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On the morning of Sunday, November 17th 1991, two brothers were driving in their pickup truck down a road in the small town of Conway, South Carolina.
The older brother was driving and the younger brother was looking out the window at the surrounding woods, looking for the perfect spot to set up to go deer hunting.
But as they rolled along, suddenly the younger brother said, hey, I see something.
And so the brother quickly pulled over, parked the truck.
They both got out and the older brother was expecting his younger brother to head into the woods and show him what he found.
But instead, the younger brother didn't go to the woods.
He turned towards the middle of the road, right out in front of their vehicle, and he stopped in front of this big stain on the ground.
When the older brother walked up next to him, they both looked down and they could tell this was a huge pool of dried blood.
In fact there was so much blood that the brothers thought maybe a big predator had attacked a deer and they worried that this big predator might still be close by.
But then the brothers noticed a trail of blood leading away from the center of the road into a ditch nearby.
So they followed the blood trail, they reached the ditch, and they stared down into it.
Seconds later, the brothers were running for their truck so they could go alert police.
But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the strange, dark and mysterious Delivered in Story format, then you've come to the right podcast, because that's all we do, and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.
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Okay, let's get into today's story.
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On Saturday, November 16th 1991, a 17-year-old high school senior named Crystal Todd was in her bedroom getting ready to go to a party in the small town she lived in, which was called Conway, South Carolina.
Crystal looked at herself in the mirror and put the finishing touches on her makeup.
Then she stepped back to get a full view of herself.
She was wearing a print shirt, jeans, brown leather shoes, and her favorite brown leather jacket.
And in the mirror, her blue eyes shined.
Her mom always told her that her eyes were bluer than the sky and they lit up any room she walked into.
After checking herself over a few more times, Crystal felt happy with how she looked, and she was about to head out for the night when the phone in her bedroom started to ring.
She answered it, but right away she wished that she hadn't.
A young man named Davey, who Crystal had gone out with on a few dates, was the caller.
Crystal had told Davey that she did not want to see him anymore, but clearly he had not gotten the message.
Davey asked Crystal if she wanted to go out with him that night, but Crystal said she already had plans so she couldn't.
So Davey said, okay, well, can we get together another time soon?
Crystal had always been taught to be polite.
So she took a deep breath and, in a sweet voice, told Davey again that she did not think they should see each other anymore, but she hoped they could still be friends.
Then Crystal hung up the phone, grabbed her purse and headed into the living room where her mom was sitting on the couch.
She told her mom that she was going out and gave her a hug.
Her mom reminded her to be home by 1230, and Crystal just smiled and nodded.
Crystal almost never missed her curfew, and even if she was going to be home just a few minutes late, she always called her mom ahead of time to let her know.
So Crystal said goodbye to her mom and stepped outside onto the large wooden porch in front of their traditional country-style house.
Then Crystal walked across the yard to her new blue Toyota Celica car parked out front.
She climbed into the driver's seat, started the car, and immediately felt a rush of excitement.
Crystal loved this car.
It had been an early graduation present from her mom.
Her mom had even gotten her vanity license plates that read, C. Todd.
Crystal leaned across the passenger seat, opened up the glove compartment and grabbed a cassette tape from inside.
She put the tape into her stereo, turned the music up loud and then pulled away from her house and turned onto a tree-lined road that led toward the center of town.
Just being behind the wheel of her beautiful new car gave Crystal a sense of freedom that she rarely felt in this small town, where almost everyone knew everyone else's business.
And as she drove she looked out at the dense woods that surrounded most of Conway and thought about what her life would be like once she finally left her hometown.
Crystal loved her mom and her friends, but she dreamed of driving her new car out of Conway and going to college in another city where she could finally meet some new people and have some new experiences.
Crystal finally reached the center of town and drove past the shopping mall and a few fast food restaurants.
Then she turned onto a side road and, after following that road for a few miles, she arrived at the house where the party was going to be that night.
When Crystal stepped inside the house, the house was already packed with teenagers and music was blaring from the stereo.
One of Crystal's friends immediately came up to her and asked if she was meeting Davey there.
Crystal frowned and said, no, she was not.
And she actually hoped Davey would not show up to this party at all.
But Crystal would tell this friend that there actually was another guy Crystal was hoping to see at this party.
But when Crystal's friend asked her who this guy was, Crystal just smiled and didn't say anything, like she was keeping a big secret.
