TX - Terri 'Missy' Bevers, 45, killed in church/suspect in SWAT gear, Midlothian, 18 Apr 2016 #47

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Trebor5591 said:
A church may not be a high end target, but there is more to steal in a church than you might think:

-Cash collections
-Computers/laptops
-sound equipment/boards
-speakers
-microphones
-musical instruments
Click to expand...

The first 6 of your list are totally valid, IMHO. The electronics are commonly stolen material. Just to expand on A/V gear that can be found in your common Texas church:

- PTZ cameras
- A box of wireless lav transmitters

But then again, how did they plan to take all this stuff if they’re driving a tiny car? Such preparation was taken otherwise with their disguise. Unless the Altima is completely unrelated and is a red herring (my fear for years now).
 
alec said:
The first 6 of your list are totally valid, IMHO. The electronics are commonly stolen material. Just to expand on A/V gear that can be found in your common Texas church:

- PTZ cameras
- A box of wireless lav transmitters

But then again, how did they plan to take all this stuff if they’re driving a tiny car? Such preparation was taken otherwise with their disguise. Unless the Altima is completely unrelated and is a red herring (my fear for years now).
Click to expand...
I think it is likely that the Altima is unrelated to the crime. There has never been anything connecting it to Missy's slaying. The only way that it could be related is if the driver was looking for a place to rob, rejected the gun store because there was too much security, and settled on the church as a low-risk target. ALTIMA-tely (I couldn't resist the pun), I think that the Altima is a red herring.
 
A/v and tech equipment is less valuable than you'd think. A thief, who's nearly always a druggie, won't gather up the many pieces that audio or video require, and keep them with the correct equipment, making it a pain to re-sell. Also, innovations in security and a/v equipment are frequent. I'd bet my paycheck a country church's tech is likely older and not greatly valued on the second hand/pawn market. A druggie would steal some of it, easily grabbed, to get $20, but it's not worth a costumed trip on a rainy night.

In the clips we see the perp popping his head in various rooms. This person isn't looking at computers, monitors, PTZs, video cams or mics. Because he doesn't appear to explore far enough to take the time to even read model numbers if they see anything, much less check to see if they even power on.

One more thing. Because most thieves want quick money, or items they can convert to quick money, they don't do a recon of the entire property and then go back to gather it up. Occam's Razor. You can make that line of thinking work, but it's not the most likely, is it? The police said on the first day that the perp targeted Missy. This doesn't seem to be a break in.
 
I stopped to ask myself, "Have I ever driven around the perimeter of a building at night the way the Altima driver did?"

And the answer is, "Yes." I've done it several times, and in most cases it was because I was lost and was trying to find the building's address. In some cases it was just because I wanted to know whether the address was odd or even so I could figure out whether the address that I was looking for was on the same side of the street or the opposite side of the street.

I don't know what the situation was with the gun store, but sometimes it can be very difficult to locate the address numbers on a commercial building (and sometimes they're simply not there).

I'm not saying that that's what the Altima driver was doing necessarily, but it's one innocent explanation, and there are probably many others.

ETA: It's getting more uncommon for people to not have internet at home, but in 2016, it would have still been fairly common for a person to pull up to a building in order to use (steal) a business's unsecured Wi-Fi. It could be that the guy was trying to see if he could pick up a Wi-Fi signal, drove all the way around the building without finding one, and drove off to try to find one someplace else.

Odds are that the situation with the Altima was neither of the possibilities that I mentioned. The bottom line is, there could be any number of reasons that are unrelated to the slaying of Missy.
 
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Ozoner said:
I think it is likely that the Altima is unrelated to the crime. There has never been anything connecting it to Missy's slaying. The only way that it could be related is if the driver was looking for a place to rob, rejected the gun store because there was too much security, and settled on the church as a low-risk target. ALTIMA-tely (I couldn't resist the pun), I think that the Altima is a red herring.
Click to expand...
I don't think so. ;) The Altima is worth to think about it further. IMO
 
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Trebor5591 said:
A church may not be a high end target, but there is more to steal in a church than you might think:

-Cash collections
-Computers/laptops
-sound equipment/boards
-speakers
-microphones
-musical instruments
-food
-cooking equipment
-office supplies
-calculators
-copiers/copy supplies

As far as thieves getting in and out fast--yes in a residential burglary, however in a church, at 4:30 a.m., the burglar may have thought he had hours alone before anyone showing up. They must have panicked when Missy showed up.
Click to expand...
Should we not have seen him putting some valuables on the hallway floor for collecting the stolen goods at the end from there?
I haven't been a burglar until now - how would a burglar have worked on his mission to steal? I assume: not in the way, this SP did. How did he escape so fast WITH stolen goods? If he didn't escape with stolen goods - why were there no goods placed for later transport, when SP left in hurry?

