PART 1

The silence was the first thing that hit me. It wasn’t a peaceful silence, the kind you find in a library or a church. It was heavy, suffocating. It was the kind of silence that screams that something is fundamentally, irrevocably wrong.

My name is Heidi. And on the afternoon of June 9th, that silence was the only thing greeting me as I stood outside my daughter’s apartment building in Alton, Illinois.

Lisa was twenty-two. She was my baby, but she was also about to have a baby of her own. Eight months pregnant. We called the little one “Baby Bean.” Lisa hadn’t settled on a name yet, but “Bean” stuck. It was perfect. Small, growing, full of potential life. Lisa was glowing, despite everything. Despite the stress, despite the heat of an Illinois June, she was ready to be a mother.

But I hadn’t heard from her in fifteen hours.

Fifteen hours might not seem like a lifetime to some. People get busy. Phones die. Nap times turn into deep sleeps. But Lisa and I? We were tethered. We texted constantly. Good mornings, funny memes, complaints about the humidity, updates on Bean’s kicking. When Lisa went silent, the world went tilted on its axis for me.

I checked my phone again as I killed the engine of my car. 1:00 P.M. The screen stared back at me, blank. No “Hey Mom.” No “Bean is awake.” Just the last text from the night before, a text that had been gnawing at the lining of my stomach all night.

“I’m trying to figure it out.”

That was it. That was the last thing she said to me.

I stepped out of the car. The air in Alton was thick, sticking to my skin instantly. It was a quiet street, usually. Working-class, decent people. The kind of place where neighbors knew which cars belonged in the lot and which ones didn’t. But today, the atmosphere felt charged, like the air before a tornado touches down.

There was construction going on nearby. The rhythmic banging of hammers, the grinding of machinery. It should have been normal, but it grated on my nerves. I saw a large red dumpster parked on the street, overflowing with debris. Drywall, wood scraps. I looked at it for a second too long, a strange shiver running down my spine, before turning away. I didn’t know then what lay inside it. I didn’t know that a construction worker had already found something in there that would haunt him forever.

I walked up to the building. Apartment 4. Second floor.

I climbed the stairs, my hand gripping the railing so hard my knuckles turned white. Please, Lisa. Just be asleep. Just be mad at me. Just be anything but what I think you are.

I reached her door. It was unlocked.

That was the second strike. Lisa was careful. especially lately. Especially with him. She wouldn’t just leave the door unlocked.

I pushed it open. “Lisa?”

My voice sounded small, swallowed up by the apartment. The living room was still. Too still. The curtains were drawn, filtering the midday sun into a dusty, golden haze.

“Lisa? It’s Mom.”

I took a step inside. The air conditioning was humming, a low drone that masked the sound of my own heartbeat thumping in my ears. I walked down the short hallway toward the bedroom. The door was ajar.

I pushed it open.

And then, my world ended.

I can’t tell you exactly what my brain registered first. The human mind has a way of protecting you, of shattering the image into jagged, unrecognizable pieces so you don’t go insane instantly.

I saw her. She was on the floor.

“Lisa?”

I rushed forward. She was lying there, wrapped in a sheet, something covering her head. It looked like a turban. A towel, maybe?

I fell to my knees beside her. “Baby? Lisa, wake up.”

I reached out to touch her. Her skin… oh God, her skin. It was cold. Not cool from the AC. Cold. The kind of cold that sinks into your fingertips and travels straight to your heart. It was the cold of absence.

“Lisa!” I screamed it then. I grabbed her shoulders to shake her, to wake her up from this terrible, sick joke.

But when I moved her… the towel shifted.

And there was nothing underneath.

I didn’t understand. I physically could not process the visual data my eyes were sending to my brain. Where is she? Where is her face? Where is my daughter’s smile?

The scream that tore out of my throat didn’t sound human. It sounded like an animal caught in a trap, a raw, guttural sound of pure, unadulterated horror. I scrambled backward, crab-walking across the carpet, my breath coming in short, hyperventilating gasps.

I ran. I ran out of that room, out of that apartment, stumbling down the stairs into the blinding sunlight. I collapsed on the front steps, my body shaking so violently I couldn’t stand.

Neighbors were coming out now. They had heard me. I saw faces—worried, confused, terrified.

