The call came in on April 4th, 2015. A neighbor had found the body of Charles Taylor in his home in Ellenton. When I arrived, the scene was one of the bloodiest I’d ever seen. Charles had been stabbed over thirty times in the chest and face, and there were deep wounds from a blunt instrument.
This wasn’t just a murder; it was an execution carried out with pure rage. The only other person in the house was Charles’s bedridden father, Alan. He had been there the whole time, trapped in a back room, listening to his son die. Alan couldn’t tell us much.
He’d heard a commotion and thought he heard another man’s voice, but the only person he could positively identify was his daughter-in-law, Amanda Taylor. She had come into his room and calmly told him that Charles had fallen and they were taking him to the doctor. They never did. Amanda, his son Rex’s ex-wife, became our prime suspect instantly.
And she was gone. I’d known Amanda since we were eleven years old. She was the only girl who showed up to my sleepover, and from that night on, we were inseparable. Her childhood was rough—her father did time for murder, her mother struggled with addiction—and Amanda’s own issues started early.
She was angry, fascinated with death, and obsessed with true crime. When she was thirteen, she met Rex Taylor, a boy in a band who was a few years older. They were obsessed with each other from the start, and by sixteen, Amanda was pregnant. They married and had another child, and for a while, it seemed like everything was fine.
But it wasn’t. Rex had been addicted to prescription pills since he was a kid, and his father, Charles, kept giving him the scripts. Amanda hated it. She begged Charles to stop feeding Rex’s addiction, but he wouldn’t.
Rex spiraled. Amanda gave him an ultimatum: get clean or lose the kids. He chose the drugs. In April of 2014, they separated.
Rex moved in with his father, and his drug use went from bad to worse. He’d call us, and we couldn’t even understand what he was saying, he was so messed up. A few months later, Rex committed suicide. Amanda was shattered.
She became unstable, obsessed with death, and filled with pure hate. She told me once, “I know Rex didn’t go to heaven, and I just want to do whatever I can so that I can be in hell with him. ” She tried to kill herself at his grave on their shared birthday, slashing at her throat with a knife Shawn had secretly given her. We barely stopped her.
She was hospitalized and discharged on April 1st—just three days before Charles was murdered. While she was in that facility, her rage didn’t cool. It focused. She decided that killing Rex’s father would make her feel better.
And so she did it. On April 4th, Amanda and Shawn Ball arrived at Charles’s house around three in the afternoon. Charles was crying, sobbing over Rex. Amanda got angry at seeing him cry.
She took out a bayonet-style knife and simply started stabbing him. Shawn hit him repeatedly with a tire iron. Amanda stabbed Charles thirty-one times. She later told us the time was intentional: “I killed Charlie at 3:27.
That’s mine and Rex’s day. That’s our birthday. ” She described the killing as exhilarating, like a roller coaster ride. She’d taken a photo of herself holding the knife with Charles’s dead body on the sofa in the background and posted it online.
She wanted the world to know what she had done. She wasn’t sorry. She was proud. After the murder, they hit the road.
We tracked them from Virginia to North Carolina, and we were terrified. We’d found Amanda’s social media—pictures of her holding a knife to Rex’s throat with fake blood, interspersed with photos of her kids, and her jokes about becoming a famous serial killer. She and Rex had even corresponded with serial killers in prison. Now, she was on the run with a man she claimed was a decorated Navy SEAL, and they were buying ammunition.
We believed they were planning a spree. When they got to Tennessee, Shawn started to crack. He was sick, throwing up, panicking. Amanda was disgusted by his weakness.
They ran out of money, and Amanda decided to test him. She pulled into a rest stop where two college girls were standing. She told Shawn to kill them. He froze.
He put the gun under the seat and refused. That was the beginning of the end for him. Amanda was furious. She saw Rex in him, the weakness, the failure.
As the girls walked away, Shawn swallowed a bottle of pills—Amanda’s own medication—and passed out. Amanda looked at him, decided she was done, and walked to the passenger side of the car. She had never fired a gun before. She aimed and shot him in the face.
As he came to, lying on the ground, she told him, “I want you to know I used you for your car and your guns and I hope you die. ” Then she drove off, leaving him for dead. Shawn survived. The bullet went through his jaw and lodged in his shoulder.
It was after that, alone on the road, that Amanda called 911 and spoke to a dispatcher. She said she was lost. The dispatcher kept her talking, and the North Carolina State Police pulled her over. She was taken into custody without incident.
Shawn was arrested at the hospital, barely alive. And that’s when the truth came out. Shawn Ball was not a Navy SEAL. He had never been in the military at all.
He was a waiter at a local restaurant. He’d made up the entire story to get close to Amanda, to feed her fantasy of a murder spree. But when it came down to it, he couldn’t do it. And she threw him away like trash.
At trial, Amanda pled not guilty. She wanted the spectacle. She smiled and laughed when they showed crime scene photos. The jury deliberated for less than twenty-five minutes and found her guilty of murder.
She received life in prison without the possibility of parole. Shawn pled guilty and expressed genuine remorse. He was sentenced to sixty years, and he’ll likely serve forty-one. He could have stopped it at the beginning.
He could have stopped her. I stuck beside Amanda for a really long time, even after everything. Eventually, I saw her for what she really is: the most evil person I’ve ever known. I just didn’t see it before.
But I do now.