Then Crystal poured herself a beer into a red plastic cup and stepped away into the crowded living room.
Crystal was fairly short.
She was only 5 foot 3 inches tall.
So once she was in the room she got up on her toes and craned her neck to see over everybody in the room, but she didn't see the guy she was hoping to see.
So she weaved her way through the crowd and found her way to the living room couch.
For the next couple of hours, Crystal sat right there drinking a beer, periodically scanning the crowd in hopes of seeing this new guy, but he never appeared.
And as Crystal scanned the room that night, she started to become more and more aware of all the happy couples dancing and talking to each other, and it started to make her feel really lonely.
And as she started to feel lonely, she suddenly wished that her really good friend, Ken Register, had been there that night.
Ken and Crystal had been friends since they were kids, and whenever they were together, Crystal never seemed to get bored.
But Ken had graduated a year earlier and he made it a point now not to hang out at high school parties.
Finally, at around 11pm, when still this guy had not shown up to the party, Crystal got up from the couch, she made her rounds around the house saying goodbye to her friends, and then she headed back outside.
The music from the party faded as she got into her blue car and then, after firing up the engine, she began driving back toward the center of town along the dark road.
After a few minutes, Crystal passed the mall's brightly lit parking lot and then glanced at the clock on her dashboard.
It was only 11.15, which meant she had a little over an hour before she had to be home for curfew.
And Crystal was not about to waste an hour of freedom, so she decided she would at least go out and get some fast food before heading home.
After driving a little further down the road in the direction of the nearest fast food restaurant Crystal, eased off the gas and stopped at a traffic light.
She turned up her music even louder and started singing out loud, but then she heard a car horn blaring over the music.
She thought she must have missed the green light, but when she looked up, she saw it was still red.
She heard the horn again and realized the car that was honking was right next to her.
Crystal looked out her passenger side window at this other car and when she saw who was driving it she immediately smiled and waved and the other driver rolled down their window and Crystal did the same she rolled down her passenger side window.
Then the other driver, while shouting over the music, asked if Crystal wanted to hang out.
Crystal's smile instantly grew much wider and she said, yes, definitely.
She had about an hour until she had to go home.
A moment later the light turned green, so Crystal drove forward and pulled into the parking lot of a nearby middle school and parked.
The other driver followed her.
Crystal grabbed her keys and got out of her car, but left her purse behind.
Then she made her way over to this other driver's car.
She hopped in the passenger seat and they took off.
At 1 am on November 17th, so about two hours after Crystal had left that party, her friend Ken Register, who she had hoped would be at that party with her, was getting ready for bed.
Ken had worked his construction job all week and then spent the previous night with his girlfriend at the go-kart track.
He was exhausted and he knew he still had to get up early for church.
But before he could lie down in bed, his telephone rang.
He figured it must be his girlfriend calling to say goodnight.
So he reached over and grabbed the phone.
But right away he knew it was not his girlfriend and something was terribly wrong.
Crystal's mom was the one calling him and she was frantic.
She said Crystal still was not home and had not called her to say she'd be late.
And so Crystal's mom asked Ken if he knew where she was or if he had seen her that night.
Ken told her that he had not been with Crystal that night, so he didn't know where she was.
But he reassured her that, you know, Crystal was probably just out with friends and had lost track of time and would be home soon.
But nothing Ken said seemed to calm Crystal's mother down.
Instead, she just kept saying, "'Ken, I really think something is wrong.
She's never late.
And if she's going to be, she always calls.'"
And so Ken, who had known Crystal's mom since he was a little kid and could really tell this was a crisis point for her, he told her look, I'll call the two closest hospitals and see if maybe she's in one of those.
And so Crystal's mom thanked Ken and he told her he would call her right back after he called the hospitals.
After ken hung up with crystal's mom, he would call both hospitals, but neither had any records of crystal ever having come in that night.
So ken called crystal's mom back and gave her the news, but he told her again that you know, crystal was fine.
She likely just lost track of time or maybe she got sucked into dropping someone off who lived far away.
But don't worry, she'll be home, everything's fine.
Crystal's mom was not buying it, but she did say to Ken that while he was calling the hospitals she had called the police, and they too told her that this did not seem like a big deal and that likely Crystal would be home soon.
Ken felt terrible for Crystal's mom, but there really wasn't much else he could do, and so eventually they both just said okay, you know, we'll be in touch if we hear from Crystal.
