The call came into Sergeant Green’s office, and when he picked up the line, the caller said three words and nothing more: follow the money. Then the line went dead. Green had been investigating the murder of Courtney Coco for a year and a half with almost nothing to show for it. A caller willing to point him in a new direction was strange enough.

But when he had the call traced, the number came back to the home of Courtney’s grandfather. That made him dig deeper, and what he found changed the shape of the case entirely. Courtney Coco was born on March 30, 1985, in Alexandria, Louisiana. She was the youngest of three girls, the family’s baby, and she soaked up more than her share of attention and love.

She was especially close to her father. When she was eight years old, he died suddenly, and the loss stayed with her. She helped with the funeral arrangements and chose his burial plot herself. Afterward, she told her family she wanted to be buried beside him one day.

As a child and teenager, Courtney was relentlessly active. She played baseball and softball, cheered, and did gymnastics. Before she even finished high school, she was taking college classes in a nearby town. She developed an interest in forensic science and began seriously considering a career in it.

She loved writing down the details of various crimes and solving them step by step, as if she were running a real investigation. After high school, her older sister helped her get a job as a receptionist at a local dental clinic. Around the same time, wanting more independence, she rented a small house and moved out of her mother’s place. Still, she stayed close to her mother and visited whenever she could.

On the first Friday of October 2004, Courtney stopped by her mother’s house to see her and her stepfather before the weekend. Her parents were getting ready to go camping, and her mother asked Courtney to feed the dogs while they were away. She also asked her to use up the milk and bread in the fridge so they wouldn’t spoil. When Courtney’s mother returned home on Sunday evening, she noticed something odd right away.

The dog bowls were empty, and the animals were acting as if they hadn’t been fed in a long time. The milk and bread were still in the fridge. The house looked as though Courtney had never come by at all. But even then, her mother didn’t panic.

Courtney was nineteen, and her mother assumed she had gotten busy with friends or work. She figured Courtney must have fed the dogs on Saturday at least, or maybe earlier that morning. She pushed the thought aside and went about her day. The next day, Monday, Courtney’s mother got a phone call.

It was Sergeant Green from the local police department. He asked if Courtney was home, and her mother told him Courtney lived alone. Then she asked what was going on. Green explained that he had received a call from officers in a small town called Winnie, Texas, about 180 miles from Alexandria.

Police there had found the body of a young woman. She carried no ID and nothing to identify her except one thing: a ring on her finger. The ring was engraved with the name of Alexandria High School and a single name, Courtney Coco. Courtney’s mother refused to believe the body could be her daughter’s.

She told Green there was no reason Courtney would be that far from home, no connection to Texas at all. Then she remembered something else. A few weeks earlier, Courtney’s house had been broken into several times, and various things had been stolen. Her mother’s first thought was that Courtney’s class ring had been among the stolen items and had somehow ended up in Texas with a stranger.

In fact, those burglary reports were the very reason Green had Courtney’s mother’s phone number in the first place. When he ran Courtney’s name through the department’s system, those reports came up. But he also told her the Texas police still could not identify the young woman, because the ring was the only real evidence they had. According to the investigator, earlier that morning a farmer in Winnie had been driving his tractor near an abandoned building when he thought he saw a human body inside.

He reported it, and a local detective who lived nearby went to check the area. At first, the detective thought the farmer might have been mistaken or had seen something else. Murder was almost unheard of in their small town, and he found it hard to imagine the situation was as real as it seemed. But once he reached the abandoned building, he realized the farmer was right.

There was a body of a young woman inside, already in an advanced state of decomposition. Her clothes were missing from the lower half of her body, and her shirt was pulled up. She was lying with her feet pointed toward the entrance. To the detective, it looked as if someone had placed her that way deliberately, as though they wanted someone to find her in that position.

Because the local police had little experience with murder investigations, they immediately requested help from the Texas Rangers, who took over the case. There was no purse beside the victim, no ID, nothing that pointed the investigators to her identity. The only items crime scene technicians found were tire tracks near the abandoned building, a few footprints in the dust on the floor, and a beer bottle, though they had no way of knowing whether the bottle was connected to the crime at all. The investigators also noted that the body was heavily decomposed, yet they had serious doubts that it had been lying in that building for days.

