Original subtitles

(phone buzzing) (dramatic music)

- She was looking for love.

- She wanted someone that would give her

the freedom to be herself.

- He looked like a normal, nice guy.

(dog barking) (searchers chattering)

- [Reporter] The mother of two small boys

reporting missing early Sunday morning.

(ominous music)

- This is a predator's paradise.

- It's that's that dark side of the web

that people don't realize exists.

- Each day, she was living in fear.

- I knew that he was no angel, but he really had me tricked.

- She didn't stand a chance against that monster of a man.

(dramatic music)

(twangy guitar music)

- My name is Andy Martin, and I'm a detective sergeant

with Dorchester County Sheriff's Office.

Dorchester County is probably a typical southern county.

You know, manufacturing large-scale facilities.

A lot of residential.

Then west of the county, a lot of farming.

We farm here cotton and corn, soybeans.

Just a county.

- Dorchester County is a growing community.

It's a suburb of Charleston.

The crime that we have here, I mean,

most of it is kinda drug related.

There's a not a high homicide rate here.

- That's where miss Ashley Pegram lived the last time

she went out that door the last night that she was alive.

(ominous music)

- Oh, there's me and Ashley at my cousin's wedding.

She was really friendly.

She was a really good mom.

She was just a really good sister, like the best.

I mean, I couldn't have asked for a better sister.

She loved her kids.

She hated to discipline.

She was more like the friend mom.

Ashley was very photogenic, she took really good pictures.

- She always said you was the pretty one.

- And I didn't agree.

I always thought she was the prettier one.

- Both of y'all are pretty.

Ashley was a great mom.

She was a real sweet person to be around.

- She just kind of spiraled down after that.

I tried to help her the best I could,

but I mean I wish I would've done more honestly.

I didn't really know that type of pain

that she was going through.

She was depressed.

She was just making poor decisions

and things like that because of it.

So she would drink and kind of kill the pain

of losing her son's father.

Mom didn't like the drinking at the house with the kids,

so she would leave to do that.

She was mainly seeing one person at the time,

and she was supposed to stay the weekend with him.

And they had got into a fight.

And he brought her home early, upset.

So she just jumped on there because she wanted to find

someone that would take her out so she could drink.

He actually messaged her,

and it just kinda moved really quickly after that.

I mean, they started talking,

and within two hours she was in the car with him.

- I think Ashley was probably very vulnerable

and more vulnerable than others to being taken advantage of.

The reason for this is if she was grieving,

feeling low about life and her loss,

she may want to believe other people when they're giving her

information which in fact might not be true

because she's seeking support, comfort.

Because you're depressed or low or anxious

might mean that you take more risks.

- Ashley told me shew as going out and have a few drinks.

Nothing sexual, she said.

I'm not interested in being married again.

She was really pretty that evening.

She had put on her gray sweater, a pair of jeans.

And she bought some new shoes and she wore those.

He didn't come to the door.

You know a lot they would come to the door

to ask for Ashley, but he sat in the car.

- A lot of the times I would run out to the car

and check 'em out and see who they were

and get a visual of the car and things like that

just because I worried about her.

And I wasn't there that night.

- It scared me not knowing who he was.

I was always leery about that.

Soon as Ashley come home every time,

she would open the front door and she would say,

"Mom," you know, and I would know that she was there.

She didn't do it.

- Mom actually called me and said that Ashley

hadn't returned home.

I just knew something wasn't right.

(ominous music)

- In American society, we expect people on the first date

to come to the door and meet the family.

That's part of American culture.

It's considered to be rude not to do that.

It is a red flag.

It doesn't mean that this is a bad person,

but it certainly would be on my radar.

- He said he had left her at a gas station.

And he actually had put his number in the messages,

so I grabbed Mom's phone and started calling

over and over again.

He didn't answer.

Eventually, he called back.

I was like, where's my sister?

In this message, you said you left her at a gas station.

What gas station?

And that's when he changed his story and said

that he had left her in front of a mobile home park.

(ominous music)

Me and Mom actually walked up and down that road,

looking in the ditches to see if maybe she had got hit.

I just knew.

Sister intuition, call it what you want,

but I just knew something was not right.

(ominous music)

- Dispatch center received a call from a woman.

She was concerned because her sister

had not returned from a date,

and she wanted to report her as a missing person.

We probably have 15 missing person reports per year.

The vast majority of them are a juvenile that runs away.

A husband who drives off to see his girlfriend

and doesn't want our assistance.