And then they hung up, and a little while later Ken was asleep.
At around 9 am, eight hours after Crystal's mom had called Ken, two brothers in their 20s were driving down a road in Conway in their pickup truck.
The older of the two was driving while the younger brother was scanning the woods outside.
He was looking for a good spot to start their deer hunt for the day and just then the younger brother said he saw something.
So the older brother who was driving, pulled over to the side of the road and parked, and then, after they both got out, the older brother expected the younger brother to head towards the woods to show him what he saw, but instead the younger brother walked ahead in the middle of the road and stopped over this big stain on the ground.
And when the older brother walked up next to him, they both looked down and they could see clearly it was a huge pool of dried blood.
In fact there was so much blood on the concrete that the brothers thought maybe some big wild predator must have attacked a deer in the area.
And they both worried that maybe this wild predator was still close by.
But then the younger brother pointed to a trail of blood that led from the road to a nearby ditch, about 10 feet away.
The men looked at each other and then followed the blood trail, and when they got to the other side of the road and looked down into this ditch that was about five feet deep, what they saw at the bottom stunned them both into silence.
Finally, the older brother snapped out of his daze and started running back towards the truck, and his younger brother followed him.
The two of them climbed into the truck and before long they were peeling out of there, speeding down the road as fast as they could to alert the police.
A little after 10 am, so about an hour after those brothers made a 911 call, Detective Bill Knowles of the Horry County Police parked his car on the side of the road near the woods and stared out his window at the other police officers who were gathered around the ditch on the opposite side of the road where the brothers had made their ghastly discovery.
Knowles stepped out of his car and stretched.
It was sunny and very mild that morning.
Then, as soon as he was out of his car, one of the officers spotted him and waved him over to the ditch.
Knowles walked slowly across the road, staring down at the massive trail of dried blood.
Then he reached the officer and looked down into the ditch below.
Knowles' breath caught in his chest, and a look of complete shock crossed his face.
He had known he was coming to investigate a murder, but the brutality that had been inflicted on the victim he was now staring at was beyond anything he'd seen before.
The victim had suffered multiple stab wounds, and whoever killed this person had been filled with a level of rage that Knowles could barely comprehend.
Knowles asked the other officers at the scene if they had any details about who the victim was, but they told him that they hadn't located any identification or any vehicle nearby that might help them determine who this person was.
So Knowles climbed into the ditch, he crouched down closer to the body, and began inspecting them.
He saw there was a gold high school ring on the victim's right hand, so he asked one of the officers to take the ring off.
The officer slipped on a pair of gloves and gently removed the ring.
Then he held the ring up so he and Knowles could get a better look.
And in the sunlight, they could read the engraving on the inside of the ring clearly.
It said, Crystal Todd.
Knowles had children of his own, and so seeing this young woman whose life had been stolen from her really hit him hard.
And so, right there in the ditch, he leaned over Crystal's body and he quietly promised her he would find whoever had done this and he would bring them to justice.
Then Knowles climbed out of the ditch and walked back towards his car.
Officers would stay back at the scene to collect blood samples from the victim and from the road and those samples would be passed on to forensics labs in the area to be tested.
But Knowles knew those tests took time, and he wanted to start working right away.
So he got into his car and he drove off, determined to keep the promise he had just made to that poor girl.
Not long after leaving the crime scene, Knowles pulled up in front of Crystal's house and he saw Crystal's mom pacing back and forth and smoking on the large wooden porch.
He could tell she had not slept all night.
Knowles dreaded this part of the job more than anything, but he wanted to make sure Crystal's mom learned about her daughter from him before everybody else in town heard the news.
So, Knowles took a deep breath, he stepped out of his car, and he approached her.
He was tall and in his 30s with a kind face and a warm demeanor.
And when Crystal's mom saw him, she smiled thinking he might have good news for her.
But when Knowles reached her, he put his hands on her shoulders and a grave look came across his face.
And Crystal's mom knew her daughter was gone.
And she started crying.
In a gentle voice, Knowles told her that they had found Crystal's body, and he said how sorry he was for her loss.
Then he made the same promise to her that he'd made to her daughter.
He would find the person who had done this.
Knowles said he hated to put her through anything else that morning, but he asked her if she could tell him anything about the night before.
That might help him figure out what had happened to her daughter.
Crystal's mom could barely think.
She was crying and her hands were trembling.