I fumbled for my phone. My fingers were numb, useless sausages. I hit 911.

“911, what is your emergency?”

“My daughter…” I choked, the words vomiting out of me. “My daughter… her head. My daughter’s chopped my head off!”

I was incoherent. I was saying my head. I meant hers. I meant Lisa’s. But in that moment, I felt like I had died too.

“Ma’am, calm down. What is going on?”

“My girlfriend’s daughter… killed… she’s dead!” I was babbling, mixing up words, my brain misfiring. “She’s decapitated! He killed her!”

“Who, ma’am? Who killed her?”

“DeAndre,” I spat the name. The name tasted like bile. “DeAndre Holloway.”

I didn’t need a detective. I didn’t need fingerprints. I didn’t need DNA. I knew. A mother knows. I knew the darkness that had been swirling around Lisa for two years. I knew the monster she had tried to love, the monster she thought she could fix.

As the sirens wailed in the distance, getting closer, I sat on those concrete steps, hugging my knees, rocking back and forth. And my mind didn’t stay there in the horror of the present. It snapped back. Back to twenty-four hours ago. Back to the beginning of the end.

To understand why my beautiful, pregnant daughter was lying headless in her bedroom, you have to understand the two years of hell that led us here. You have to understand DeAndre.

DeAndre Holloway was twenty-two, just like Lisa. He was charming when he wanted to be, quiet when he didn’t. But there was a void in him. A darkness. He had a past—broken home, bouncing between relatives, homelessness. Lisa, my sweet, animal-loving Lisa who organized fundraisers for shelters when she was ten, she saw him like a stray dog. She thought if she just loved him enough, if she just gave him a home and a family, he wouldn’t bite.

But he didn’t just bite. He devoured.

Their relationship was a rollercoaster of toxicity. High highs and abysmal lows. He isolated her. He beat her. She would come into work at Dairy Queen with black eyes, making up stories about her dog jumping on her. Everyone knew. Her boss knew. I knew.

“He’s hurting you, Lisa,” I’d tell her, begging her to leave.

“Mom, he’s just going through a lot,” she’d say, her voice small. “He doesn’t mean it. He cries afterward. He hates himself for it.”

The cycle of abuse is a trap made of steel. And now, she was pregnant. She thought the baby—our little Bean—would fix him. She thought becoming a father would give him the purpose he lacked.

But two days ago, on June 7th, the cracks had turned into canyons.

DeAndre had gone missing. Just vanished. Lisa came home from work and he wasn’t there. No note, no text. Just gone.

She texted me that night, terrified.

“You think he’d just leave like this?”

I remember staring at that text. Part of me, the selfish part, hoped he had. Please, I prayed. Please let him be gone. Let him run away and never come back.

I texted her back: “If this is how it’s meant to happen, at least it was non-violent. You’ve been set free.”

I believed that. I wanted to believe that. I thought, This is it. The trash took itself out.

But Lisa… she couldn’t see it. “I’m not seeing it that way yet,” she replied. She was heartbroken. She felt abandoned. She told me she had reacted badly to him earlier that day. She blamed herself. Victims always do.

“I broke a razor down and cut my leg cuz I told him I was just going to kill myself,” she confessed to me.

My heart broke reading that. My strong, vibrant girl, reduced to self-harm because she couldn’t make a broken man whole. “Why?” I asked her.

“Cuz I just can’t get it right.”

That night, she drove around at 1:30 in the morning, too anxious to sleep. Waiting for him. Waiting for the sound of his key in the lock.

He didn’t come.

The next morning, June 8th—yesterday—she went through the motions. She washed her work uniform. She texted me: “I still feel like he’ll show up, but I can’t tell.”

She started acting detective. She messaged her landlord, asking him to check the cameras. She messaged DeAndre’s family. She was frantic.

And then, the call came.

DeAndre’s uncle called her. He said he had DeAndre. He said he was bringing him back. He said everything was “fine.”

I remember the dread that washed over me when she told me. He wasn’t gone. He was coming back.

“With his uncle, that’s who called anyway,” I texted her, trying to keep my voice steady through the screen. “Where does his uncle live?”

I was angry. I was so angry. I told her, “And of course it’s your fault. That and you better be careful so he doesn’t give you something that Bean will catch.”

