman could frighten her. No report was ta. Bonnie Faye kept calling friends and at about eight in the morning called 911 again. An officer, Wade Petty, was sent to the house. While he was there he heard that a body had been found.
At about nine that morning two brothers, Lloyd and Willis Allen, had gone deer hunting. They turned down a dirt lane off Collins Jollie Road, saw blood and drag marks and found a partly clothed body in a five-foot ditch. Willis was sick; the brothers drove to their sister's trailer and called 911 at 9.10. An officer was ta to the scene before ten. The body was Crystal's. Her throat had been cut three times, almost to decapitation, and the autopsy recorded thirty-five cuts and stab wounds, seven bruises and three abrasions, six stab wounds to the chest, three stab wounds through the skull into the brain and a sexual assault. She had been conscious for several minutes while she bled to death. There was semen and bruising consistent with a violent sexual attack. Investigators photographed the body from every angle, made plaster casts and bagged soil from the lane.
He lit two cigarettes and handed one to Bonnie Faye. Later that day he came back to help and told her that Crystal was probably asleep at a friend's house. At the funeral, which more than 1,500 people attended, he was a pallbearer and was sick in the bushes. Bonnie Faye leaned on him and told him that if he had been with Crystal she would still be alive. Rumours of a satanic cult spread among Crystal's friends, and several girls received notes made from newspaper cuttings saying 'you will be next'.
He said he had never had sex with Crystal and described her reputation as loose. He gave a blood sample only after asking about DNA, and told Bonnie Faye and her niece that the police would rig his blood. An FBI profile by David Caldwell described a white man aged twenty to twenty-five, angry, impulsive, with a temper and a knife, who was local and probably an acquaintance of the victim.
He was the fiftieth person asked to give blood. He said he had met Crystal at the Ninth Avenue stoplight on Elm Street, followed her to the middle school where she left her car, and driven with her to a country spot. They had consensual sex, he said, and she became angry when he did not pull out and threatened to claim that he had raped her, so he stabbed her with a knife kept between the car seats. He dragged her to the ditch, threw the knife away and drove home. His mother was in the kitchen when he got in.
Bonnie Faye Todd said that she did not know how the court could have mercy on him. She confronted him on the Sally Jesse Raphael show, saying that she wanted him to come home in a box.