This was no burglar, IMO, killing some woman in a quick and brutally way because of nothing and leaving without a gathered heap of stolen goods. MOO
 
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FromGermany1 said:
Should we not have seen him putting some valuables on the hallway floor for collecting the stolen goods at the end from there?
I haven't been a burglar until now - how would a burglar have worked on his mission to steal? I assume: not in the way, this SP did. How did he escape so fast WITH stolen goods? If he didn't escape with stolen goods - why were there no goods placed for later transport, when SP left in hurry?
Click to expand...

No disrespect intended -- you make reasonable points about what we think burglars do - but we don't know what we don't know, so we don't know if this was a non-burglar who took nothing, or if it was a failed burglar whose attempt to rob went wrong.

One example of what we don't know, we have no way to know what sort of time schedule SP thought he was on. That would change everything. We can paint a reasonable scenario where SP wants to rob whatever's there, and decides he needs to be out the door by 6 or 6:30, before it gets light and LONG before anyone will be there to work. He is going to arrive at 3:30, scout around the place for an hour to see what he wants to take, then start collecting and loading from 5:00 to 6:00, leaving plenty of room to spare. He's unfortunately interrupted at 4:15, long before he has decided what to take, but he's not staying.

Problem is, criminals can do it however they want. There are no rules for intended burglars. Or for non-burglar trespassers. Or for intended vandals. Or for intended killers. We can't look at the way they acted in the heat of the moment and know what was in their mind when they walked in the door, unless they tell us. Intent could have changed at any time in the process.

Most importantly, we can ask the same sort of questions about why SP, if there to kill, did this and that. Just like some of his actions would seem amiss for a burglar, others would seem amiss for someone who just came to shoot MB. He doesn't really fit there either. Only when he is caught will we find out if he was a burglar who killed, a killer who also looked for something to steal, or just someone on a lark who decided to play killer with a random person who walked through the door. The one thing we do know, it was clearly a loser, who gained nothing by being there, and who is still a loser.
 
I do not know all the detailed information about this case other than a general summary and the surveillance videos. I did notice something about the church video that has maybe already been noticed? From the evidence it seems like the story is a robbery gone bad, interrupted by a startled victim.

After watching the church surveillance video, there is something I thought was strange. There seem to be two surveillance videos in this case. The first is earlier in the night when a Nissan Altima seems to be traveling around the parking lot of a business near the church while turning its headlights on and off so as not to be noticed. The second is the church surveillance video. Whether they are related or not I do not know.

The church surveillance video is revealing, not for what it shows, but for what it does not show. In the surveillance video, it seems like this person never looks up for any surveillance cameras. In some parts of the church video, they are right below a surveillance camera. Yet it could possibly be the same person driving the Nissan Altima who seemed so concerned about being seen in the car earlier. In addition, the person was completely dressed up in police gear. They must have had at least some concern with being identified.

Some people think in the first video, the Nissan Altima had a handicap symbol on the license plate and with Missy Bevers being a former special needs teacher, you have to wonder.

Whoever it was, it is as if once this person got to the church, they knew that not being on surveillance video was not an option.
 
When the Sheriff's dept. wrote the report on the Missy Bevers murder they mislead everyone because it read there was a gun found at the body site location. It should have read there was a gun found on the PREMISES. The gun they are referring to was Missy's gun that was in her truck.
Sillybilly said:
ADMIN NOTE:

For members who may not be up to speed on some of the specifics of this case, please review this post that confirms that a handgun was in fact used in the Missy Bevers killing.

Posts have been removed. Please move on from that discussion.
Click to expand...
 
Sgt. Pepper said:
When the Sheriff's dept. wrote the report on the Missy Bevers murder they mislead everyone because it read there was a gun found at the body site location. It should have read there was a gun found on the PREMISES. The gun they are referring to was Missy's gun that was in her truck.
Click to expand...

Please provide an approved link to the source of that information. Thanks !!
 