People regularly drove past the place, and the police believed that if the body had been there the whole time, someone would have noticed it much sooner. The scene pointed in one direction: the young woman had likely been killed elsewhere, then driven to the abandoned building and positioned with her feet toward the entrance. The lead detective believed the killer might have tried to make the scene look like a sexual assault, which made him wonder whether the real motive was something entirely different. There was another strange detail: the body showed no clear signs of injury.

The medical examiner found no visible wounds, no marks of strangulation, no obvious trauma that explained her death. After Courtney’s mother got the call from the police, she began contacting relatives and acquaintances, trying to find out if anyone had seen Courtney over the weekend. To her horror, she realized no one had heard from Courtney since late Friday night. Then she remembered the empty dog bowls and the food still in the fridge, and her panic grew.

Still, she kept hoping it was all a terrible misunderstanding and her daughter was fine. The investigators in Texas asked a family member to come to the morgue and identify the body, but Courtney’s mother and sisters could not make the trip. Finally, Courtney’s uncle agreed to drive to Texas. Her mother told him Courtney had a butterfly tattoo on her back and had recently gotten braces.

He went to the morgue while the rest of the family gathered at Courtney’s mother’s house and waited for news. When the phone finally rang, Courtney’s mother was too afraid to answer, so one of her sisters picked up. After a short silence, she turned to the family and said they should start preparing for a funeral. The young woman found in Texas was Courtney.

The investigators were still waiting on the medical examiner’s reports, hoping they would explain the cause of death. In the meantime, they began tracing Courtney’s last movements. The biggest question was how she had ended up so far from home. They started at her house.

The first thing they noticed was that her car was missing. Then they saw that all the doors were locked and there were no signs of a break-in. In the living room, they found dominoes set up on the table, along with a beer carton and an ashtray. There was also a notebook with three names written in it: Courtney, Jackie, and Louis.

It looked as though Courtney had been sitting there playing with friends and had simply left everything as it was. Otherwise, the living room looked normal. But when the investigators entered the kitchen, they saw the trash can had been overturned, which could have been a sign of a struggle. Then they reached Courtney’s bedroom, and things became more alarming.

Her clothes were on the floor, including her jeans and her sneakers. Since none of these items had been found with her body, the investigators began to wonder whether Courtney had been killed in her own bedroom, then moved to her car and driven to Texas. Her blanket was missing from the bed, and the shower curtain was gone too. The investigators believed these items might have been used to wrap her body so it could be removed from the house without drawing attention.

They also found a small safe under the bed. It was open, but instead of money, it held only an empty cigarette carton. Because of that, the police began looking for a possible financial motive, and they also considered whether Courtney’s murder was connected to the earlier break-ins she had reported. But there was a clear problem with that theory.

Those earlier incidents involved someone breaking into the house, while this time it looked as though Courtney may have let the killer in herself. There were no signs of a break-in, and based on the scene, it seemed likely Courtney was in her bed when she was attacked. That meant the killer was already inside the house. For the investigators, that was a strong indication Courtney knew the person.

The investigators went to talk to Jackie and her boyfriend Louis, whose names were in the notebook on Courtney’s table. Jackie was Courtney’s closest friend, and she said they had spent Friday evening together. According to her, she and Courtney met around 7:00 p. m.

and went to the restaurant where Louis worked. After his shift ended, they all returned to Courtney’s house, where they played dominoes and talked. Jackie said Courtney seemed perfectly normal that night, nothing out of the ordinary. Then Jackie said Courtney drove her and Louis home around 2:30 a.

m. The next day, Courtney was supposed to pick up Louis to take him to work, but she never showed up. The investigators considered whether Jackie or Louis could be involved, but from the start, the theory was not very likely. Jackie had brought her children with her that night, and they were at Courtney’s house the whole time.

Moreover, the police found no evidence that Jackie or Louis had gone to Texas. The trip would have taken most of the day, and both of them appeared to have been in Alexandria all weekend. The next person the investigators looked into was a man named Floyd Williams, who had been dating Courtney shortly before her death. He was Jackie’s brother.

According to people close to Courtney, the relationship had been extremely tense. They were constantly breaking up and getting back together. But the investigators soon learned that was only part of the story. When they spoke to Courtney’s sister Lies, she told them Floyd was selling drugs.