And so she took a long drag on her cigarette and just tried to clear her mind for a second.
Then she told Knowles that Crystal had gone to a party the night before and she hadn't come home for curfew.
She said she had called around and nobody had seen or heard from Crystal.
And one of her friends Ken, had even called a couple of hospitals to see if maybe she was there, but she wasn't.
And then after that Crystal's mom just said she couldn't remember anything and she went back to smoking.
Knowles told Crystal's mother again how sorry he was, and then he turned and walked back to his car.
Crystal's mom watched him drive away from the house, and then she went back inside and collapsed on the couch, sobbing.
Then she reached over and grabbed the phone and called Ken.
On the other line, when Ken heard the news, he was totally devastated.
With his voice cracking, he said he would come by as soon as possible.
He would be with her so that Crystal's mom would not be alone.
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Not long after Knowles left Crystal's house, he got word that Crystal's car had been located.
It was found in the middle school parking lot.
So Knowles headed in that direction.
When he arrived, he met several other officers in that parking lot and he hoped Crystal's car could offer some clues as to what happened.
The thing that struck Knowles immediately about the car was that there was no sign of a break-in or a struggle, and Crystal's purse was still in the passenger seat.
To Knowles.
That indicated that Crystal had parked there under her own free will and that her murder had likely not been the result of a robbery.
Knowles hoped that Crystal's friends might be able to shed some light on how Crystal had gotten from her car in the middle school parking lot to the road where her body had been found.
And he knew.
On Sunday evenings almost all of the teenagers in town got together to hang out in the mall parking lot.
So later that day, as the sun started to set over the woods, Knowles headed to the mall.
By the time he got there, news of Crystal's murder had spread all through town and the local teenagers had gathered together at the mall, just like Knowles figured they would.
But instead of making plans or talking about school, the teenagers were discussing what had happened to their friend Crystal.
Knowles parked his car, stepped outside and walked towards a group of kids who were leaning against a car nearby.
He introduced himself and asked if any of them had known Crystal.
He was not surprised that basically all of them said they either knew her well or had at least spent some time with her in school.
Then Knowles asked if any of them had been to the party where Crystal was the night before or if they had heard anything about what had happened the night before.
One of the young women nearby chimed in and said that she heard that Crystal had been murdered as part of a satanic ritual.
Knowles sighed and shook his head.
The last thing he needed was some crazy rumor about Satanists spreading through town.
But then another girl said she was at the party the night before and that Crystal had hoped to meet a guy there.
Knowles asked who this guy was, but none of the kids seemed to know.
Then the girl said there was another guy who might have gone looking for Crystal the night before.
She said his name was Davey and that Crystal had broken up with him after a few dates and he was really angry about it.
And all of the other kids in the group agreed, Davey was someone Knowles should talk to.
So Knowles got all of the information he could about Davey from this group of teenagers.
Then he told them all to be careful and he headed back to his car.
The kids had told Knowles that Davey lived in a nearby town and back at the station Knowles got an address.
And Knowles had connections in the police force in the neighboring town, so he contacted them and told them what was happening.
They said they would round up Davey for him and that Knowles could question him at their police station.
And so later that night, Knowles drove out of Conway towards this nearby town.
And he was already starting to form a picture of what he thought could have happened, based on the crime scene and how he had found Crystal's car.
Knowles believed Crystal had parked her car at the middle school by choice and then gotten into another car with someone she knew.
And he thought there was a strong possibility that whoever was driving that other car was the person who had killed her.
And, considering the violence that had been inflicted on Crystal, Knowles thought he was most likely looking for a young man who was angry with her.
And Davey, a teenage boy who Crystal had rejected, definitely fit that description.
A little while later and Knowles had finally arrived at the neighboring town's police station.
When he got there, an officer from the local force greeted him and told him that Davey was ready for questioning.
The officer also said when they picked Davey up, they discovered the exterior and interior of his truck had just been washed and that the boy had been carrying a pocket knife.
Then the officer led Knowles through the station into a small interrogation room where Davey was seated behind a wooden table.
The room was very bright and very cold.
Knowles took a seat and stared across the table at Davey.
Davey was 18 years old, tall and wiry, and he couldn't stop shifting around in his chair.
Knowles' expression was blank, and he didn't give away anything he was thinking.
Then, in a calm voice, he asked if Davey had killed Crystal.