I was harsh. I regret that text every single second of every single day. I was trying to snap her out of it. I was trying to make her see that he was dangerous, that he was careless with her heart and her body.

She ignored the warning. She just wanted him home.

At 9:11 P.M. last night, the cameras—the ones the police would later show me—caught them. Lisa’s black car pulling into the lot. The two of them walking into the apartment.

I texted her one last time at 10:49 P.M.

“You okay?”

I stared at the bubbles, waiting for them to appear. Waiting for the “Yeah, we’re talking,” or “He’s asleep.”

Nothing.

I fell asleep with the phone in my hand, haunting dreams flickering behind my eyelids.

I didn’t know that while I was sleeping, just miles away, hell was breaking loose in Apartment 4.

I didn’t know that the neighbors downstairs were listening to the ceiling shake. They heard the muffled yelling. Not screaming—muffled. Like someone with a hand over their mouth. Or someone who knew that screaming would only make it worse.

They heard the thuds.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

One neighbor later told the police it sounded like someone chopping wood.

Chopping wood. In a second-floor apartment.

Can you imagine? Can you imagine hearing that sound and thinking, They’re just fighting again? I don’t blame them. I can’t. They were scared too. But the image of it… the rhythm of it…

Thump… pause… Thump.

And then, silence.

The screaming stopped. The shaking stopped.

At midnight, the camera caught him. DeAndre.

He walked out of the apartment. He was alone.

He wasn’t frantic. He wasn’t running. He walked calmly to Lisa’s car. He tried the handle—locked. He’d forgotten the keys.

So he went back inside. Back into the room with… with what was left of her.

He came back out a few minutes later. He had changed his clothes. He was wearing a face covering.

And he was carrying something.

A white laundry basket.

He held it with both hands. It looked heavy. He didn’t go to the car this time. He walked behind the building, past the smoke shop, toward the dark, quiet street where the construction dumpster sat.

The same dumpster I had looked at when I parked my car.

He threw the basket in.

He threw my daughter’s head in the trash.

Sitting on those steps, surrounded by police tape and the flashing red and blue lights, I didn’t know the details yet. I didn’t know about the basket. I just knew she was gone.

A detective approached me. His face was grim. He looked like a man who had seen too much evil in his life, but this… this had shaken him.

“Mrs. Noel?”

I looked up. “Did you find him? Did you find the animal who did this?”

“We’re looking,” he said. “We have units everywhere. But we need to ask you… did Lisa have enemies? Was anyone else—”

“Stop,” I whispered. “It was him. He told me.”

The detective paused. “He told you?”

“He told Lisa,” I corrected, tears streaming down my face, hot and stinging. “Last month. He was staying with me. He got scary. I kicked him out. And as he left… he called Lisa.”

I looked the detective dead in the eye.

“He said, ‘I love you guys, but I’m coming back to kill you.’”

I shivered, despite the heat. “We thought he was just talking. Just angry talk. You know? Men say things.”

“He meant it,” the detective said softly.

“He meant it,” I repeated.

And then, another officer walked up. He was holding a radio. static crackled.

“Dispatch to Unit One. We found a… we found an item of interest in the dumpster on the north side.”

The detective’s eyes flickered to me, then away. “What item?”

The voice on the radio was shaky. “Sir… it’s a laundry basket. There’s… there’s human remains inside.”

The world tilted again. The white noise in my ears turned into a roar.

He hadn’t just killed her. He had taken her apart. He had tried to erase her.

I stood up. My legs felt like jelly, but a new feeling was rising up through the grief. A burning, scorching fire.

“Find him,” I growled. “Find him before he disappears again.”

PART 2

The hours that followed were a blur of red tape and blue lights. I was stuck in a nightmare where the clocks had stopped, but the world kept spinning frantically around me.

I sat in the back of an ambulance, a shock blanket draped over my shoulders despite the sweltering heat. I wasn’t injured, not physically. But the paramedics insisted. Maybe they just didn’t know what else to do with a mother whose daughter was currently being cataloged as a crime scene upstairs.

The detective, a man named Miller, came back to me. “Mrs. Noel, we need to find DeAndre. Any idea where he would go? Does he have friends? Family nearby?”

“His mom,” I said, my voice raspy. “He always runs to his mom when he’s in trouble. Or his sister, PJ.”

