A grieving mother lashed out at her daughter’s killer when they came face-to-face with one another at a convenience store in Texas.
Darci Bass had been buying groceries at a local convenience store in the city of Hemphill, near the Louisiana border, when she found herself standing opposite the man accused of murdering her 19-year-old daughter, Livye Lewis.
The encounter was anything but calm. Overcome with grief and rage, Bass hurled four heart-wrenching words at Matthew Edgar, the man who stood accused of her murder: ‘You killed my daughter!’
‘When he came in the door, I just started throwing whatever I could at him and went for him,’ Bass told CBS News as she recounted the stomach-turning moment.
Lewis died on Halloween 2020 with her body dead on the side of a remote road in Hemphill in the early hours of the morning.
She was found hunched over the steering wheel of her car in a chilling scene having been shot in the neck by a rifle.
Investigators immediately suspected that Lewis knew her killer.
‘She was just sitting there with her legs crossed,’ said Sabine County Sheriff’s Investigator J.P. MacDonough to 48 Hours. ‘
That indicates to me she was not afraid. She was comfortable with whoever she was speaking with.’
Not far from Lewis’s body, investigators found 23-year-old Matthew Edgar, her boyfriend, curled up in the fetal position behind her car.
Next to him lay the rifle that quickly became the focus of the investigation.
Bloodied but unharmed, Edgar was rushed to the hospital, where MacDonough questioned him.
‘When was the last time you saw Livye?’ MacDonough asked.
‘Tonight,’ Edgar replied – although he claimed to not have any memory as to how he ended up at the scene covered in blood.
‘You don’t know how you ended up on the ground behind the car … with the dead girl in it?’ MacDonough pressed.
‘No, sir,’ Edgar responded. ‘I have no clue.’
Despite Edgar’s sudden ‘amnesia’, his arrest seemed inevitable.
But his defense attorney, Rob Hughes, challenged the case, pointing out significant gaps in the evidence.
‘There were no fingerprints taken or DNA lifted off the gun,’ Hughes argued.
This uncertainty left room for doubt, even as investigators remained convinced of Edgar’s guilt.
As the investigation stalled, the pandemic further delayed justice.
With courts shut down and no grand juries convened, Texas law required Edgar be released on bail.
For mother, Bass, it was this confluence of circumstances that months later saw her run into Edgar in her neighborhood convenience store and her simmering grief boil over into rage.
‘I just remember saying, “You killed my daughter … you killed my daughter,”‘ Bass recalled.
The verbal confrontation then turned physical as the pair walked out into the parking lot.
Bass grabbed a chain from Edgar’s truck and smashed it against his windshield.
‘She loved you!’ Bass cried in anguish, still desperate for answers. ‘She loved you and she was good to you and your kids and to your family. What made you think this was the answer to anything that was going on?’
Edgar filed a complaint, leading to charges against Bass for assault, retaliation, and criminal mischief although public outrage and her anguish as a grieving mother led to the charges being dropped.
Finally, in March 2021, justice seemed within reach. A grand jury indicted Edgar for murder, and his trial began.
On the fourth day of his trial, he allowed the battery on his ankle monitor to die and made a run for it.
Authorities went ahead with the trial in his absence with the jury finding him guilty of murdering Lewis.
Edgar managed to evade being caught for 11 months but when he was finally apprehended, he was sentenced to 99 years in prison, with the possibility of parole after 30 years.