Video appears to show Eliza Fletcher suspect after murder
Newly emerged video reportedly shows Eliza Fletcher’s murder suspect spending more than an hour cleaning his SUV soon after the Tennessee heiress was snatched from the street and killed.
Surveillance footage obtained by WREG shows a black SUV pulling up to the Longview Garden apartments in Memphis, where police say suspect Cleotha Abston, 38, was first spotted after the deadly kidnapping.
The GMC Terrain pulled up at around 7:57 a.m., the station said — more than 3 1/2 hours after the 34-year-old teacher and mom of two was attacked nearby during her regular 4 a.m. run.
It also matches the time witnesses told cops that Abston was seen “acting very strange” while visiting his brother — a felon now also charged with drugs and weapons offenses — who lives at the complex.
The vehicle, thought to be the GMC Terrain seen in the attack, was seen being pulled into a parking spot where it was partially blocked from view in the grainy, long-distance footage.
“He sits in the vehicle for a while, and then goes to the trunk,” WREG’s Quametra Wilborn said of the full footage.
While it was “difficult to see exactly what he was doing,” Abston then rushed into the complex, the reporter said, with the footage seemingly showing him carrying several objects.
Moments later, he comes back to the SUV “where he spends more than an hour,” Wilborn said.
Court documents previously revealed that a witness who knows Abston told cops that she saw him “cleaning the interior of the GMC Terrain with floor cleaner. She also “stated that he was behaving oddly.”
“This was later confirmed by” Abston’s brother, Mario, 36, who also states that he saw his brother cleaning the car floor, an affidavit said.
The brother and friend also saw him “washing his clothes in the sink of the house” and “acting very strange,” the affidavit said.
The SUV was also parked next to a large trash container that was later hauled away by investigators.
Later, a trash bag that “contained purple Lululemon running shorts that were consisted [sic] with the ones Eliza Fletcher was last seen wearing” was found, court docs stated.
Abston was arrested by US Marshals the next day after he was linked to the monstrous crime by DNA from a Champion slide left at the deadly abduction.
He was charged early Sunday with crimes including tampering with evidence and especially aggravated kidnapping.
The suspect was then hit with first-degree murder charges early Tuesday after a body found late Monday was confirmed to be Fletcher. He is due in court Wednesday for a hearing on those new charges.
Abston has already served 20 years in prison for a previous violent kidnapping in 2000, when he was just 16.
At that point, he already had a lengthy rap sheet — including a juvenile delinquent act of rape when he was just 14, according to Fox News.
Neighbors also called him a “creep” and “pervert” who would pester women for sex.
“The thing about these sexual predators, it seems it doesn’t matter how much time they do … When they get out, they’re back on the hunt,” John Kelly, a criminal profiler and psychotherapist, told Fox News Digital.
Fletcher was the mom of two young boys, an elementary school teacher and granddaughter of a billionaire hardware company magnate.
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