Miller nodded, radioing it in. “We’re on it.”

While they hunted him, I was trapped in my own mind, replaying the last two years. I tried to find the exact moment I should have intervened more forcefully. Was it the first black eye? The time they lived in a tent by the lake? The time he broke her nose?

I remembered Lisa’s face the last time I saw her. She looked tired. Not just pregnancy tired—soul tired. She loved him so much it defied logic. She loved him with a desperation that terrified me. “He’s broken, Mom,” she’d say. “I can fix him.”

But you can’t fix something that doesn’t want to be whole. You just cut yourself on the jagged edges.

As the sun began to dip lower, casting long shadows across the street, the pieces of DeAndre’s escape began to come together. The police were thorough. They were pulling footage, interviewing neighbors, tracking phones. Later, they would tell me exactly what he did after he threw my daughter away like garbage.

And knowing… knowing was almost worse than not knowing.

At 2:30 A.M., while I was tossing and turning in my bed, DeAndre was banging on his mother’s door.

He had driven Lisa’s car there. My daughter’s black car. The car she had saved up for. He parked it right out front, bold as brass.

His sister, PJ, was asleep. But her sister—DeAndre’s other sister—heard the pounding. She told police later that it scared her to death. She looked out the window and saw him pacing the driveway, manic, like a caged animal.

They let him in. They didn’t know. How could they? To them, he was just their troubled brother, probably fighting with his girlfriend again.

He spent the night there. He slept in the house of his family while my daughter lay cooling in hers.

The next morning—the morning I would find Lisa—DeAndre woke up and went into the bathroom. PJ walked past and saw him standing there, scissors in hand.

He was cutting off his dreadlocks.

He had grown those locks for two years. He was proud of them. They were his identity. And now, he was hacking them off, watching them fall into the sink.

“Why are you cutting your hair?” PJ asked him, confused.

He didn’t look at her. He just kept snipping. “Fresh start.”

Fresh start.

The audacity of it made me want to scream until my throat bled. He was shedding his skin. He was trying to become someone else. Someone who hadn’t just committed an atrocity.

He took a shower. He washed Lisa off of him.

When he came out, he asked his mom for clothes. He wouldn’t put his own back on. He gathered up his hoodie, his pants—the clothes he wore when he killed her—and he took them outside. He stuffed them into the trash can by the curb.

He was erasing himself.

Then, he did something even stranger. He walked into the kitchen where his grandmother was cooking breakfast. He sat down. He ate.

And then he handed her a stack of plastic cards.

“Here,” he mumbled.

His grandmother looked at them. “DeAndre, why do you have Lisa’s ID? Why do you have her debit card?”

He stared at the table. “I’m gonna get it back to her.”

“And these?” She held up two keys. Lisa’s apartment keys.

“I found them on the ground,” he lied. “I’m gonna get them back to her.”

He was disassociating. Or maybe he was just acting. I don’t know which is worse. He was handing off the trophies of his kill to his own grandmother, implicating her in his madness.

At noon—right around the time I was pulling up to Lisa’s apartment—DeAndre stood up.

“I’m going to cut some grass,” he announced.

“Where?” his mom asked.

“Just… grass.”

And he walked out the door. He left Lisa’s car with a handwritten “FOR SALE” sign in the window—another frantic, bizarre attempt to distance himself—and he took off on foot.

Back at the crime scene, the reality of what had happened was becoming physical.

A construction worker, a man whose name I never caught but whose face I will never forget, approached the police line. He looked pale, shaken. He was holding something wrapped in a rag.

I watched from the ambulance steps as he spoke to a detective. The detective’s face went white.

Later, I learned what he found.

He had gone to the dumpster—that red dumpster I had walked past—to throw away some drywall. And he saw it.

A knife.

It wasn’t a weapon of war. It wasn’t a hunting knife. It was a serrated pairing knife. A kitchen knife. Short, with teeth.

The handle was covered in blood. The blade was caked in it.

He had picked it up by the blade, confused, before the horror set in.

“It looked like a female’s clothes in there too,” he told the police, his voice trembling on the recording I’d hear later. “And shoes. Slippers. They were red… with blood.”

He had found the laundry basket.

The police swarmed the dumpster. They cordoned off the entire block. They treated that trash bin with the reverence of a holy site because inside it lay the most important part of my daughter.