She also said she had once seen bruises on Courtney’s arms and had tried to ask where they came from. Courtney avoided the question at first, but later told her sister that if anything ever happened to her, Floyd would be the one responsible. That was more than enough for the investigators to treat Floyd as a primary suspect. They brought him in for questioning, and as the interview went on, he seemed increasingly suspicious.

When asked where he was the night of the murder, Floyd could not give a clear answer. He said he had been somewhere in town, wandering from place to place, which already seemed strange. Then he began insisting that he and Courtney had broken up long ago and that he had no reason to kill her. At the same time, the investigators learned Floyd was now dating another woman, which led to an interesting detail.

When the police examined Courtney’s phone records, they saw that the last call made from her phone was to that woman’s number. The investigators began to wonder whether there was a love triangle, and whether the motive lay in that part of Courtney’s life. The fact that Floyd already had a criminal record related to drugs made him look even more suspicious. Still, Floyd denied any involvement in Courtney’s death, and without solid evidence, the investigators could not move forward.

They took his fingerprints and a DNA sample, then continued searching for other suspects. Shortly afterward, the police learned about another man named Fred, who had also dated Courtney shortly before her death. During questioning, Fred said the relationship was never serious and he had no reason to hurt her. He agreed to give the investigators a DNA sample and his fingerprints, and was released.

After some time, the investigators got a new lead. Courtney’s phone suddenly showed activity in Houston, about sixty miles from where her body had been found. The police traced the phone’s activity to an apartment building in one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. They could not yet determine which apartment the phone was in, but they got lucky.

When officers arrived at the building, they saw a teenager in the hallway, and as soon as he noticed them, he started running. The officers chased him down and found Courtney’s phone in his pocket. The teenager insisted he had nothing to do with the murder and said he had bought the phone from local criminals. He also mentioned he had been driving a dark green car, and the investigators immediately wondered whether it was Courtney’s missing vehicle.

The investigators put out an alert for the car, and a few days later someone called with information. A similar car had been spotted in the same area, and the police soon confirmed it was Courtney’s. It turned out that since the crime, her car had been abandoned on the streets of that neighborhood, where different people used it whenever they wanted, including for drug deals. The police tried to find out who had left the car there in the first place, but they never identified them.

Several people said they had seen two men driving it, but no one could identify them. The investigators believed those men might have been directly involved in Courtney’s murder and had deliberately abandoned her car in that neighborhood. If that was the plan, it was a clever way to destroy the value of anything the killer might have left inside the vehicle. Different people got into and out of the car, leaving behind fingerprints and DNA, and any evidence that existed the night of the murder was wiped out beneath all of it.

And if that was the goal, it worked almost completely. When crime scene technicians examined the car, they found a huge number of smudged fingerprints. Because so many people had been inside, they could not extract a clear DNA profile from the interior. But the trunk gave them something to work with.

The investigators found several dried stains that looked like blood, and they recovered DNA from the trunk lid. When experts compared that DNA with the samples collected from various suspects, they got a match. The profile belonged to Fred, Courtney’s former boyfriend. The investigators brought Fred in for questioning immediately, but he continued to deny any connection to Courtney’s death.

When they told him his DNA had been found on the trunk lid, he said there was a simple explanation. He had been in Courtney’s car many times, and at some point he had probably opened the trunk to put something inside, like groceries. The investigators were not willing to simply believe him, but they also did not have enough to prove he had killed Courtney. As for the blood in the trunk, the DNA test showed it belonged to Courtney.

At first, that seemed strange. As previously noted, there were no obvious wounds on her body, and the medical examiner had not yet been able to determine her exact cause of death. The investigators had been waiting for a more detailed medical report. Several weeks after Courtney’s body was found, the results finally answered some of the biggest questions in the case.

First, there were no signs of drugs or large amounts of alcohol in her system, ruling out an overdose. Second, despite the way her body was found, the experts found no evidence of sexual assault. This reinforced the investigators’ belief that the killer had deliberately staged the crime scene, trying to make the police think the case involved sexual assault and send the investigation in the wrong direction. As for the cause of death, the experts reached the only conclusion that seemed logical: Courtney had been suffocated.

But the method the killer used had not left the obvious kind of marks they usually expected. It might have been a pillow, or even a hand covering her mouth and nose. Because of the condition of her body, it was impossible to see any marks on her face. There was one question the experts could not explain at first: why was Courtney’s body so heavily decomposed?

