Father Killed 5-Year-Old, Faked Tears on TV: Charges

Justin Turner's stepmother and father face murder charges in 1989 slaying
By Bob Cronin,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 14, 2024 11:20 AM CST
Sheriff: Father's Anguish on TV Was an Act
Images of Victor Turner, 69, and Pamela Turner, aka Megan Renee Turner, are displayed during a news conference Wednesday in Moncks Corner, South Carolina.   (Kailey Cora/The Post And Courier via AP)

As a TV news crew recorded the moment in March 1989, a South Carolina man who had joined the police search for his missing 5-year-old son stepped inside a small camping trailer on his property. A few seconds later, he backed out of it, saying: "My son's in there. Somebody's hurt him." The archived WCBD footage later shows the father sitting on a porch, his face in his hands, appearing to be in anguish at the death of Justin Lee Turner. In 2021, suspicious investigators reopened the case, CBS News reports. On Wednesday, Victor Lee Turner and Megan R. Turner, Justin's stepmother, were arrested in Cross Hill and charged with murder.

Justin's parents had called the Berkeley County Sheriff's Department on March 3, saying he hadn't come home from school that day. The reopened investigation found otherwise. Witnesses said the boy didn't take the school bus that morning; he was marked absent from his classes. "He never got on the bus, he never arrived at school," Sheriff S. Duane Lewis told reporters last week, per the New York Times. "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." Justin appears to have been choked, the sheriff said. "I can't think of a more tragic, horrendous murder," he added.

Technology not available in 1989 tied microscopic fibers on Justin's shirt to a ligature that investigators found at the Turners' home, officials said. Among the red flags sheriff's officials pointed out was that Victor Turner didn't check to see if the boy was alive after entering the camper. "He looked dead," Justin's father later told investigators. "I could feel something was wrong with him. I did not touch him." The boy's father and stepmother eventually moved out of the area, and the sheriff said they never once called to check on the investigation progress. "What does that tell you?" Lewis said. (More cold cases stories.)

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