Davey shifted more in his chair and tapped his foot on the ground.
He didn't look up at Knowles, but he said he had nothing to do with any crime.
He said he'd called Crystal the day before to see if she wanted to go out with him, but she had said she already had plans.
Not totally buying his answer.
Knowles pushed a little more and asked if Davey made a habit of washing his truck on Sunday evenings.
Then, for the first time, Davey looked Knowles in the eye.
He smiled at the detective and said keeping his vehicle clean was very important to him.
Knowles smiled back at him, at which point Davey looked back down at the floor.
Then Davey cleared his throat and said again that he had not seen Crystal the night before and he hadn't even been in Conway.
Knowles leaned forward across the table and asked if anybody could back up his story, and Davey said some friends had been with him.
Davey fit Knowles' idea of the potential killer, but Knowles knew he still had to gather more information before he could determine Davey's guilt or innocence.
The kid had been a little smug about cleaning his truck, but a lot of young men in the area went out of their way to keep their trucks looking really good.
And Knowles knew a knife was most likely the murder weapon.
But Davey carrying a pocket knife on him was not out of the ordinary because it was a pretty common practice amongst hunters and hikers in the area.
So Knowles told Davey not to leave town and that police would be in touch if they needed more information.
Then he walked out of the interrogation room, thanked the officers at the station for helping him and headed back outside to his car.
It had only been about 12 hours since Crystal's body had been discovered, but Knowles already felt like he was running out of time.
He knew that the murder of a popular high school student could send panic through a small town like Conway, so he wanted to close the case as fast as possible and reassure everyone that their families were safe.
But over the next several days Knowles questioned all of Davy's friends and they all corroborated his story that he had not seen Crystal or Benin Conway on the night of her murder.
And so Knowles started to feel like his chance to close this case quickly was slipping away.
A week went by with no new leads in the investigation, and now Knowles found himself standing outside in a huge crowd of people gathered in the church cemetery who were desperate for answers.
Over a thousand people were there to attend Crystal's funeral, including almost every teenager who went to school with her.
Knowles could hear crying throughout the crowd as the minister said his final prayer.
Knowles and members of his team had come to the funeral to see if anything or anyone might stand out and offer them any sort of clue.
But as Knowles watched Crystal's friends and family walk by her coffin to say their final goodbye, all he saw was a town in mourning.
Crystal's death had affected everyone and he knew her murder would stay with this community for decades to come.
By the time Knowles left, he knew the funeral hadn't given him any new information to go on.
In fact, it had just made it clear how difficult his job would be.
In a town like Conway, where everybody seemed to know Crystal, the list of potential suspects was almost endless.
So not long after the funeral, Knowles reached out to state law enforcement and forensics experts in South Carolina for help.
And together, they came up with a plan to narrow down Knowles' search.
They decided they would use DNA testing.
DNA testing is an investigative technique that uses biological evidence found at the crime scene or on a victim to connect a suspect to the crime or to rule out a potential suspect.
At the time of Crystal's death, DNA testing was still a relatively new technique and it hadn't been used yet to solve a murder case in the state of South Carolina.
But Knowles wanted to use all of the tools available to him.
So the police in Conway made a public announcement that they needed male volunteers to submit samples for DNA testing.
Police said these samples would help them eliminate suspects and enable them to narrow down their search for Crystal's killer.
Knowles hoped at least a few of Crystal's male classmates who'd been at the party with her would volunteer, but he was astonished when over 50 men in the community quickly agreed to provide DNA samples in the hope it would help the investigation.
The DNA testing would be handled by the state and Knowles was informed it could take months before they had all of the results.
He was happy his team had taken another step in the investigation, but he wasn't about to just wait around for test results that might not even lead to the killer.
So while he waited for the results, Knowles kept digging into Crystal's personal life.
And in January of 1992, so about a month and a half after Crystal's funeral, Knowles discovered something that he thought was a major break in the case.
On a cool January night, Knowles sat at his desk in the station reading through Crystal's school notebooks that had been retrieved from her locker.
Knowles was exhausted because he and his team had been working around the clock on this case for months, but he refused to let that exhaustion get in the way of the promise he had made to Crystal and her mother.
Knowles rubbed his eyes, picked up the mug on his desk, took a sip of coffee and kept reading over the notebooks.
He was looking for anything that might help his investigation, but as he read, he just started to feel a deep sense of sadness.