We realized we probably had something different because she

had small children and she had been gone since Friday.

No one had heard from her, and it was not a usual pattern

for her to have and not contact her family.

- I received this case on April 7th

concerning a missing person.

The first thing I did is I wanted to speak

to the complainant,

which was Ashley Pegram's sister Brandy Chance.

Unusual for most households, they shared a cell phone.

And Ashley was not allowed to leave the residence with it.

And so when she left that night,

she left with nothing but herself.

The phone was still at home.

The next morning, the person who took her out

had sent a text message to that phone, saying,

I hope you're okay, you were really drunk last night.

And I'm sorry for kicking you out of the car

and leaving you at the gas station.

- Yeah, can you hear me?

Hold on, I'm gonna step out the door.

Hold on, I'm gonna step out the door so you can hear me.

(ominous music)

- Mr. Bonilla was not somebody that really had much

interaction with law enforcement prior to this.

He was not a defendant that I had come across at all

in our office here.

- I explained to him that the person he went on a date with

had not returned home yet,

and I would like to speak to him about their date.

He agreed to come in and speak with me, and he did.

He came in that evening at six o'clock in the evening,

and we sat down for an interview.

In his statement, he said that he picked up Ashley

at her house, they went to a bonfire in Goose Creek.

A small party in the back yard.

- I went to school with Edward and Anthony

back in middle school and high school.

I also was the girlfriend of Anthony, and I knew them

for 17 years and dated the brother for four years.

On the night of April 3rd,

we were just kinda having a family get together.

Some of us were out by the bonfire,

and then some of us were in the garage playing ping pong.

Just, you know, family.

We were always family-oriented.

Edward came over,

it was around 9:30 or so that evening, with Ashley.

I'd never met her before.

This was my first evening meeting her,

and I was kinda shocked because Anthony, Edward's brother,

had told me that his brother was bringing a girlfriend.

So I imagined it was his current girlfriend,

which wasn't the case.

- They were there from about 9:30 till almost midnight.

He stated that they left there because, according to him,

Ashley had become very intoxicated.

- I've worked in the medical field for several years,

and I can pretty good at, you know,

reading people and depicting their behavior,

and she didn't seem super intoxicated.

I did see them leave that evening.

It was probably about 11:45 at night.

Ashley was not ready to go.

She actually wanted to stay.

I think she was having a good time.

And Edward was persistent, you know, it was time to go.

And she still hadn't finished her beer.

And he pretty much told her that's okay, just take it,

and went and grabbed the rest of her six-pack

out of the fridge, and they got in the car and left.

- They were driving, she needed to use the restroom.

They pulled into a nearby gas station.

We're gonna pull in.

I'm gonna show you just about the same place.

This is the gas station here in which Mr. Bonilla said

that he brought Ashley to use the restroom.

In fact, he did.

And we confirmed this information by that camera there

that recorded him pulling in and parking in that exact spot.

I have video of Ashley exiting the vehicle and going through

the main doors, going down the hallway.

She went into the ladies room and then exited.

What's significant about that one piece of information,

it gives us a time.

We know exactly what time she was here

to start your timeline from when they left the party

at the back yard to what time they got here

to the next time we have him on a camera.

So it's the beginning of our timeline.

(dramatic music)

- I decided to start taking pictures of it.

This is your car that you took her out in.

I'm just gonna start photographing it.

While in doing so, I noticed on the front right

quarter panel was it looked like the sole of a shoe.

And what stood out was it was small on the bottom

and large on the top.

It was my impression at that time that the only way

that you were going to get this impression on that car

is she'd been laying on her back here

and kicking against the vehicle like that.

The day that I saw that, it was that moment that I believed

that something violent had occurred during that evening.

I have always known at some point in an investigation

who did it, but now you have to prove that he did it.

(ominous music)

- We actually got a bunch of people

up in the neighborhood together,

and we searched around the neighborhood area.

Everyone was worried.

All the family members were worried,

a lot of her friends, my friends.

We were all just really concerned.

You know, just looking for her and not knowing

what you're going to find, like oh my God,

you could actually find her.

That was really hard knowing that you were looking

for your sister's body.

- The location where he told me he let her out,

she's less than a mile and a half from her physical address.

So it kind of seemed odd that she only lives

down the road to the left, why would you stop here?

Right there at the corner of the intersection is a garage.

That garage has two cameras, one facing this road

and the other facing the intersection.

Remember, Mr. Bonilla said that he drove her down that road

to here, pulled into this residential entry way,

let Ashley out to pee on the side of the road.