She had been found only two days after her death, so they expected her body to be in much better condition. But once the investigators found her blood in the trunk of her car, the pieces began to come together. They believed Courtney’s body had been transported in the trunk and may have remained there for some time. Under the hot Texas sun, the temperature inside the car could rise above one hundred degrees, causing the body to decompose more rapidly.

But none of that brought them any closer to identifying who was responsible. For months, the investigation made little progress. A year and a half passed, and Courtney’s family grew increasingly frustrated, feeling the police were not doing enough to solve the case. They blamed Sergeant Green, who was leading the investigation, and accused him of being unprofessional and failing to solve it.

Eventually, the family began looking into the matter themselves. They tried to gather evidence, talk to witnesses, and find any information that might lead to the killer. From time to time, they presented what they considered promising leads, and the police would check them out. But every lead ended in a dead end.

Then one day, the phone rang in Sergeant Green’s office. The caller said three words: follow the money. Then the line went dead. Green found the call so strange that he asked other officers to trace its source.

To his surprise, they discovered it had come from the home of Courtney’s grandfather. He began investigating that tip, and soon uncovered something no one had told him before. When Green looked into Courtney’s finances, he found large payments being sent in her name, and he was quickly able to trace their source. Shortly before Courtney’s father died, he had lost one of his legs in a workplace accident.

As part of the settlement, the employer had agreed to pay him a substantial sum over several decades. But after his death, Courtney became the sole beneficiary. The reason was simple: he was not the biological father of Courtney’s two older sisters. They were from their mother’s previous marriage.

Because Courtney was only eight years old when her father died, her mother controlled the payments for the next ten years. But once Courtney turned eighteen, the money began going directly into her own account. Sergeant Green learned she had been receiving $1,500 every month, plus a much larger payment every five years. Just a few weeks before her murder, Courtney had received $20,000 and had withdrawn that amount in cash.

It made Green think immediately of the empty safe under Courtney’s bed. Suddenly, the pieces began to fit together. Perhaps the real target was that money, because Courtney certainly would not have spent that entire sum in just a few weeks. But that raised two important questions.

Who in Courtney’s life knew she was receiving those payments? And why had no one in her family told the police about the money during a year and a half of investigation? Green began looking at the case from a different angle, and now the behavior of Courtney’s family started to worry him. He began to seriously wonder whether someone close to her was involved, and whether all those tips they had been giving the police were actually meant to steer the investigation away from the truth.

After digging deeper into the payments Courtney had been receiving, Sergeant Green learned that in the event of Courtney’s death, her mother would become the beneficiary. So he brought her in for an interview. From the very beginning, he made it clear he viewed her as a possible suspect. But Courtney’s mother insisted she had nothing to do with her daughter’s death.

According to her, she had no idea the payments would go to her if Courtney died. She said she had always assumed the next beneficiary would be someone from her late husband’s side of the family. Green also realized that if Courtney’s mother truly had a financial motive, she would not have needed to take money from Courtney’s safe, because the payments would have come to her legally. Beyond that, it was hard for him to believe a mother would kill her own daughter.

What he suspected more than anything was that she knew more than she was saying. But Courtney’s mother kept insisting she was telling the truth. So Green turned his attention to Courtney’s sister Lies. As previously mentioned, she was the one who had told the police she saw bruises on Courtney’s arms, and that Courtney once said if anything happened to her, Floyd would be responsible.

The problem was that the investigators had never been able to confirm that story. Green also learned that Lies had a criminal record, including charges related to burglary and assault. At that point, he began to seriously wonder whether Courtney’s sister was involved. He asked Lies to come to the station, telling her there were new developments in the case.

But when she was in his office, Green began interrogating her. Lies denied any involvement in her sister’s death and even agreed to take a polygraph test. But as soon as the investigator asked whether she was the one who killed Courtney, Lies broke down crying, tore off the sensors, and ran out of the room. That behavior seemed highly suspicious.

But the next day, Lies returned to the station and agreed to retake the test. This time she answered every question, and the investigator found no indications she was lying. Lies explained she had a medical condition and was taking medication for seizures. Because the interview had gone on so long and she had been under severe stress, she had missed a dose of her medication.

Still, Sergeant Green did not fully trust her. To him, Lies’s behavior was strange. He thought she answered the questions with too much hesitation and excessive caution, as if she was not truly interested in helping the police solve her sister’s murder. But he could not do anything, because there was not a single piece of evidence linking Lies to the crime.