Amidst Crystal's notes for her high school classes, he saw drawings she had doodled in the margins and little messages she'd written to herself.
Flipping through the notebooks.
All Knowles could think about was how young Crystal was and how full of hope she must have been.
But then someone had robbed her of all of that, and that person was still walking free.
Just then, something in one of the notebooks jumped out at Knowles.
The name Andy Tindall was written in the flowery handwriting of a teenager who might have a crush.
So Knowles flipped through a few more pages, and he saw Andy's name again written in the same way.
In the interviews that Knowles had conducted with Crystal's friends, Andy's name had never come up.
But now Knowles wondered if Andy was the high school boy Crystal had hoped to see at the party.
So during the following week Knowles dug into Andy's background, but he discovered Andy wasn't a high school boy at all.
He was a 31-year-old man who liked hanging out with high school girls.
And Knowles also learned that Andy had come to Conway, South Carolina, after committing a robbery in Alabama and violating his parole.
And so for the first time in weeks, Knowles felt like he might have a real prime suspect.
Knowles contacted some of Crystal's friends he'd already spoken to and he asked them if they knew anything about Andy.
And finally, he found one of Crystal's friends who was willing to talk.
Knowles met with this girl at her house and she told him that Andy was like a secret between some of the girls at school.
She said he was handsome, charming, and he had muscles like a bodybuilder.
She said she didn't know if Crystal and Andy had ever gone out, but Crystal had definitely met him and she wouldn't have been surprised if Crystal did have a crush on him.
That was the connection between Crystal and Andy that Knowles was looking for, and the fact that Andy had violated parole in another state was enough for police to bring him in.
And so on January 21st 1992, over two months after Crystal's murder, Knowles sat across from Andy in a small police interrogation room.
But unlike Davey, the nervous teenage boy Knowles had questioned earlier in the investigation, Andy was totally calm and collected.
Knowles stared at Andy across the table and asked him if he had killed Crystal.
Andy didn't flinch.
He just said he'd only met the girl one time, months before the murder, and had never seen her again.
Knowles, who almost always kept his cool, started to get frustrated.
He took a deep breath and he asked Andy why a 31-year-old man was hanging out with high school girls.
But Andy said he had just talked to some of the high school girls when they'd ended up at the same events in town.
Nothing more than that.
Then, Knowles took another breath and just stared at Andy, trying to get a read on him.
Knowles wasn't sure if Andy was guilty, but his name was in Crystal's notebook and he was a known criminal and Knowles didn't want to just let him walk.
So Knowles leaned forward in his chair and asked if Andy would be willing to submit samples for DNA testing.
Andy stared back at Knowles for a bit and then, in the same calm voice he'd had throughout the entire interview, he said he would do it.
Andy's DNA samples would be added to the other DNA samples that state authorities were already testing from the volunteers around town.
And in early February of 1992, almost three months after Crystal's murder, Knowles would finally see the results from those DNA tests.
And Knowles' theory that the killer was a man who felt Crystal had wronged him in some way would be proven true.
And Knowles would rediscover a detail from his investigation that would solidify the killer's motive.
Based on DNA test results, evidence collected at the murder scene and interviews conducted throughout the investigation.
Here is a reconstruction of what police believe happened to Crystal Todd in the early morning hours of November 17th 1991.
At about 1115 pm on November 16th, Crystal's killer cruised down the tree-lined road that cut right through Conway in his blue Plymouth Sundance car.
He passed by the mall and glanced out the window to see if anyone was hanging out, but the parking lot was empty, so he kept on driving.
It was getting late, but he really wanted to find a girl to spend some time with.
Then he looked up the road ahead of him and saw a car coming to a stop at a red light.
He looked closer and saw the vanity license plates that said, See Todd, and he started laughing.
He knew that was Crystal's car and if he could have picked one girl in town to be with right now, it would have been her.
So the killer pulled up right next to Crystal's car and began honking.
She didn't respond, so he leaned on his horn even harder, and this time it worked.
And Crystal looked over at him, and she smiled.
He smiled back, and he felt his heart beat a little bit faster.
Then he rolled down his window, and she did the same.
And then he asked her if she wanted to hang out, and she said yes.
And then the light turned green, and he followed her into the middle school parking lot.
The killer watched as Crystal walked past his car and climbed into his passenger seat.
Once she was in the car, he started driving and they began talking about the party she had just gone to.