And then according to his statement,

he drove off and left her.

We were able to go to that garage, make access contact

with the property owner, who gave us access to his cameras.

And I can tell you that at no time

did a vehicle matching Mr. Bonilla's vehicle descriptors

come down this road and pull into here.

(ominous music)

- After the interview, Detective Andy Martin

came to me as a supervisor.

And he was, whether it's old-fashioned police intuition,

whatever it was, he said I think we have a problem.

The story that Bonilla gives Andy Martin

has some holes in it, and a portion of that

comes down to the second stop to use the bathroom.

While not uncommon, why would you stop and use the bathroom

a mile and a half when you're almost home?

It just doesn't make any sense.

We kinda go off in law enforcement the three Ds.

If it's dumb, different, or dangerous, you stop and think.

- When I first interviewed Mr. Bonilla,

one of the things that he told me was he was unemployed.

He said he was not employable

because he had injured his ankle and he couldn't work.

When Miss Diaz came in, she told me that he did work.

You have to wonder why would someone lie to me

about their employment.

What is it about their job that they don't want me to know?

I told him who I was. And I asked him, I said,

does Mr. Bonilla have access to a van?

And his employer said yes.

He goes, he has a take-home van.

And he happened to bring it up.

He says, it's strange you should mention that.

He goes, Mr. Bonilla was on his way there

because there was something in the van

he said he needed to remove.

I told him, I said, please don't let him have access

to that van.

When I arrived, the van was still in its parking spot,

and it was safe.

Same time, Edward Bonilla was there and he approached.

And I looked over and I said,

I thought you said you didn't have a job.

He said, well, I just got this job

I think he said like two days previous.

I looked over at the owner-operator and I said is that true?

And he said, no.

He goes, Edward has worked for me for the past eight months.

(ominous music)

I opened the van door to look inside,

and I saw a lot of red something

on the wall, on the ceiling, and various locations.

- Bit by bit, piece by piece, we pulled items out of the van

and we tested them for presumptive blood.

We got to this picture right here,

and this really kinda stood out to me.

As you can see, this is a polyurethane can with some type

of substance running down the side of the can.

You could also see that it's missing a handle

and that the can is very dented,

so we tested some of the stains on it.

That deep purplish, blueish that we're looking for

which would indicate there was a large presence of blood,

presumptive blood, in that area.

To see this, it really almost sends kind of a chill

down your spine to know that you're sitting somewhere

where someone may have been brutally beaten.

And I say brutally beaten because it would take

a tremendous amount of force to bring the blood to the skin

and then break the skin and then cause enough blood

to transfer over to another object

to create this cast-off pattern.

- We take DNA standards, and that is a known DNA sample,

from the sister and the mother.

And we take known items that belong to Ashley Pegram,

toothbrush, hairbrush, those type items,

and we send 'em up to the lab.

(dramatic music)

- And in a matter of just about four days,

I had the results back with a match to Ashley Pegram.

(somber music)

- Detective Martin told us that he had found blood

and it was a suspected homicide then.

We were just devastated.

Even though we knew in our hearts, you know,

that something terrible was happening to her,

it was still hard to hear it.

Devastating to hear it.

(ominous music)

- We met with the suspect's mother and asked her about

the vehicle that her son went on a date with that night.

She said that it was parked

at a location in north Charleston.

We located the vehicle, I seized it, and had it brought here

to our crime scene lab for them to take a look at it.

(ominous music)

- The amount of blood that's in the van,

there's no way that she was dead when she was moved

from the Sonata to the work van.

Because there would just be no reason

for just the repetitive just blows that had to have occurred

in there to have caused all of the cast-off

and blood spatter that was found pretty much

just all over the back of that work van.

- I was worried about him leaving the area.

And the one thing that I could do I felt

was go ahead and arrest him for lying to me.

- We had a meeting on the 15th, and we had decided

to charge him with obstruction of justice.

He had lied to us on a few different occasions.

- When I went to his apartment,

he was actually dragging a suitcase down the sidewalk

about to enter a rental vehicle, an SUV.

He was about to leave.

I felt the case was strong.

I felt that whenever I tell a jury that I found her blood

in two locations of vehicles that he owned and operated,

I felt that we would get a conviction.

But of course a body is huge.

(somber music)

- Andy Martin was actually really great.

I asked him if he would just give me an update every day.

I said, could you just call me every day

and just let me know something?

I mean, just that phone call every day from him

actually kept me afloat just being able

to hear something back and knowing that someone

was out there doing everything that they could to find her.