Shortly after the interviews with Lies, Green was told he would no longer be handling the Courtney case. It turned out Courtney’s mother had gone to the chief of police and complained about the way Green was treating the family, saying he had overstepped his bounds and was harassing them. She wanted him fired, but the chief did not go that far. Instead, he removed Green from the investigation and handed the case to another detective.

That detective tried to find new leads, but he made no real progress either. Eventually, the case was closed as unsolved for years. Courtney’s family continued trying to move forward on their own. They kept looking into the case, conducting interviews, holding memorial events, and doing everything they could to keep Courtney’s memory alive.

But none of it brought them any closer to an answer. Then in 2015, a new investigator took another look at the case and sent a preserved sample of Courtney’s blood for analysis. In 2004, experts had found no trace of drugs or large amounts of alcohol in her body. But this time, the results were different.

The sample showed traces of a powerful prescription drug combined with a high level of alcohol. Based on this dangerous mixture, the medical examiner concluded that Courtney may not have been suffocated after all, and that the cause of death might have been an overdose. For Courtney’s family, this was a complete shock. For years, they had never seriously considered that possibility.

Now the investigators were telling them that because of this new finding, there was no point in continuing the investigation. But key questions remained unanswered. Someone had moved Courtney’s body to another state, and someone had taken the money from her safe. Courtney’s loved ones refused to believe the overdose theory, but for the police, it was the end of the line.

So the case faded away again. This continued for several more years. All the while, Courtney’s family kept pushing to have the case reopened, trying to shine as much light on it as possible. Then in 2019, they reached out to a former state police investigator named Woody Overton.

By that time, Overton had retired and started a podcast in which he used his law enforcement experience to analyze criminal cases in detail. Overton became interested in Courtney’s story and began researching it himself. He soon became convinced that the overdose theory was baseless. To him, it did not look like a real explanation but like an excuse the police had latched onto because the investigation had gone nowhere.

Then he requested the case files, and while reviewing them, he realized it would be nearly impossible to solve Courtney’s case without outside help. Overton believed someone out there knew more than they were saying. So his goal became simple: spread Courtney’s story to as many people as possible, hoping someone would finally come forward with a real lead. He began broadcasting podcast episodes about the case in September 2019, and the series quickly became the talk of Alexandria.

The podcast immediately brought Courtney’s murder back into the spotlight. Her old friends, acquaintances, and locals who remembered the case began talking about it online, sharing theories, and trying to piece together what had happened. But there were also people who clearly did not want this case to move forward. At one point, someone smashed the windows of Overton’s car.

Another time, someone cut its internal wires. Even with those obvious threats, Overton had no intention of stopping. Once the podcast came out, Overton received many calls and messages. Most of the tips were vague and led nowhere.

But after about three weeks, a real lead finally came in. A woman named Tiffany called Overton, and instead of offering a vague theory or a small piece of information, she told him something much bigger. She said she had known the name of the killer for years and had no doubt the information was correct. According to Tiffany, Courtney had been killed by a man named Anthony Burns, the close friend of Tiffany’s ex-husband.

She said that at the time, her husband Sheamus had told her Anthony was behind the crime, because Anthony had confessed to him directly. Overton realized Tiffany’s account could be the key to finally solving the case. But her word alone was not enough. For one thing, she was relaying something someone else had told her.

For another, there was an obvious question: if she had known this for years, why had she stayed silent all that time? So Overton asked her if she was ready to find out what had happened to Courtney. Tiffany agreed. He asked her to meet with her ex-husband, turn on a recorder, and try to get him to talk about the case.

If Sheamus said on the recording that Anthony had killed Courtney, they would finally have much stronger evidence than mere secondhand claims. Tiffany agreed and did exactly what Overton asked. She brought up the new podcast and told Sheamus that people all over Alexandria were listening to it. She said he needed to listen to it too, and asked him to tell the host what he knew about the person who killed Courtney.

Sheamus replied that it was Anthony Burns, and that he did not need to listen to any podcast because he knew it for certain. He added that Anthony had done it for the money, and that Burns’s mother had washed the blanket Anthony used to wrap Courtney’s body. In total, Sheamus mentioned Anthony’s name sixteen times. To Overton, that seemed like the breakthrough the case had been waiting for.