As Crystal spoke, the killer began looking out the window, searching for the perfect spot away from all the lights in the center of town.
And when those lights were far behind him in the rear view mirror and the road was so dark they could barely see the woods on either side, he pulled off the road and parked.
Crystal asked him what he was doing and he told her that it would be easier for them to talk if they weren't driving.
His heart started beating faster and he was breathing heavily.
He looked at Crystal and smiled.
Then he took off his seatbelt.
He leaned over the passenger seat and tried to kiss her.
Crystal told him this is not what she wanted, but he didn't listen.
Crystal tried to push him off of her and get out of the car, but she couldn't.
She was trapped.
Then the killer forced himself on Crystal and sexually assaulted her.
Sometime after midnight, when Crystal had finally gotten free, she grabbed her shirt and jeans from the floorboard, she got out of the car, began getting dressed and then she began screaming at the killer through the open passenger door.
Inside the car, the killer seethed and his head started pounding, and he just wanted her to stop screaming, but she wouldn't stop.
So the killer opened the glove compartment and grabbed a knife with a locking blade that he kept in his car.
Then he opened his door and he rushed around the car towards Crystal, who was still getting dressed.
Before Crystal could react, he grabbed her shoulder and slammed the knife into her skull.
Crystal felt the right half of her body go completely numb.
Then the killer pulled the knife out and Crystal staggered forward in the road.
The killer followed with his knife raised and Crystal held up her left hand to try to stop him, but there was nothing she could do.
He stabbed her in the chest and she fell down, but the killer kept going.
The killer would stab Crystal 31 times, and some of the wounds were inflicted after she was clearly already dead.
Finally, the killer stopped, looked at what he'd done and started to panic.
The road was dark, but in the moonlight he could see where the road dropped into a ditch on the opposite side from where he had parked.
So he grabbed Crystal under the arms, dragged her body across the road and threw her in the ditch.
Then he ran back to his car, slammed the door and sped off down the road.
And he didn't stop until he parked in front of his house.
Before he got out he looked over the car to see if there was anything Crystal had left behind, and he saw her keys on the floorboard of the passenger seat.
He grabbed her keys, got out of the car and ran across the porch to the front door.
His hand was shaking and his house key rattled the doorknob as he unlocked the door.
Once he was inside, he ran to his room and he hid Crystal's keys in a drawer.
And when he looked down at his hands, he finally realized he was covered in blood.
So he stripped down, ran to the bathroom, and took a shower.
Afterwards, his hands were still trembling, but he was breathing a little easier.
So he walked back to his bedroom and got dressed for bed.
But before he could lie down, the phone rang.
He figured it was his girlfriend calling to say goodnight, so he grabbed the phone.
But when he answered, it was not his girlfriend, it was Crystal's mother who was frantic because her daughter had not come home.
Ken Register, who was one of Crystal's best friends since childhood, who was a pallbearer at Crystal's funeral and who was the person who had comforted Crystal's mother after she found out her daughter had been killed, had been the one who murdered Crystal.
It would turn out that Ken fit the description of the killer Knowles had first imagined a young man who knew Crystal and who believed he had some reason to be angry with her.
But the detail from early interviews that Knowles had rediscovered, the one that would clarify Ken's motive, was that Crystal and Ken had briefly dated years before the murder and Crystal had broken up with him because she thought they were better off as friends.
But Ken didn't see it that way and he believed Crystal belonged to him.
And his desire to have her for himself, no matter the cost, had grown over the years.
And then, on the night of the murder, Ken was driving home from the go-kart track when he saw Crystal at the red light and he decided that was the night they were going to be together.
And when Crystal tried to push him off of her in the car, he flew into a violent rage.
It would turn out, Crystal's murder was the first murder case in South Carolina solved by using DNA evidence, because Ken had been one of the people in town who had quickly provided a DNA sample when police asked for volunteers, and Ken's DNA sample had linked him to the sexual assault and the murder.
Ken would later suggest he had provided those samples despite being guilty, because he didn't fully understand how DNA evidence could tie him to the crime.
Ken would ultimately confess to the murder.
He was found guilty and he was sentenced to life in prison.
Then in 2022, over 30 years after the murder, Ken came up for parole.
But Crystal's friends, who still missed her dearly, started a petition to have Ken's parole denied.
And Ken eventually just waived his right to a parole hearing and, as of May 2023, he remains in prison.
Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast.
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