Jonathan Lemuel Lara, 26, was found dead in the back room of the Greenville Radio Shack on June 26, 1999. He had been restrained to a chair with flex ties and stabbed in the neck with a screwdriver; a co-worker discovered the body the next day after finding the store locked with a closed sign during business hours. The killing went unsolved for nearly six months.

In December 1999 investigators linked Lara’s death to a string of violent killings when Karen Moore Hayden, 30, was found murdered in a Greenville flower shop on December 22 with her throat slit. The suspect was identified as Dallen Forrest Bounds. On December 23 Bounds killed his ex-girlfriend Sandra Roberts Ott and her ex-husband Timothy Ott in Easley, then took two women hostage before dying by a self-inflicted gunshot wound during the standoff.

Forensic evidence recovered from Bounds’s apartment later tied him to the murders of Lara and Hayden. Authorities arrested Bounds’s roommate Casandra Cae Laster and charged her with accessory after the fact to felony murder for withholding information about Bounds’s involvement. A jury convicted Laster and she received a 15-year sentence; her 2003 appeal was dismissed. Did anyone in Greenville at the time notice anything unusual about the Radio Shack or its staff in the weeks before June 26, 1999?