- Not having any answers, not knowing.

And I always looked for her to walk down the street.

I was always looking up the street because we always

sat out on the front porch and watched the kids play.

That's some of my fondest memories is sitting on the porch

talking with Brandy and Ashley.

- We're in the apartment complex in which

the murder suspect, Edward Bonilla, lived.

Right there is the apartment that he lived, and you'll see

that it bumps right alongside a large reservoir.

Early on in the investigation when I discovered

that Mr. Bonilla lived here, I was very concerned

that he was gonna dispose of Ashley Pegram's remains

in this body of water.

As you can see, it has alligators in it.

We're so worried about the time that we have elapsed here

that I wouldn't be able to find a body.

The Department of Natural Resources, the game wardens,

they put boats in the water.

They checked the peripheral area as well

as they had a pilot fly over to look for any signs

of human remains and clothing.

We didn't find anything.

- On the 4th about 6:44 a.m. to 7:12 a.m.,

we found that his found went to Harleyville,

which is north of where his residence is.

And it wasn't something that was in his historical records,

so it was kinda out of place.

After, we have GPS coordinates back near his work

when he dropped the work van off.

If you put all the points together, the totality

of all those show him in that same general area.

- The online dating scene is part of this digital world

that we live in.

We give out information, we see information,

but ultimately we all leave this digital footprint.

For example, emails, telephone, PC, laptop content.

All of this can be traced.

Some apps and other online features are more difficult

when they're encrypted and sometimes the police

have difficulties in accessing that information.

But in this digital world,

this digital footprint doesn't disappear.

And sometimes this can be used to help prosecution.

- On the day that he actually picked up Ashley Pegram,

he was texting his girlfriend about what they were gonna eat

and how his day was going

and then about having sex later on when he arrived home.

At the same time, he is texting Ashley Pegram about their

date and who he is and picking her up and that kinda thing.

What it tells me from what you see in that line of texting

is that this is a guy that is of low morals.

He's cheating on his girlfriend.

That's who he is.

But does it scream he's gonna kill this child?

No, I did not see that in a text message.

- From my understanding of Mr. Bonilla,

the way he presented himself was that he had

disregard for females in general, disrespect for women.

And so as a result of that,

it was easy for him to take advantange of women.

(ominous music)

- If you look at the timeline,

Mother's Day is approaching, and that's huge.

I remember telling him in one of my last interviews with him

that if he lets this mother spend this Mother's Day

without her child or knowing where her child is at,

the jury will hang him.

(dramatic music)

- It is a triangular piece of land

really in the middle of nowhere.

You have to take an access road to a frontage road

to there's a little community that's been there

for 200 years way at the end of the road.

And there's some farmland off to the left-hand side

with a triangular piece of woods

kinda poking out into the farmland.

Very remote.

That's the area we're given.

So it's two o'clock on a Friday, and so we make

the determination let's go see what we can find.

Let's go walk it.

(dramatic music)

- We came back out.

I made contact with Low Country Rescue Dogs.

It's a volunteer group here in the local area

that they use their canines that are trained and certified

to search for human remains.

These two ladies deployed their canines.

They were both Labs, one yellow and one black Lab.

And the yellow Lab apparently hit on the gasses

of the decomposition.

They notified the rest of the detectives.

We came up and right there, the lower half,

the visual to the naked eye was a bone which I recognized

to be a coccyx, commonly called the tailbone,

was protruding out of the soil.

Once the body was exhumed, she was naked with exception

of the red bra was wrapped partially around her neck.

And there was another black piece of clothing

that was there and her eyeglasses.

I recognized the eyeglasses from her photo.

Those were the same ones that she has in the photos

that her family had been putting up in the local area.

At that time, I personally believed

without a doubt that was her.

- As we continued to clean the body to examine it closer,

a couple of things became notable and alarming,

including black electrical tape wrapped around

her right wrist and looped several times around her neck.

The significance especially of finding the electrical tape

told us that there was likely foul play.

We saw several areas of discoloration on the scalp,

so these would be consistent with scalp contusions

as a result of blunt force trauma of the head.

Her toxicology testing was positive for two things.

The first was ethanol.

The other drug that was detected in her system

was cyclobenzaprine, which is a muscle relaxant.

- We know from the pathology report there was

a controlled substance, a muscle relaxant, in her system.

Nothing in her background would indicate

that she would ever use any type of controlled substance.

The day before Mother's Day.

You just go down there.

