Darius Berry offered support after Krystal Anderson was killed. Little did the family know he'd become a suspect in the case.
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Slain woman’s sister says suspect’s son had her fooled
It’s been a long road for the family of Krystal Anderson, an Aiken County mother
who’s been missing since August.
Now investigators believe she is dead. Her boyfriend
Tony Berry was arrested and charged with murder and kidnapping, while
his son Darius this week was arrested on a charge of accessory to murder after the fact.
Authorities believe Tony Berry killed Anderson on Aug. 20 and stuffed her body into the trunk of his car. Authorities believe Darius helped his dad conceal the evidence by burning the car in Newberry County on Aug. 28.
When all of this started and Anderson was thought to have been kidnapped, her sister Shadira Smothers was leaning on family members like Darius for any leads on where Anderson might have been.
She never imagined he may be connected to it all.
“I’m sitting here like, ‘OK, well, you know, this, this sounds like he really is innocent.’ And then a day later, I find out that he’s arrested and tied into it, which my gut told me from the beginning,” she said.
She’s referring to messages sent by Darius this week on the day his father would be charged with Anderson’s murder.
When Darius was arrested the next day, Smothers was speechless
“I was completely shocked because, like I said, like, the day that Tony received the murder charge. He inbox me and, and was just telling me that you know, his prayers was with me and, you know, he hoped my family gets the closure that they deserve,” she said.
She said she’d been receiving messages from Darius since Anderson disappeared.
She said Darius’ shared theories on Anderson’s whereabouts, how his father allegedly harmed her, the reason behind the burned car and where her body might be.
“I think throughout the process, he started realizing the person that his father really was,” she said. “He started believing the things that people were saying that his father has done to other victims. But at that point, it was too late. It was too late, whatever was done was already done.”
Smothers says she wanted to believe he was sincere
“My heart was believing that, hey, Darius just got caught up in something that his father did. You know, this kid, maybe he really didn’t have anything to do with it. You know, he started being sincere. That’s what I thought,” she said. “And it turned out that I was misled the whole time by him.”
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