On the evening of April 15, 2004, a fifteen-year-old girl named Silene Yasmin Eaddy slipped out of her home on Fountain Lake Road in Columbia, South Carolina. Her neighbor saw her go and called out. Erica — as her family and friends knew her — didn’t stop. She said she was heading to visit someone around the corner.
She never came home.
Thirty-four hours later, firefighters responding to a brush fire on an isolated stretch of road in lower Richland County found her body in the brush off Pincushion Road and Montgomery Lane. She had been savagely beaten. The medical examiner’s autopsy revealed something that has defined this case ever since: soot was found in her lungs. Silene Yasmin Eaddy was still breathing when the fire was lit.
Twenty-two years later, no one has ever been arrested for her murder. No person of interest has ever been publicly named. And someone, somewhere, is still living with the answer.
Who Erica Was
Before we talk about what happened to her, we need to talk about who she was. Because Erica Eaddy was not a case number. She was not a cautionary tale. She was a person, fully and specifically, and she deserves to be remembered that way.
Erica was born in Lexington, South Carolina, and entered the foster care system as a young child alongside her siblings. At age three, she was taken in by Brenda McCoy and Frederick Eaddy. Two years later, the adoption was finalized. She had a mother, a father, a home, and a name.
By every account, she was a joyful child. Brenda remembered her trying to cook for the family, dressing her little brother Eugene in a suit to greet people at the door. A volunteer coordinator named Mary Revels, who worked with Erica in a community reading program, remembered sitting with her — reading, writing, drawing. Erica told her she wanted to become an artist someday. She sang in her family’s community gospel choir. She danced. She filled sketchbooks. She was the girl her friends came to with their problems — the one who always had something to say that helped, even when she was struggling to apply that same wisdom to her own life.
She was also, in those final months, a girl in pain. Her adoptive father Frederick had died of a heart attack when she was five years old — and Brenda would say, years later, that Erica never, ever got over it. As she moved into her teenage years, that grief became a search. She wanted to find her biological mother. She wanted to know where she came from. But the records weren’t accessible, and no one could tell her where to look, and that not-knowing sat on top of everything else she was carrying.
She had been referred to Alston-Wilkes Youth Services School — an alternative program for at-risk youth — in February 2004, after an incident at Dreher High School. But by all accounts she was thriving there. Still in ROTC, still dancing, well-behaved since enrollment. Whatever was pulling at her wasn’t happening inside those school walls.
She had started spending time with people Brenda couldn’t reach. She had started saying things that suggested she was scared — that she had gotten into a situation with a group of people and didn’t know how to get out. She didn’t say it directly. She didn’t ask for help in a way that made the danger clear. But she said enough that Brenda knew something wasn’t right.
“I knew she fell in with the wrong crowd of people, so I knew in my heart something was not right,” Brenda said. “I think in some ways, she was afraid because of some of the things she would say, but then she didn’t know how to get out of her situation.”
She was fifteen years old. She was searching for something solid. And she was afraid. And those things, together, put her on Fountain Lake Road on the evening of April 15th, 2004, walking away from her house toward something none of us have ever been allowed to fully see.
The 34 Hours
The timeline of Erica’s final hours is one of the most frustrating and haunting aspects of this case — not because it is complicated, but because it is so stubbornly, deliberately incomplete.
She left her house between 7:00 and 7:30 PM on Thursday, April 15th. She said she was going to visit a neighbor around the corner. That neighbor has never been publicly identified by investigators — not in 2004, not in 2005, not in any of the anniversary appeals or cold case profiles that have followed in the years since. Twenty-two years later, that name remains protected.
At 5:30 AM on Saturday, April 17th, firefighters found her body.
In between those two points — roughly 34 hours — almost nothing is known publicly. Investigators have confirmed they believe she was murdered by someone she knew. They have confirmed tire tracks were found at the scene. They have confirmed the fire was set deliberately to destroy evidence. They have confirmed that people in the Lower Richland community have information they have not shared.
That is the sum total of what has been made public about those 34 hours. After twenty-two years and nearly 100 tips.
The Investigation: A Timeline
April 2004: Richland County Sheriff’s Department opens a homicide investigation. Investigators go door to door, visit churches, set up driver’s license checkpoints. Sheriff Leon Lott states publicly that he believes people in the Lower Richland community have knowledge they are not sharing.
Spring 2005: The case is officially transferred to the Richland County Sheriff’s Department Cold Case Unit. Lt. Stan Smith and Investigator Eric Barnes take over. Smith notes that time has loosened some of the fear in the community — people are beginning to talk, slowly. Barnes says: “This thing is still solvable. We need bits of information that’s going to push it over the top.”
