By: Maddie Rowley

The Missy Bevers case is one of those cold cases that really sticks with me because the details are so strange. If you’ve heard about this case, you might have seen the creepy video of an unidentified person in police SWAT gear roaming the halls of Creekside Church of Christ in Midlothian, Texas the morning of Missy’s murder—shuffling aimlessly from room to room, peeking in doors and breaking windows with some sort of hammer or crowbar. If not, here it is:

We can safely assume the person in the video is involved with Missy’s death, but before I get too ahead of myself here, let’s start at the beginning. 

Missy Bevers, a 45-year-old mother of three arrived at Creekside Church at around 4 a.m. on April 18, 2016. She was set to teach a 5 a.m. fitness class and had arrived early to set up the space beforehand. When her students arrived, they found her on the floor, riddled with puncture wounds all over her head and chest.

She was pronounced dead at the scene, and when police detectives played back the church’s indoor surveillance footage, they found that the perpetrator wearing (possibly fake) police SWAT gear had broken into the church via a side door. 

There’s lots of back-and-forth as to both the identity and gender of the intruder. Some people on the Unsolved Mysteries Reddit thread believe the person is a woman judging by the way they walk, and others surmise the person is a man due to their overall build. Other than this spooky video, police have essentially had nothing to go off of in terms of who killed Missy since 2016. 

A sporting goods store across from Creekside Church captured video of a 2010-2012 Nissan Altima that pulled into the parking lot and turned off its headlights at 1:58 a.m. and then left at 2:04 a.m. but police were never able to locate the car. Another dark SUV is seen leaving the parking lot at around 4:30 a.m. but police weren’t able to locate that car either. 

Here’s the surveillance footage from that:

Was this a burglary or an act of vandalism gone wrong? If so, kind of strange that the intruder didn’t seem to steal anything if that’s why they were there in the first place. Or, was the person in the SWAT uniform there to kill Missy, but was walking aimlessly around the church to throw off detectives? 

If the person was there to kill Missy, how did they find out where she would be and at what time?

Missy was an instructor for a company called “Camp Gladiator.” She had set up a Facebook event for the workout, so it’s possible that the perpetrator knew she would be at the church at that specific time after seeing it on Facebook. 

But why? Who would want to murder Missy, a devoted mother who was extremely active in her community and was heavily involved in her three daughter’s lives? 

Despite some evidence of marital and financial problems due to texts found on Missy’s phone, her husband, Brandon was hundreds of miles away on a fishing trip when the murder took place, and he was pretty quickly ruled out as a suspect by Midlothian Police.

The Dallas Morning News reported that Missy had received a creepy message on LinkedIn three days before she was killed, and that when she showed her friend the message, they both thought it was strange because it was from a man neither of them knew. It’s unclear if any viable leads developed from this message. This same article says that it’s possible that the murderer could have recorded the homicide on video using a cell phone.

Some blogs have suggested that Missy’s father-in-law might be a prime suspect because his body type and walking gait is similar to the perpetrator’s gait in the video. 

Popular true crime podcast, Crime Junkie did an in-depth episode on the Missy Bevers case, and in it they reported that after Missy’s murder, her father-in-law went to the dry cleaners to drop off a woman’s white shirt that was covered in blood. He explained that the blood was from a dog fight that happened a few days beforehand at Brandon’s sister’s house. The police followed up on this claim and confirmed that the blood was in fact from a dog. 

Missy’s father-in-law has since been ruled out by police because he was away in California when the murder took place. 

A new lead came in after several calls were made about a former police officer named Bobby Wayne Henry, who, police confirmed, still owned his police riot gear even though he insisted it no longer fit him. Henry worked as a security guard from time-to-time despite a past sexual assault charge that got him removed from the police force. Henry also walked with a limp, owned a dark SUV, and was later arrested on charges of child pornography, but police deemed him to be taller than the perpetrator seen in the video, so he was essentially eliminated.

Another plausible theory is that one of Missy’s former or current students, or even a fellow Camp Gladiator instructor could have had some sort of beef with Missy and that could have been a motive. 

All of these leads have frustratingly amounted to nothing. This is one of those cases that, on the outside, seems like it should be totally solvable with the clear surveillance video of the would-be murderer, but so far, four years later, it’s still unsolved. What are your theories on this case? Who killed Missy Bevers?