And from the time your daughter left the house,

she was with someone who did not love her.

She spent over 30 days in a swamp, face down in the mud.

Nobody caring for her, nobody loving her.

But as of right now, she is in the protection

of people that do care and do love her.

And I'll have your daughter home for Mother's Day.

- Detective Martin knocked on the door.

And I said, have you found Ashley?

He said, yes, mam, I believe so.

We was devastated.

We were horrified.

I mean, that's something that no one knows

till they go through it.

I mean, just a simple date turned into a murder.

All he had to do was bring her home.

- It took me a minute to get up on that porch

because I didn't want to hear it.

Even though I knew, you know, from the get go

it wasn't gonna end good, I didn't want to hear it.

I still had a little bit of hope that maybe, you know,

she would come home.

(ominous music)

- So she goes to the party.

At some point, they went down into a rural area

probably in the local area here.

And she exited the vehicle to relieve herself,

to use the bathroom to pee.

And it is my belief that he assaulted her at that time.

Now this physical assault was taking place.

I'm past the point of letting you go home.

He thinks she's dead.

He's moved her now into the work van.

It is my opinion that at some point that he's driving

down the road, she made some kinda sign of life.

At this point, he goes to the back where she is laying down.

And I know she was in the back of the van not only

from the blood, but I have that imprint of the same sandal

that I found on the front right quarter panel

of that vehicle.

I have a photograph of that print on the top of a paint can.

She was in there.

He reaches down and he grabbed a one-gallon can of stain,

and he beat that child to death in the back of that van.

(dramatic music)

- By the time we went to court,

kinda regardless of what he ended up testifying to,

I mean I felt pretty confident

that we had a very strong case against him.

And ultimately the story he presented to the jury

was that yet again she had been drinking,

had gotten belligerent, they had gotten out of the vehicle,

and that point in time she had basically

tried to assault him.

And he indicated that he ended up at that point in time

putting her in a bear hug from behind and couldn't remember

if he had kinda cut off her airway with his arm

or put his hand over her mouth.

But ultimately implying at that point in time

that she had suffocated and died as a result of that.

- The trial was awful.

A lot of the things that he said I just did not believe.

Just sitting there kinda shaking my head, you know,

and just balling because I'm hearing these details of him

leaving her on the side of the road dead

and picking her up and putting her in various vehicles

and transporting her to other areas and leaving her

on the side of the road dead again.

That was really hard to hear.

- When we heard and saw what he had done,

there's no words that could explain how we felt.

And he got up on that stand and said what he did.

I mean, we knew when he was saying it

that it was just not true.

You know it wasn't true.

It didn't even sound like Ashley.

- Nobody could believe that this happened

and that Edward had done it.

I would've never imagined Edward to commit

such a brutal, horrible crime in the manner that he did.

You know, I think about it often, if not daily,

and it just still baffles me because again I went

to school with him at high school, and I just never

pictured him to do something of this magnitude.

- In court, he was very indifferent.

He sat there almost stoic.

He never cared, never showed any emotion,

apology, or grief for what he had done

to this 28-year-old mother of three, daughter, and sister.

The only time I saw an emotion out of him

was whenever the sentence was rendered that he would

do the rest of his life in a South Carolina prison.

(dramatic music)

Ashley Pegram comes from a family that, you know,

as close as they are in a rural area,

I don't think they would've ever met had it not been for

a dating site that allowed them to meet.

- It sounds like Ashley took a lot of risks

in meeting this person online.

Ultimately, she hadn't got to know the person when we need

to really get to know the person, not just that profile.

Because they could be anybody.

Ashley didn't plan for those dangers,

so I'd encourage anybody to think about their backup plan,

make sure they tell a friend,

make sure they know where it is that they're going,

and ultimately do your research on the person

that you're meeting.

(somber music)

- I cry just about every day still thinking about her.

Just the loss is such a huge loss.

You know, I'm supposed to live the rest of my life with her.

You know, we're supposed to watch our kids grow up together

and she's supposed to be there through old age.

I'm never gonna see what she looks like when she's older.

I'm never gonna, you know, she's missing out on her kids.

- Every day I miss Ashley.

Not a day goes by that I don't think

I see her in there in the kitchen washing dishes.

You can tell she's gone.

There's a different feel to the house now.

It's not the same, it'll never be the same.

- You know, a lot of people don't ever get answers.

They never find out what happened to their loved one.

So I was glad that we were able to solve it

and he was gonna pay for what he had done.

So just relief.

(dramatic music)