I remember sitting there, watching them work, and feeling a strange detachment. It was too much. The human mind has a circuit breaker, and mine had tripped. I couldn’t feel the grief anymore. I just felt a cold, hard need for resolution.

Where is he?

The sun set. The streetlights flickered on. The neighborhood, usually so quiet, was alive with the whispers of neighbors and the crackle of police radios.

Then, at 1:45 A.M.—early morning of June 10th—the call came in.

It wasn’t Alton PD who found him. It was the Gillespie Police Department, a town miles away.

They had picked up a “John Doe” walking down the side of the road that afternoon. He was acting strange. No ID. Refused to give his name.

They arrested him for possession of cannabis. A minor charge. They had no idea they had a monster in their holding cell.

Detective Miller came over to me. “We got him, Heidi. We think we got him.”

“Is he alive?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Good,” I said. And I meant it. Death was too easy. I wanted him to live. I wanted him to remember.

The footage of his arrest is something out of a psychological horror movie.

He was in the interrogation room in Gillespie. He was handcuffed to a bench. And he was unraveling.

He wouldn’t sit down. He paced back and forth, the chain rattling against the metal bench.

“Sit down,” the officer said, tiredly.

“I can’t,” DeAndre snapped. “I’m handcuffed. I can’t do anything.”

“You can sit.”

“Why? You scared of me?” DeAndre taunted him. His eyes were wide, wild. “You scared of me? Do it. Tase me. Do it!”

He was goading them. He wanted a fight. He wanted pain. Maybe he thought pain would drown out the noise in his head.

He started laughing then. A high, breathless laugh that had no humor in it. He banged his head against the wall. Thud. Thud. Just like the thuds the neighbors heard in the apartment.

“Come get me out!” he screamed at the ceiling. “I thought you’d be here to get me out!”

“Who?” the officer asked. “Who’s your folks?”

“Don’t worry about it!”

He was waiting for someone to save him. Maybe his mom. Maybe Lisa. Maybe he had forgotten that the only person who would have ever come to save him was the one he had just destroyed.

The Alton investigators arrived in Gillespie the next morning. They brought a warrant for his DNA, his fingerprints. They brought the weight of a double murder charge.

They sat him down. “DeAndre, we know who you are. We know what happened in Apartment 4.”

DeAndre looked at them, his face a mask of blank indifference. “I want to go to work,” he said.

“Work?” the detective asked. “Where do you work?”

He didn’t answer. “I’m disassociated,” he mumbled. “I saw a doctor once. I got pills.”

He was playing the insanity card early. Or maybe he really was gone. It didn’t matter to me. Crazy or not, evil is evil.

“I want my lawyer,” he said finally.

And just like that, the steel trap slammed shut. The interview was over.

He was charged on June 13th. Two counts of first-degree murder. Two counts of intentional homicide of an unborn child. Concealment of a homicidal death.

The bail was set at $2 million.

The headlines screamed it: PREGNANT WOMAN DECAPITATED. BOYFRIEND CHARGED.

But headlines don’t tell you what it feels like to walk into a funeral home and have to choose a casket for your daughter and the granddaughter you never got to hold. They don’t tell you what it’s like to know that the man who did this was someone you had dinner with. Someone you tried to help.

DeAndre’s family went public. His stepfather posted a video on YouTube. He looked broken. “He’s not a monster,” he pleaded to the camera. “What he did was monstrous. But the human exists. We tried to get him help. The system failed him.”

I watched that video. I felt for them, in a way. They lost a son too. But my empathy had limits. The system might have failed DeAndre, but DeAndre failed Lisa. He failed his child.

He was sitting in a cell, refusing to come out, threatening to cut the guards’ heads off.

“I’ll do it to you too!” he screamed at a corrections officer.

He was still dangerous. He was a rabid dog that needed to be put down.

But the justice system… it’s slow. It’s a grinding, painful machine. And before we could get justice, we had to endure the waiting. We had to endure the legal battles.

And I had to learn how to live in a world without Lisa.

PART 3

Justice isn’t a gavel strike. It isn’t a scene from a courtroom drama where the bad guy confesses and goes to jail in an hour. Justice is a slow, agonizing grind. It is a waiting room with no clock.

