A man confessed on his deathbed to killing a 10-year-old girl and her mother, closing a 24-year-old cold case in Beckley, West Virginia.
After the confession, officials found remains believed to be those of Susan and Natasha “Alex” Carter, her daughter, in Beckley on Monday.
The mother and daughter were last seen on 8 August 2000.
Larry Webb, who was indicted in October 2023, confessed to the crime after investigators visited him at the Hilltop nursing home center earlier in April.
Before he died in custody, he admitted to burying their bodies in his back yard, according to a West Virginia state police news conference on Tuesday.
Rick Lafferty, Alex Carter’s father, said during Tuesday’s press conference that because the “case went cold so many times”, he “almost lost hope several times”. Still, he felt he could finally “bring my baby home”.
The mother was in a custody dispute with Lafferty at the time of her disappearance, and she lived at Webb’s home with her daughter.
In 2022, after obtaining a search warrant for Webb’s residence, officials found a bullet embedded in the wall of a bedroom “known to have been occupied by 10-year-old Alex Carter”, FBI supervisory special agent Tony Rausa said during the news conference.
The blood-covered bullet was sent to an FBI lab for DNA testing, where authorities confirmed that the blood belonged to Alex Carter, Rausa said.
Webb was indicted on charges of first-degree murder, but the court proceedings were delayed due to his declining health.
Webb told officials that he killed the mother after a fight about money that went missing from his home, and that he knew he had “ruined his life forever” after the killings.
He killed Susan’s daughter to hide her mother’s death, authorities said. Webb wrapped both bodies in bedsheets and left them on his basement floor while he dug the graves in his back yard, Rausa said.
Webb died on Monday morning at Montgomery general hospital, just a few hours before the bodies were found.