August 2005: Sheriff Lott makes a formal public appeal specifically to the Lower Richland community, urging anyone with knowledge of Erica’s death to come forward.
September 2008: South Carolina launches a cold case playing card program — decks sold at prison commissaries statewide for $1.66 a pack. Erica becomes the Three of Diamonds. About 30 family members of victims featured on the cards attend the press unveiling. No substantial leads result from the program.
2015: Investigators say they are very close to solving the case. They need one more piece of evidence or one more person willing to testify.
May 2017: Lead investigator Gene Mincey gives the most detailed public account of the investigation to date. Four cold case investigators are now assigned to the case. Tire tracks confirmed at the scene. Mincey states: “She, evidently, was hanging out with the wrong people, which we found out to be many.”
April 30, 2020: Brenda McCoy dies. She never received answers about her daughter’s murder.
February 2025: Investigator Dottie Cronise makes a renewed public appeal. Nearly 100 tips have been received. None have connected to the physical evidence. The case remains open and active.
July 2025: Erica’s stepmother Sonya Tucker and sister Candice speak publicly for the first time in years, saying the family believes Erica knew her killer and asking investigators to keep pursuing the case.
Brenda
No account of this case is complete without spending real time on Brenda McCoy.
Brenda chose Erica when she was three years old. She chose her again at five when the adoption was finalized. She chose her every time she went after her on foot through the neighborhood, every time she filed a missing persons report, every prayer she said in an empty house waiting for her daughter to come home.
After Erica died, she kept her ashes in an ornate black and gold urn in the china cabinet — at her son Eugene’s request. He had picked out the urn himself. He had asked his mother to keep it where she could see it, where she could talk to her. So Brenda did. She talked to her daughter. She told her what she wished her life would have been.
In 2005, she gave her first newspaper interview. In 2017, she spoke again — at 65 years old, thirteen years into the not-knowing. She said: “It’s never gonna be easier because I don’t know what happened. Now, if I find out what happened, then I can kind of rest my mind.”
She also said: “They took a part of me, and they did it and left her there.”
Brenda McCoy died on April 30, 2020, without ever receiving the answer she spent sixteen years waiting for. That is not a footnote. It is one of the central injustices of this story, and it deserves to be named as such.
The Letter
Three weeks after Erica’s murder, a woman named Angela Oliver wrote a letter to the editor of The State newspaper in Columbia. She was responding to coverage she felt had focused too much on how Erica had lived — the running away, the expulsion, the wrong crowd — and not enough on the fact that a child had been murdered and her killer was free.
She wrote: “If we all were judged by the first 15 or 21 years of our lives, I’ll bet we would not look so good either.”
She asked the paper to focus on finding the murderers of this child. Less on how she lived. More on who did this to her.
That letter was written in 2004. We are still having to say the same thing in 2026. Erica was not a cautionary tale. She was a fifteen-year-old girl who had survived more loss than most adults ever face, who was trying to find her footing in a world that kept shifting underneath her, who was loved completely by a mother who is now also gone.
She deserved better than she got. She still does.
Where It Stands
As of 2026, the murder of Silene Yasmin “Erica” Eaddy remains unsolved.
The Richland County Sheriff’s Department Cold Case Unit continues to carry the case. The tip line is active. A cash reward is available. Investigator Dottie Cronise is still working it — still going back to the crime scene photographs, still waiting for the tip that connects.
Erica’s sister Candice has a son who will never meet his aunt. That is the legacy of an unsolved murder. It doesn’t just take the person. It takes every version of them that was still coming.
Twenty-two years is long enough.
How You Can Help
If you have any information about the murder of Silene “Erica” Eaddy, please reach out:
Richland County Sheriff’s Department Cold Case Unit
1–803-576-3000
SC Crime Stoppers
1-888-CRIME-SC (1-888-274-6372)
Tips can be made completely anonymously. A cash reward is available for information leading to an arrest.
If you are currently incarcerated in a South Carolina facility and you remember the Three of Diamonds — the card with the photo of a fifteen-year-old girl and a date in April 2004 — that tip line is still active.
Listen to This Episode
“The 3 of Diamonds from SC: The Murder of Silene ‘Erica’ Eaddy” is available now on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or wherever you listen to Vanished Voices.
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Resources:
Brundrett, R. (2008, September 17). Special cards give police ace in the hole. The State, p. A1. https://www.newspapers.com/image/754809746/
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