For months, DeAndre sat in a cell, but he wasn’t really there. The courts declared him “mentally unfit to stand trial.” He was sent to a state institution, pumped full of medication, treated until he was “competent” enough to understand that he was going to prison forever.

I hated those months. Every day he was in treatment was a day he wasn’t paying for what he did. It felt like he was hiding behind his own broken mind.

But I waited. Lisa would have wanted me to wait. She would have wanted me to see this through.

Then, there was another blow. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled that an unborn child—my granddaughter—could not be considered a second murder victim for a life sentence. A legal technicality. A loophole in the language of the law. It felt like they were saying she didn’t count. Like she wasn’t a person yet.

I had to swallow that rage. I had to focus on the long game.

Finally, in January 2024, the fog lifted. DeAndre was deemed fit. And instead of dragging us through a trial—instead of forcing me to look at the photos of what he did to my baby girl, instead of making the jury listen to the sound of that “chopping wood”—he entered a guilty plea.

He admitted it. No more “I found the keys.” No more “fresh start.” Just Guilty.

January 17th, 2025. Sentencing Day.

The courtroom was cold. It smelled of floor wax and old wood. I walked in with my head high. I wasn’t just Heidi Noel anymore. I was Lisa’s voice. I was Bean’s voice.

I saw him. DeAndre. He looked different without the dreads, smaller somehow in the orange jumpsuit. He didn’t look like a monster. He just looked like a waste of a life.

When it was my turn to speak, I stood up. My hands were shaking, but my voice… my voice was steady. I had rehearsed this in the shower, in the car, in my nightmares for two years.

I looked at the judge, then I looked at him.

“This didn’t have to end this way,” I said, my words echoing in the silent room. “My daughter should be here raising her toddler instead of being a casualty of domestic violence.”

I took a breath. I wanted to scream, to claw at the glass partition, but I remembered the poem Lisa loved. Grace of a woman, not the grief of a child.

“If you have a mental instability,” I said, speaking not just to him but to everyone listening, “seek treatment. Be consistent. Understand that your illness will not keep you from being held accountable.”

I turned my eyes to the back of the room, to the women who might be watching, to the girls who might be in love with a ‘project’ like Lisa was.

“If someone threatens to end your life, believe them,” I implored. “If they can say it, think it, and talk about it, they can carry out the threat.”

I saw the police chief in the gallery. He looked moved. He later told the press that seeing us there, seeing our strength, was inspirational. He talked about how Lisa was found with her hand resting on a pregnancy book. Her last thought was for her baby. That image… it broke me and built me back up all at once. Even in the end, she was a mother.

The judge read the sentence.

Sixty years.

Thirty years for murder. Twenty for the homicide of an unborn child. Ten for concealment. Consecutive.

He will have to serve at least fifty-two years before he can even breathe the word “parole.” He entered that prison a young man. If he ever leaves, he will be an old, broken shell.

It wasn’t life. It wasn’t the death penalty. But it was enough. He was erased from the world, just like he tried to erase Lisa.

We walked out of the courthouse into the winter air. It was crisp, clean. The weight that had been pressing on my chest for two years lifted, just a fraction.

We will never know why. Was he jealous? Was he snapping under the pressure of fatherhood? Was it just the final explosion of a violent mind?

It doesn’t matter. The why won’t bring her back.

I focus on the who. Who Lisa was.

She was the girl who saved animals. The girl who served ice cream with a smile even when she was hurting. The girl who loved so fiercely she ignored her own safety.

We raised money through a GoFundMe, but not for us. For a local domestic violence resource. We turned her tragedy into a shield for someone else. Maybe, just maybe, her story will save one girl. One girl who sees the red flags and leaves before the door locks.

I found a poem on Lisa’s Facebook page a few days after the funeral. It was like she had left it there for me. A roadmap for survival.

“After a while, you learn the subtle difference between holding a hand and chaining a soul… And you learn to build all your roads on today because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans.”

I read those words every day.

“So you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.”

I am planting my garden, Lisa. I am decorating my soul with the memories of your laugh, your kindness, and the little baby we almost met.

The silence is still there. But it’s not screaming anymore. It’s just… quiet. And in the quiet, I can finally hear you.

You really did have worth, baby girl. You really were strong.

And I promise you, I will be too.

The End.