What should have been an easy crime to solve is now a cold case.
On the 18th of April 2016, while getting ready to teach a fitness class at a local church, Terri “Missy” Bevers was murdered by an unknown assailant. Six years on, her case is still unsolved.
Missy Bevers via courtjunkie.com
Missy was a 45-year-old mother of three from Red Oak, Texas. She took fitness very seriously and taught her own classes. She was an active member of the community and had no known enemies.
Just after 4 am, Missy arrived at Midlothian’s Creekside Church of Christ to prepare for her early morning fitness class. She taught a gladiator boot camp and was prepping the room for a famously intensive session.
Missy was found by her students at 5 am, who quickly called emergency services. She had a head injury and multiple puncture wounds to her chest. She was unresponsive when she was discovered. Missy died shortly after the paramedics arrived, and the investigation into her murder began immediately.
Chilling video footage from the church showed a person carrying a hammer while opening and closing various rooms around the building. At one point, they broke open a door with the hammer. The person’s clothing included a helmet, gloves and shin guards. They also wore a vest emblazoned with ‘police’.
The suspect in the church via Midlothian Texas Police Department
The footage of the person in the riot gear was analysed, but the gender of the assailant was inconclusive. The killer was between 5’2” and 5’8”, their feet predominately pointed outward, and they walked with a limp.
Glass from broken windows scattered the floor of the building, guiding police on a trail that helped track the person's movements in the riot gear. They also found marks on the church's backdoor, indicating how the perpetrator accessed the building, initially leading police to believe that the incident may have been a robbery that had gone wrong.
However, after searching the property, it was evident that nothing was missing from the church nor from Missy, who was still wearing her wedding ring.
The police were concerned, there hadn’t been a homicide in the area in years, and they weren’t used to dealing with a murder investigation. The video footage was released to the public in the hope of finding the person featured in the video, and the police told viewers to note the specific gait with which the person walked. Within hours of its release, the police department was inundated with tips from the public, and the FBI and US marshal’s office stepped in to help field calls.
The police subpoenaed Missy’s phone and recovered messages detailing flirtatious and intimate conversations on LinkedIn. There were also strange and creepy messages from a man Missy had shown a friend a few days before her death. Police believed that she had been in contact with her killer, and the names of the people on LinkedIn were never released.
Missy posted a lot on social media about her upcoming boot camps, and the night before she was killed, she said that come rain or shine, the class would still go ahead. Unfortunately, her advertising made her movements easily trackable.
Missy’s bootcamp post via Facebook.com
After his alibi was verified, Brandon Bevers was questioned by investigators, wanting to know who would harm his wife. He told investigators he couldn’t think of anyone who would like to hurt Missy. Judging by the fact that Missy’s licensed gun was left in her car in the church carpark, Missy didn’t think there was anyone who wanted to harm her either.
Brandon told the police that his marriage to Missy was great and that they were happy. Still, investigators found out that the marriage was in disrepair and fraught with financial issues and infidelity.
On the 22nd of April, Brandon’s father, Randy, went to a dry cleaners in town with a woman’s blood-stained shirt, asking for it to be cleaned. He told the employee that the blood was from breaking up a dog fight, but Missy’s murder story had been all over the news, so the employee called the police. A warrant was issued for the shirt, and when analysed, it looked like someone had already tried to clean the blood off the shirt beforehand.
Police also noticed that Randy had a similar physique to the person in the security footage from the church, and he walked with a limp. However, Randy was in California when Missy was murdered, and his alibi cleared him as a suspect. Brandon’s sister, Kristi, corroborated her father’s story that the dog fight happened, and the report eventually came back as positive for canine blood, but the damage was done by then. The community chastised randy, and despite all of the statements being made public, he was, in their eyes, guilty.
A few weeks later, police found security footage from a nearby sporting goods store and discovered a Nissan Altima driving around a nearby carpark a few hours before the murder. This video was also released to the public, but the car owner never came forward, and no one knew who the car belonged to.
The surveillance footage of the Nissan Altima via SWFA
There was another vehicle that the police didn’t enlist the help of the public in finding. It was a dark SUV seen leaving the church carpark on the same morning, around 4.30 am.
Some months later, in the fall of 2019, the police realised that a tip had been phoned in multiple times during the investigation. The new lead was regarding former Lancaster police officer Bobby Wayne Henry. He was also a tactical officer who admitted to police that he still owned his riot gear but didn’t fit him anymore.
Henry was a licensed security guard who worked Missy’s funeral and attended mass at Creekside Church of Christ. Henry was suspended from the police due to an aggravated sexual assault in 1996. He owned a similar car to the second vehicle police were looking for information on, and he also walked with a limp.
Police sought the advice of a forensic podiatrist to compare the walk of Henry and the masked assailant in the video footage. But the findings were inconclusive.
However, the main issue with Henry being a suspect in Missy’s murder was that he was 6’1” tall. Far too large to be the person in the security footage. However, the second search warrant issued by the police turned up multiple devices that contained child pornography.
In June 2017, Henry was arrested for the pornography charges and took part in an interview from jail with Dallas’ WFAA News. He denied knowing Missy or even her name, and eventually, his alibi for the night of Missy’s murder was corroborated.
He was released without charge after 70 days in jail. To date, he hasn’t been charged for the child pornography in his possession. He was also ruled out as a person of interest in Missy’s homicide.
Despite help from the FBI and seemingly strong suspects, the case reached a dead end. Unease quickly rippled through the city of Midlothian with Missy’s killer still free to wander the streets. Internet sleuths began to comb the internet for clues to try and help find Missy’s murderer, but some of them went too far in their search.
More recently, Missy’s daughter, Hannah, spoke to Inside Edition and recalled the struggle she and her family had been through since her mother’s death;
“I’ve had people on Facebook message me and say … ‘Your dad did this, your dad killed your mom’. My dad loved my mom and I know that 100 percent.”
Missy’s killer was between 5’2” and 5’8”, their feet predominately point outward, and they walked with a limp. This person could be a man or a woman. Police are still looking for the owner of the Nissan Altima.
Oak Farms Dairy is still offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the capture of Missy’s killer. Anyone with information can share tips with police by texting MIDL and a tip to 847411 or calling Ellis County Crime Stoppers at 972–937–7297.