Man Killed Son in 1989, Then Staged Tearful TV Discovery, Officials Say

After a 5-year-old South Carolina boy disappeared in South Carolina in 1989, a news camera rolled as his father appeared to discover his son’s strangled body inside a camping trailer on the family’s property.

For three and a half decades, the killing of Justin Lee Turner remained unsolved. But on Wednesday, nearly three years after investigators reopened the case, the authorities said that they had charged his father and stepmother with his murder.

Victor Lee Turner, 69, and Megan R. Turner, 63, were arrested on Tuesday at their home in the town of Cross Hill in Laurens County, S.C., according to the sheriff’s office in Berkeley County, where the boy was killed. Cross Hill is about 60 miles northwest of Columbia, the state capital.

Justin was reported missing on the afternoon of March 3, 1989. The Turners told the authorities at the time that he had gotten on a school bus that morning and never returned.

News footage in 1989 from WCBD-TV of Charleston, S.C., shows Mr. Turner joining a group of police officers and volunteers who were searching on the family’s property for his missing son. At one point, Mr. Turner, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, emerges from a white-and-light-blue trailer. “My son’s in there,” he says quietly. He is later shown sitting on a porch near some firewood, burying his face in his hands in apparent grief.

But Sheriff S. Duane Lewis of Berkeley County said that fresh analysis of the cold told a different story about what happened to Justin.

“He never got on the bus, he never arrived at school,” Sheriff Lewis told reporters at an emotional news conference on Wednesday. “That’s because he had been murdered. And he’d been murdered by his stepmother and his father, and left in a camper behind their house.”

“I can’t think of a more tragic, horrendous murder,” he added.

He said Justin had ligature marks on his neck, indicating that the boy had been choked to death.

At one point, Ms. Turner had been arrested and charged in the case, but those charges were dismissed, Sheriff Lewis said at the news conference. The couple moved away, and Ms. Turner changed her given name from Pamela, according to an affidavit. They never asked the authorities about the investigation or their son again, Sheriff Lewis said.

“I never got one phone call,” he said.

Lawyers for the Turners could not be reached for comment.

Amy Parsons, a cousin of Justin’s, told the Turners at a court hearing this week that they did not deserve “one day outside of those prison walls for what you did to Justin.”

“You were supposed to take care of him, love him,” Ms. Parsons said, according footage aired this week by WCBD-. “And instead, you tortured, abused and murdered him. Your child.”

The case was reopened in 2021. A cold case unit of the Berkeley County Sheriff’s office that re-evaluated the autopsy and physical evidence collected at the crime scene found inconsistencies in the Turner family’s account of Justin’s disappearance, according to the affidavit.

The affidavit said Ms. Turner reported that Justin never got off the school bus that Friday in March 1989. But witnesses said that they had not seen the boy get on the bus and that he was not in school that day.

Ms. Turner explained that she had been in the shower when Justin went outside to catch the bus, and said she had previously argued with him, the affidavit said.

Two days into the search, Mr. Turner showed an “apparent awareness” of the boy’s fate by asking officers what would happen if a person who was a family member had harmed or killed the boy, the affidavit said.

He then “feigned” discovery of the boy’s body “within seconds” of entering the camper, and did not check it for signs of life, it said.

Forensic technology was used to match fibers found in the house with the boy’s clothing and the wounds on his neck, the affidavit said. There was no debris or other matter on his body, clothing or shoes, suggesting he had been carried from the house to the camper, it said.

Sheriff Lewis did not give a timeline for the prosecution’s case. “I’m hoping and I’m praying that Justin is looking down from heaven, rejoicing that today there’s some justice,” he said. “There’s still some justice in this country.”