But there was something else on the recording as well. A specific comment that made Sheamus’s story seem more credible while raising more questions at the same time. When Tiffany asked how Anthony had killed Courtney, Sheamus said he did not know, but he added that her body had looked badly beaten and was blue from her head to her waist. Tiffany immediately asked, “How do you know what her body looked like?

” At that point, Sheamus hesitated. He said he must have heard it somewhere in the news. But Overton quickly checked and found that this detail had never been made public. Part of Courtney’s body had indeed turned blue after death, but that information was not even included in the official autopsy report.

So Overton called Tiffany again and asked if she remembered where Sheamus had been when Courtney was killed. That was when she remembered something strange. Sheamus had been gone the entire weekend and had never told her where he was. He came home at midnight on Monday, and when Tiffany went out to greet him, she was struck by a terrible smell coming from him.

At the time, she did not know how to describe it, but she said it smelled like death. Later, she also found women’s underwear in his work trailer next to a roll of wrapped plastic. All of that made Sheamus look increasingly suspicious. Overton began to wonder whether Sheamus had helped his close friend dispose of Courtney’s body, or perhaps participated in the murder itself.

There was another detail that stood out. Sheamus frequently traveled to Texas for work, and his route sometimes passed through Winnie. At one point, he even went to a local hospital there, which was confirmed by records. So Sheamus knew the area well and could have suggested it as a place to leave Courtney’s body.

Finally, Tiffany added that shortly before the murder, Sheamus and Anthony had gone riding four-wheelers and had taken Courtney with them. That meant all of them knew each other. Now Overton had to find out exactly how Anthony was connected to Courtney. That was where the case took another unexpected turn.

To his surprise, he discovered that at the time Courtney was killed, Anthony had been engaged to her older sister, Lies. Overton immediately called Detective Tanner at the local police department and handed over everything he had. After reviewing Tiffany’s statement and Sheamus’s recording, Tanner started the investigation almost from scratch, and he soon came to believe Anthony might indeed be the person responsible for Courtney’s murder. Before questioning Anthony, Tanner decided to meet with Courtney’s family and tell them the investigation was active again and there was finally a real chance of progress.

Then he mentioned Anthony’s name and explained he was now the primary suspect. The reaction in the room was strong and intense. Courtney’s mother could not believe it and ran out. Lies, Anthony’s former fiancée, could not say a single word.

For the family, absorbing the accusation was nearly impossible. When Courtney died, Anthony had been treated almost like one of them. He had helped carry Courtney’s casket and had even placed a cross at the spot where her body was found. Later, once Lies had calmed down, Detective Tanner began asking her about Anthony.

To his surprise, she told him a great deal that investigators had never heard before. According to Lies, on Friday, when Courtney was still alive, a huge argument broke out between her and Anthony. After that, Anthony left the house for the entire weekend and did not return until Monday evening. But that was only the beginning.

Fifteen years after Courtney’s death, Lies suddenly said she believed Anthony and Courtney might have been having a secret relationship, and that she had suspected it even before the crime. According to Lies, she once called Anthony and heard Courtney’s voice in the background. She also noticed that Anthony and Courtney often disappeared at the same time. Lies said she asked them if something was going on, but they insisted it was not.

After Courtney was killed, the police returned her belongings to the family, and among them Lies noticed a gold ring. It looked familiar. Then she realized Anthony had given her a ring that looked exactly like it. When she compared them, she thought they were matching lover rings, which strengthened her conviction that Anthony and Courtney had been having a secret affair.

Finally, Lies said that about four years after the crime, she walked into Anthony’s house and saw his mother sitting on a chair wrapped in a blanket. According to Lies, the blanket’s pattern was very similar to the blanket missing from Courtney’s house. Despite all of that, Lies insisted she had never suspected Anthony, and that was why she had never told the police any of these things. But the investigators had serious doubts about that explanation.

It was not just her seemingly strange silence. The bigger problem was what Sheamus had said on Tiffany’s secretly recorded tape. Overton had not revealed every detail of that recording on his podcast, but the police listened to the full version and clearly heard what Sheamus said. He repeated: “Lies and Anthony did it for the money.

” So Sheamus was accusing Courtney’s own sister of being involved in her murder. Based on what the investigators already knew, that no longer seemed impossible. Still, they had spoken with Lies more than once, and they realized they would not get a confession from her. So instead, they began working the case from other angles.

