Natasha “Alex” Alexandra Augusta Carter was a 10-year-old White female whose disappearance on August 8, 2000, in Beckley, West Virginia, remained one of the state’s most haunting mysteries for nearly twenty-four years. Although some early records associated the case with other parts of West Virginia, investigators consistently identified Beckley as the place where Alex and her mother, Susan Gail Carter, were last seen.
Susan was involved in a contentious custody dispute with Alex’s father, Ricky Lafferty, and she had reportedly told him that he would never see his daughter again. When mother and daughter disappeared together, authorities initially believed Susan had taken Alex and gone into hiding. A felony kidnapping warrant was issued for Susan in November 2000, and for years the investigation was approached largely as a parental-abduction case.
That assumption ultimately proved tragically wrong. At the time they vanished, Susan and Alex had been staying at a home in the 100 block of Kyle Lane in Beckley belonging to Larry Dell Webb, who was involved in a relationship with Susan. As years passed without a confirmed sighting of either mother or daughter, investigators increasingly considered the possibility that both had been victims of foul play. The FBI joined with West Virginia authorities in renewing the investigation, and in December 2021 the FBI announced a $10,000 reward for information that could resolve the case.
The renewed investigation eventually brought detectives back to Webb’s property. Searches conducted during the investigation uncovered evidence inside the house that transformed what had once been treated as a disappearance into a homicide case. Investigators discovered evidence of bullet strikes that appeared to have been deliberately concealed with repairs and wallpaper. In a bedroom known to have been used by Alex, investigators recovered a bullet embedded behind a baseboard. The bullet was sent to the FBI laboratory, where testing determined that blood associated with it belonged to Alex. Additional blood evidence was reportedly discovered behind a baseboard heater and beneath the concealed bullet damage. The findings gave authorities direct physical evidence that Alex had been violently injured inside Webb’s home.
In October 2023, a Raleigh County special grand jury indicted Larry Webb for first-degree murder in connection with Alex’s death. At that point investigators believed Susan was also dead, but prosecutors said the strongest available evidence supported a murder charge involving Alex. Webb, then in his eighties and suffering from serious medical problems, was not immediately taken into custody. He had publicly claimed that he could not remember what had happened and referred to having dementia. After additional investigative work and another search of the Kyle Lane property in April 2024, Webb was taken into custody on April 12 on the first-degree murder charge. His declining health eventually resulted in his placement within the medical or hospice facilities of the state correctional system.
Before his death, Webb finally confessed to killing both Susan and Alex. According to investigators who described his admissions, Webb said the violence began with a dispute involving money that he believed Susan had taken or spent. He admitted shooting Susan inside the house. Afterward, Webb said he realized that killing Susan had destroyed his life and concluded that Alex could reveal what had happened. He therefore shot and killed the child as well in an effort to conceal her mother’s murder. His account provided investigators with the explanation they had spent more than two decades seeking.
Webb also told investigators what he had done with the bodies. He said he wrapped Susan and Alex in bedding or sheets and kept them in the basement while he prepared a grave in the wooded portion of his backyard. He then buried them together in a shallow grave on the Kyle Lane property. Armed with Webb’s confession, investigators undertook an extensive excavation of the backyard. Crews carefully removed soil over several days, digging portions of the property to a depth of roughly four and a half feet. On the third day of excavation, they located the remains of an adult and a child in the same grave. The positioning and condition of the remains, including clothing, were consistent with details Webb had provided in his confession.
The recovery occurred on April 22, 2024, almost twenty-four years after Alex and Susan disappeared. In an extraordinary coincidence, Webb suffered a medical episode that same morning while incarcerated at the Mount Olive Correctional Complex. He was taken to Montgomery General Hospital and pronounced dead at approximately 10:30 a.m. Several hours later, at about 4:30 p.m., investigators uncovered the remains believed to be Susan and Alex in his backyard. The remains were subsequently taken to the West Virginia Medical Examiner’s Office, and later family and funeral records documented that Susan and Alex had been recovered and could finally be laid to rest.
Because Webb died while awaiting prosecution, there was never a murder trial and no criminal conviction was entered against him for Alex’s killing. The case nevertheless reached a resolution through the combination of forensic evidence, his first-degree murder indictment and arrest, his detailed confession to both killings, and the recovery of the victims in the location he described. What began in 2000 as a suspected parental abduction ultimately proved to be a double homicide committed inside the Beckley home where mother and daughter had been staying. Alex’s remains were finally recovered on April 22, 2024, allowing her family to bring her home after nearly a quarter-century of uncertainty.
