Sheriff Hobart Lewis, in the inset, appeared before reporters in a Feb. 16, 2024, press conference, saying that investigators solved two unrelated homicides at this home. (Screenshot: WSPA; inset: Greenville County Sheriff’s Office)
Deputies out of Greenville County, South Carolina, say they’ve made arrests in two unrelated cases that are linked by a remarkable coincidence: They happened at the same home almost six years apart.
First, on April 17, 2016, three people went to the home in the 200 block of Eastview Road in the town of Pelzer, Sheriff Hobart Lewis in a press conference on Friday.
They wounded three people and killed Zachary Whitley, 31, as part of the suspects’ plan to commit a robbery during a drug deal. Now authorities have arrested John Wesley Nix, 34, for the crime, though they have yet to identify the two other suspects, said Lewis.
Lewis described it as something like a “drug deal gone bad.”
Then, in 2022, Charity Southerland, 21, was fatally shot during a domestic dispute with the father of her child, said the sheriff. Investigators at the time had Charles Russell Reams III, 22, as the person of interest, but investigators lacked the evidence to make charges, Lewis said.
That recently changed. The sheriff credited witness accounts and reanalysis of DNA evidence under current technology in making the arrests.
“Charity was, she was just such a good person,” her father, Linnie Southerland, said in 2023, according to Fox Greenville affiliate WHNS. “Everybody she encountered with loved her person, character, she was just a loveable kind of a person, a likeable kind of person. You wanted to be around her. So I mean someone took her life and that’s just not fair. It just ain’t fair so if there’s anybody out there that knows anything I think that they ought to have enough humanity to step up and say ‘look, I think I know somebody who’s been bragging or knows something.’”
Greeneville County records show Nix in custody.
John Wesley Nix was one of the perpetrators who shot Zachary Whitley and three others, say deputies. (Mug shot: Greenville County, South Carolina)
Reams was arrested in Rome, Georgia, in an unrelated assault case, Lewis said. Records there show that in addition to being held as a fugitive from justice, he faces Georgia charges of kidnapping, false imprisonment, possession of firearm or a knife during commission of or attempt to commit certain felonies, and theft by receiving stolen property.
More Law&Crime coverage: Cold case ‘sexual rejection’ murder of nurse solved by linking killer’s DNA to distant out-of-wedlock cousin, deputies say