Sometimes the way information is written can confuse people, especially in terms of context. I happened to be reading about this case today and remembered the article that talked about "the gun."

First, according to what I have read there was no gun found at the actual crime scene. The crime scene is inside the church in the area where Missy Bevers was murdered. However, in the parking lot, there was a "handgun" found in the glove compartment of her vehicle. The mention of this handgun is important as it is believed that if Missy Bevers had felt threatened in any way before going into the church, she would have took her handgun with her. She left it in her vehicle. This is how I interpreted the information. Link to article is below.

Who Killed Missy Bevers?
 
For those wondering, the data in the Murder Accountability Project comes directly from FBI records, which are available to the media, researchers, etc by law. At one time I actually went to the FBI site itself and found the exact same data, saying the exact same thing -- that MB's murder was by handgun. But unfortunately, it was a maze to get to the FBI page showing that, and there was no way to link to the page to see it, as you had to do one search in exactly the right way, then another, then another.

But the fact is, local LE was always vague about exactly how MB died, dodging the question until media stopped asking. If not for the FBI report, we would be in the dark -- but the FBI was there too to investigate, and the ONLY weapon they mention as a cause of death is a handgun.

It's understandable that some, who don't know what the FBI said, or who are newcomers or who haven't looked closely at the conversations here, have been led astray by the way local LE worded things in dodging the question, and want to dispute the facts. But facts is facts. We have discussed this many times on this forum, since it was discovered, and it is what it is.
 
somequestions said:
Sometimes the way information is written can confuse people, especially in terms of context. I happened to be reading about this case today and remembered the article that talked about "the gun."

First, according to what I have read there was no gun found at the actual crime scene. The crime scene is inside the church in the area where Missy Bevers was murdered. However, in the parking lot, there was a "handgun" found in the glove compartment of her vehicle. The mention of this handgun is important as it is believed that if Missy Bevers had felt threatened in any way before going into the church, she would have took her handgun with her. She left it in her vehicle. This is how I interpreted the information. Link to article is below.

Who Killed Missy Bevers?
Click to expand...
We knew fairly early on about the gun in Missy's vehicle and that her gun was not used in the crime. Although this is not a direct quote from Captain Span, it basically only indicates that Missy's gun was not used. It does not say that no gun was used.

He said the gun that was found at the scene was confirmed to belong to Bever. It was not used during the crime and was located in her car.
 
Hopefully this works, it's the FBI data page, as @SteveS said, it's kind of a maze trying to drill down to the right city, time frame,etc but you can do it and it's pretty clear there is only 1 unsolved murder in Midlothian and that was Missy, who was killed by a handgun.

Edit: oh right the link.... https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/home
 
Whether Missy Bevers was murdered with a gun or not does not really change how I view the crime. In many cases it would, but this particular person, in my opinion, used a staged robbery to cover up a murder.

I have watched the surveillance tapes, both of the SFWA store and the church. First, the SFWA store with the Nissan Altima roaming around does not make any sense to me. The Altima turns off its headlights before it even makes the right turn into the store parking lot. The interesting part is the parking lots look very similar to each other, the SFWA store and the church. Even if the Nissan Altima is not involved, since that surveillance took place about two hours before the church surveillance tape, I wonder what that person was doing there? You can easily case out a store by pretending to be a regular customer shopping during the day. By turning the headlights on and off they were indicating they were up to something more than just to turn their car around or stop to rest, etc.

The Creekside church parking lot was interesting to me for one reason. I have never seen so many handicap spots. I think it is great they thought about handicap people, but that caught my attention right away.

The surveillance tape from the church is hard to make anything out. Because I think it is definitely a disguise that may not portray reality, it could be a man or woman. The walk, at least to me, resembles a female who seems very at ease with walking through the church, even going so far as to brush their hand against the wall as they are walking.

In a case like this I think you have to look at familiarity. According to a research video online, the burglar came in through a window that was connected to the church kitchen. First thing you should look for is anyone who is familiar with the church kitchen, especially if they worked in it.

I think, because this person rarely ever looks up to see if there are any cameras, that whoever committed this crime, may have already known they would be on surveillance. But the only way you would know that is if you had already been in the church before. This is the one aspect of the case I feel strongly about.

What would I do? I would watch hours of previous tape to see who looks directly at the cameras, inside and outside the building. It does not prove anything, but you might get a name. My guess is this was already done by police.
 
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