EDGECOMBE COUNTY, NC -- A cross state crime spree and manhunt are over. It spanned three counties and ended in Edgecombe County. A teenager is dead, a woman is in the hospital with a gunshot wound, another woman was sexually assaulted and the man investigators believe is responsible, is dead.
It started Saturday night around 10 p.m. in Rowan County, in Richfield about an hour outside of Charlotte.
"My wife heard a noise last night and it sounded like a gunshot," said Robert Simpson, who lives near 4095 Richfield Road.
When police arrived to that home they found a busted window, two women shot and a third hiding in the closet, Julia Moody. She was holding her two baby boys.
One of the women shot was Moody's 17-year-old sister, Jennifer Merriman. She did not survive. The second victim is 54-year-old Bernice Merriman, Moody's aunt. She is expected to survive, Investigators say the shooter was Moody's estranged husband, and father of those babies, 33-year-old Montannez Moody. The two were scheduled to be in court Monday for a domestic violence order against him.
Just after that shooting, reports of Moody surfaced more than an hour away in High Point, in Guilford County. A man there identified as Moody kidnapped a couple at gunpoint. The man who said he was kidnapped says Moody eventually dumped him and took off with his girlfriend.
Just after 9 a.m. Sunday investigators were then led to Pinetops in Edgecombe County, almost three hours from High Point. They received a call from a woman who said she had been raped. That information led authorities to farmland and a swampy area near Highway 43 around Southwest Edgecombe High School. Authorities say the woman had been with Moody for more than eight hours in this area. She was able to escape and run to a nearby home for help after he passed out in his car, investigators believe from cocaine. Investigators found his car and tracked Moody down with dogs. On their trail they found a gun, drugs and eventually Moody, dead from a possible overdose. He was face down in water.
The woman he kidnapped was treated at Vidant Edgecombe Hospital.