On the night of September 6, 2022, former Mississippi Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Frank Riley shone a work light across a silver Ford Raptor sitting in a convenience store parking lot in New Hebron. The truck had been found in the lot, keys in the possession of a 20-year-old woman named Sierra Inscoe, who told the officers surrounding her that she had no idea who Carson Sistrunk was. Riley crouched low and examined the tailgate.
There was blood on the underside. He looked into the bed: blood dried into the cracks of the interior, blood on the spare tire mounted beneath the frame. Someone had taken a water hose to it at some point. The cleanup was partial. The evidence was not.
Somewhere 50 miles to the north, the 24-year-old welder who owned that truck was already dead.
A stranger on Snapchat
Carson Sistrunk was the kind of man people in Pearl, Mississippi described with a specific kind of warmth. He was 6’4″ and broad, the sort of physical presence that fills a doorway, but his family had called him Little Man since he was a kid, and the nickname reflected something real about who he was. He was a welder who loved his work and spent his free time hunting, fishing, and getting out into the woods near his home east of Jackson.
He grew up in the Pearl area, surrounded by family and church, and by the accounts of everyone around him, he was reliable in a way that people noticed. He showed up when he said he would. He checked in with his mother, Darlene. He didn’t vanish without a word. At his homegoing service in Jackson, his best friend described him plainly: “He had that way about him that drew people in. It was that sweet, tender spirit. He was the best of us.”
In the weeks before Labor Day weekend 2022, Carson told Darlene he had been talking to a woman on Snapchat. They had been flirting back and forth, and he planned to drive south and meet her for the weekend. He gave his mother no full name, no specific address, and no particular backstory beyond the fact that they had connected recently online. It didn’t feel suspicious. It was simply a date. On September 4, 2022, Carson climbed into his silver Ford Raptor and drove 50 miles south toward New Hebron.
By Tuesday morning, September 6, Darlene knew something was wrong. Carson had not responded to any messages. He had missed his shift at work. She filed a missing persons report with the Rankin County Sheriff’s Office. Investigators checked area hospitals and local jails. Nothing came back. Then they pulled his bank records and found a single recent transaction: a purchase at a convenience store in New Hebron on the afternoon of September 4. That was the last financial activity on his account.
The last known sighting
Surveillance footage from that New Hebron convenience store placed Carson in the parking lot during the afternoon of September 4. He stepped out of his truck looking calm, relaxed, and in good health. Through the windscreen, a young woman was clearly visible in the passenger seat. After Carson walked back to the truck, a third man briefly appeared on camera, approaching the passenger window and speaking directly to the woman inside before walking away. Carson drove off. That was the last footage of him alive.
When deputies circulated a lookout for his truck, a silver Raptor with a distinctive dark-colored hood, they returned to the parking lot to find it. Sierra Inscoe was leaning against it. She had the keys.
Inscoe told officers she had bought the truck from a local man she knew only through a nickname. Cash. No paperwork. She had been out with friends that night, not with Carson. She had never met him. Investigators were suspicious. They asked her to show them where she claimed to have gone with her friends that night. She agreed to lead them to a remote gas well.
According to investigators, Inscoe appeared forgetful of the location, redirecting them several times before eventually arriving at the site she claimed to have visited. The detour would later look deliberate.
Inside the truck, forensic specialists found bags of clothing that showed blood spatter. The blood distribution, across the tailgate, in the cracks of the bed, on the spare tire beneath the frame, and on the truck’s undercarriage, indicated that a significant amount of blood had pooled in the bed and run beneath it. The truck had been hosed down. When Inscoe was asked about the staining, she said she had struck a deer. The truck carried no visible collision damage.
When investigators tracked down the third man from the convenience store footage and spoke with him, he confirmed that the woman in the passenger seat was Sierra Inscoe. He also told investigators that Carson had said they planned to spend the evening together. By that point, Inscoe had lied about knowing Carson, lied about her whereabouts, and lied about the blood. Forensic analysis of the samples later confirmed they were human. When compared to Carson’s DNA, the match was conclusive.
A history of stolen vehicles
As investigators pulled the case apart, a pattern assembled itself that reached back well before September 2022 and extended across multiple states.
Three months before Carson Sistrunk disappeared, Sierra Inscoe was staying as a guest in the home of a Mississippi man named Aaron Smith. Smith had met her on Facebook earlier that year and offered her a spare room for a few days after she told him her landlord was forcing her out. She told him she was a licensed practical nurse looking for work in the area. She cooked, cleaned, and made herself useful. “If she was an actor, she’d be one of the best,” Smith later told The Daily Beast. One night, Inscoe ran out of her room in tears and told Smith her mother had been in a car accident and she needed to reach her brother’s house so they could drive to the hospital together.