While examining the old case files, the investigators found something interesting. There was a statement from a Winnie resident named Jad Wilson, who said he had driven past the abandoned building around 10 p. m. and saw a dark green car leaving the area that almost hit him.

At the time, Jad thought someone might be stealing copper from the building, so he tried to remember the license plate number and get a look at the driver. He only caught a quick glimpse of the driver’s profile, but he remembered some details from the license plate: two letters matching his own initials, the number eight, and that it was from Louisiana. But there was one problem. Jad said this had happened on September 27, 2004, about a week before Courtney was killed.

The investigators called Jad and asked if he was sure about the date. He admitted he might have gotten that part wrong, but he was certain about one thing: it had happened the day before Courtney’s body was found. Because for the people of Winnie, it was impossible to forget something like that. The investigators believed Jad had most likely seen Courtney’s car, because the part of the license plate he remembered matched her vehicle.

And if that was true, the person behind the wheel was probably the killer. So they asked Jad if he still remembered anything about the driver’s face after all those years. To their surprise, Jad said he had a photographic memory. He was also an artist, and at the time he had drawn the driver’s face from the side.

When the investigators looked at the drawing, it did indeed look like Anthony. So they placed Anthony’s photo in a lineup with several other men and showed it to Jad, who pointed to Anthony. With that, the police finally went to speak with the suspect. When they asked where he had been that weekend, he said he had spent it at home with Lies and that they had been in bed most of the time.

But that directly contradicted what Lies had told them. According to her, Anthony had left the house on Friday and did not return until Monday. Then the investigators asked Anthony to take a voice stress test, and he agreed. This method is not entirely reliable; it essentially looks for changes in a person’s voice that might indicate they are not telling the truth.

Anthony took the test, but his answers to the key questions were classified as deceptive. Even then, the investigators could not arrest him, because they did not have enough evidence. But shortly afterward, they found something else. They were still digging through the old case files, and there were several boxes of them.

To their surprise, they found reports from several different witnesses who had told the police that Anthony Burns had confessed to killing Courtney. He allegedly said it to a woman he met in a bar and to one of his friends, both of whom reported it to the police. According to those testimonies, Burns said he had killed Courtney, and even described how he had suffocated her, wrapped her body in a blanket, and transported her to Texas. But at the time, the police had not taken these witnesses seriously.

For one thing, they were not viewed as fully reliable people. They had criminal records and struggled with addiction. In any case, Anthony was assumed to have made these confessions while heavily intoxicated, so the officers did not treat his words as solid evidence. Now the police had three different witnesses who confirmed hearing Anthony confess, along with Jad Wilson’s testimony identifying him as the man driving Courtney’s car near where her body was found.

Putting it all together, prosecutors decided they finally had enough to take the case to court. Preparing the case took months, but in April 2021, seventeen years after Courtney was killed, Anthony Burns was finally arrested. According to the prosecutors, Anthony and Courtney had indeed been having a secret relationship, and at some point, he may have learned about the large sum of money she had recently received. They also believed jealousy may have played a role.

Courtney may have wanted to end the relationship, and that could have become part of his motive for killing her. The prosecutors believed Anthony attacked Courtney in her bedroom and suffocated her, most likely with a pillow. After that, they said, he wrapped her body in the missing blanket and shower curtain, placed her in the trunk of her own car, and drove to Texas. At the same time, the prosecutors did not have enough evidence to charge Anthony’s friend, who may have helped him move the body, or Lies, Courtney’s sister.

So their possible involvement was not part of the trial, and both testified as witnesses. Anthony denied any involvement in Courtney’s death, and his defense attorneys focused heavily on the fact that there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime. They also tried to challenge the credibility of the witnesses and argued that the police had not done enough to investigate other suspects, including Courtney’s former boyfriends. The trial ended in late October, and the jury unanimously found Anthony guilty of second-degree murder.

As a result, the judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Immediately afterward, his lawyers appealed the verdict, but the appeal was rejected. The court agreed that the evidence against Anthony was circumstantial, but said that when taken together, it was sufficient to support the verdict. So Anthony remains in prison serving a life sentence.

The possible involvement of his friend or Courtney’s sister was never proven, and the case is now officially closed. Still, Courtney’s case has not completely faded online. Much of the discussion continues to center on Lies, and whether she played a direct role in her sister’s murder or truly did not know what her fiancé had done.