A couple previously connected to four murders in two states have now been connected to a fifth killing by authorities in South Carolina.
Adrienne Simpson, 34, and Tyler Terry, 27, have already been excoriated as a “modern day version of Bonnie and Clyde” by police in Missouri. The latest allegations, according to the Chester County Sheriff’s Office in S.C., are that Simpson and Terry have been linked to–but not yet charged with–a murder that occurred around 2 a.m. in Memphis, Tennessee on May 17, 2021.
Details of that murder are currently scarce but Chester County Sheriff Max Dorsey told Charlotte-based Fox affiliate WJZY that his office “immediately” realized their investigatory capacity was not quite equipped to deal with the ordeal allegedly caused by the pair.
“So many people reached out to us,” Dorsey said during an interview on Wednesday. “They recognized our need and they recognized, that, ‘Hey look,’ we’ve got to keep officers safe and we want to keep Mr. Terry safe and our community safe. And I’m just so proud of what everyone’s done to help our county and we will never forget it.”
A massive 7-day manhunt ended late last month after Terry initially eluded law enforcement following a lengthy high-speed chase through several counties in South Carolina.
Simpson was arrested after crashing somewhere near a local high school in Chester County. During the chase, Terry allegedly fired multiple gunshots at deputies in pursuit, though no one was injured.
Terry subsequently made his way into a nearby wooded area and continued to elude a coalition of local, county, state and federal agents until he “made a mistake,” in Dorsey’s terms. The suspect was spotted crossing a street late one morning so the task force set up a perimeter that quickly honed in on the suspect and apprehended. He was ultimately arrested within an hour of being seen and without incident.
Law enforcement has had Terry on their radar since May 2, 2021, when he was a suspect in the murder of 35-year-old Thomas Hardin and two other unrelated shootings in the Palmetto State.
After a deputy spotted and then approached an idling Mitsubishi, the couple allegedly began to drive away on May 20, 2021. Simpson was charged with failure to stop for law enforcement and as an accessory after-the-fact in various other crimes allegedly committed by Terry.
Two days after the chase, the body of Simpson’s husband, 33-year-old Eugene Simpson, was discovered in a ditch. Terry was later charged with Eugene’s murder after Adrienne allegedly admitted to shooting her husband together before dumping the victim’s body.
After allegedly crossing state lines sometime after Hardin was murdered, the pair became the lead suspects in two entirely separate robberies-turned-murders in Missouri.
The Major Case Squad of St. Louis believe that Terry and Simpson shot and killed Dr. Sergei Zacharev in Brentwood, Missouri and Barbara Goodkin in University City, Missouri (Goodkin’s husband Stanley Goodkin was also shot but survived).
“This modern-day version of Bonnie and Clyde do several violent crimes in South Carolina and travel across the country,” Joseph Spiess, Jr., chief of the Brentwood Police Department, told media. “What they did between South Carolina and Missouri we don’t know yet. That’s a part of what they are going to be checking on, and obviously, South Carolina and every state in between.”
Tennessee is one of many states that might reasonably be considered in-between the Show Me State and South Carolina, leaving the body count attributed to the pair potentially higher.
[images via the Chester County Detention Center and the Chester County Sheriff’s Office]