Smith handed her the keys to his 2002 Chevy Silverado, his only vehicle, and asked her to let him know if she needed more than a day or two. She blocked him on Facebook the next time he messaged her to check in. When Smith and his family investigated further, they discovered Inscoe had sold the truck to another man using a forged bill of sale. That man had even paid for improvements to the vehicle, including a new water pump, before the fraud was discovered. Smith filed a police report with the Lawrence County Sheriff’s Office. “This poor guy lost his life,” Smith said when he learned of Carson’s case. “It could have been me.”
Before Mississippi, Inscoe had spent time in northern Florida, where she told acquaintances she was a trauma nurse at a hospital in Gainesville. In 2020, she reportedly told friends she had ovarian cancer. Friends rearranged their lives around the diagnosis, providing her with housing, preparing her meals, and assisting with her daily care. When the lie fell apart, Inscoe did not explain herself. She disappeared.
On social media, she operated multiple profiles that presented different versions of herself depending on the audience. Her main Facebook page described her as cornbread fed and noted that she liked fishing on first dates. A second profile carried a harder register, built around themes of heartbreak and emotional independence. Former friends described her not as someone who occasionally lied but as someone for whom lying had become a way of moving through the world entirely.
She claimed careers she did not have, qualifications she had never earned, and relationships that served immediate purposes before being discarded. Multiple former partners described the same cycle, nearly identically, across different states.
The detail that converted theory into prosecutorial argument came from people in Inscoe’s immediate circle. Multiple individuals told investigators that in the months before Labor Day 2022, Sierra Inscoe had spoken openly about wanting a truck for her birthday. Not just any truck. A nice one. Prosecutor Laurel Blue Brinkley later described it plainly to Oxygen’s Snapped: “She had told many people that she was going to have a truck by her birthday, and he had a very nice truck.” Investigators came to believe that Inscoe had not stumbled into Carson Sistrunk’s life by chance. She had built the approach deliberately.
The body on Gulf Camp Road
On September 7, 2022, an oil field worker driving a remote stretch of land near Gulf Camp Road in Jefferson Davis County noticed tire tracks leading off the road toward one of the pump sites. He contacted authorities. Investigators followed the tracks and found Carson Sistrunk’s body lying in the grass near the well. He had been there for several days. Exposure to the elements had complicated the forensic work, but the cause of death was not in doubt.
An autopsy revealed multiple gunshot wounds. Each bullet had entered at an upward angle, consistent with a person seated on the tailgate of a pickup truck at the time of the shots. The blood distribution in the Raptor’s bed confirmed the reconstruction: Carson had been sitting on his own tailgate when Inscoe shot him. His body was then loaded into the truck bed and transported to the oil well site, placed in the grass just far enough off the road to avoid immediate detection. There was no evidence of a struggle. No signs that Carson had been acting aggressively or that he had any reason to be on guard. He had no idea what was coming.
Carson’s cousin alleged on social media that Inscoe and at least one other individual forced Carson to withdraw funds from an ATM and sign over the title to his truck before the shooting. Authorities had not charged anyone else in connection with the crime, though investigators indicated they planned to speak with other potential persons of interest.
With the body found, Inscoe moved from person of interest to murder suspect. She had already done what she always did. Between her initial interview with investigators and the discovery of Carson’s body, she vanished. Law enforcement issued alerts and began tracking her movements. She eventually surfaced in a neighboring county, having borrowed a friend’s phone to contact her mother. Investigators traced the device’s IP address to a residential address and made their way there. She surrendered without resistance.
She was initially charged with vehicle theft, a holding charge while prosecutors assembled the murder case. Lawrence County Sheriff Ryan Everett told The Daily Beast that his agency had been called to assist and had observed a considerable amount of blood in the truck bed. Inscoe was denied bond.
The guilty plea
In 2023, a grand jury formally indicted Sierra Jane Inscoe for the murder of Carson Sistrunk. A trial was scheduled. It never took place.
In July 2024, Inscoe entered a guilty plea. She was 22 years old, having turned 21 some weeks after committing the murder. She offered no explanation for what she had done and provided no alternative account of the night of September 4. During the sentencing hearing, she addressed Carson’s family directly and acknowledged, for the first time before a court, that she had killed him.
Circuit Court Judge Richelle Lumpkin sentenced her to 40 years in the custody of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, with 35 of those years to be served without the possibility of parole or early release. District Attorney Hal Kittrell had prosecuted the case. Sierra Inscoe will spend the majority of her life incarcerated.
Carson Sistrunk was 24 years old. He was a welder from Pearl, Mississippi, who loved to hunt and fish, who always checked in with his mother, and who had a laugh that the people who knew him described as loud, genuine, and impossible not to join. His obituary noted that he was called a best friend by many, a brother by some, and that he loved unconditionally and never judged anyone. He drove 50 miles to meet someone he had no reason not to trust. He never came home.
