Man killed son in 1989, then made 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 in a trailer on the family's property.

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

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

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

News footage Recorded by WCBD-TV of Charleston, SC, on March 5, 1989, it shows Mr. Turner joining a group of police officers and volunteers who were on the family's property searching for his missing son. At one point, Mr. Turner, wearing jeans and a checked shirt, emerges from a white-and-light-blue trailer. “My son is in there,” he says softly. Later he is shown sitting on a porch near some firewood, burying his face in his hands in apparent grief.

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

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

“I can't think of a more tragic and gruesome murder,” he added.

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

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

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

The Turners' attorneys could not be reached for comment.

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

“You had to care for him and love him,” Mrs. Parsons said images were broadcast this week by WCBD-. “And instead you tortured, abused and killed him. Your child.”

The case was reopened in 2021. A Berkeley County Sheriff's Office cold case unit 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, the affidavit said.

The affidavit stated that Mrs. Turner reported that Justin never got off the school bus that Friday in March 1989. But witnesses said they did not see the boy board the bus and that he was not at school that day.

Ms. Turner explained that she had been in the shower when Justin went out to catch the bus, and said she had gotten into an argument with him earlier, the affidavit said.

Two days after the search, Mr. Turner showed “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 “pretended” to find the boy's body “within seconds” of entering the RV and did not check it for signs of life, the affidavit said.

Forensic technology was used to match fibers found in the home to the boy's clothing and wounds on his neck, the affidavit said. There was no dirt or other material on his body, clothing or shoes, indicating he had been carried from the house to the RV.

Sheriff Lewis did not provide a timeline for the prosecution's case. “I hope and pray that Justin looks down from heaven and rejoices that there is justice today,” he said. “There is still some justice in this country.”