Susan Gail Carter, a 41-year-old White/Caucasian female, was last seen in Beckley, West Virginia, on August 8, 2000, along with her daughter, Natasha “Alex” Carter. At the time, Susan and Alex were staying at a home on Kyle Lane belonging to Larry Dell Webb. Susan was involved in a contentious custody dispute with Alex’s father, Rick Lafferty, and the circumstances initially led authorities to believe that Susan had taken her daughter and disappeared.
A felony kidnapping warrant was issued for Susan in November 2000, and for years the case was treated largely as a parental-abduction investigation rather than as the disappearance of both mother and daughter.
As the years passed, however, neither Susan nor Alex surfaced. There was no reliable evidence that they had established new lives elsewhere, and investigators gradually began considering the possibility that both had been victims of foul play. The FBI joined a renewed effort to solve the case, publicly appealing for information in 2021 and working alongside the West Virginia State Police, Beckley Police Department and other agencies. By September 2023, West Virginia State Police publicly announced that Susan was no longer considered responsible for abducting Alex and that investigators believed Susan herself had been missing since the same day as her daughter.
Attention increasingly focused on Larry Webb and the Kyle Lane residence where Susan and Alex had been living. Search warrants were executed at the property as the investigation intensified. During one of the searches, investigators discovered a bullet embedded in a bedroom wall behind a baseboard in the room associated with Alex. The bullet was submitted to the FBI laboratory, where testing established that blood on it belonged to Alex. Investigators also reported evidence that damage in the area had been covered and cleaned. The forensic discovery transformed the long-running missing-person investigation into a case with physical evidence of violence inside Webb’s home.
The evidence was strongest in connection with Alex, and in October 2023 a special grand jury indicted Webb for first-degree murder in her death. At that point prosecutors publicly said they believed Susan was also dead, but acknowledged that they did not yet have sufficient evidence to bring a murder charge for her disappearance. Webb denied knowing what had happened and cited dementia when questioned by reporters. His declining medical condition delayed his incarceration, but authorities continued building the case and searching for the missing pair.
Webb was ultimately taken into custody on April 12, 2024, following another search of his property. As investigators confronted him with the evidence that had accumulated against him, Webb confessed to killing both Susan and Alex. According to prosecutors, he said he had discovered money missing from his home and believed Susan had taken or spent it. An argument followed, and Webb admitted that he shot Susan. After killing her, he realized that Alex could expose what he had done, and he said he killed the child as well in an effort to conceal Susan’s murder.
Webb gave investigators unusually detailed information about what happened afterward. He said he wrapped the bodies in bed linens and placed them in the basement while he prepared a burial site. Over the following nights, he dug a shallow grave in the wooded portion of his property and buried Susan and Alex together. The confession provided investigators with the explanation they had sought for more than two decades and, critically, directed them back to the Kyle Lane property to search for the remains.
Recovery teams began an intensive excavation of Webb’s backyard. Because of the passage of time and Webb’s deteriorating memory, he was unable to identify the exact burial location, even after being brought to the property. Investigators, excavation operators and search personnel systematically worked through the yard, digging portions of the property several feet deep. On April 22, 2024, after several days of searching, they uncovered the remains of an adult and a child buried together. Authorities said the location, positioning and condition of the remains corresponded closely with Webb’s confession, giving investigators a high degree of confidence that they had finally found Susan and Alex.
The discovery came with an extraordinary final turn. Earlier that same day, Webb had suffered a medical episode while being held through the state correctional system and was pronounced dead at Montgomery General Hospital. Roughly six hours later, investigators located Susan and Alex’s remains at his former home. Webb therefore died before he could stand trial. Although he had been formally indicted and arrested for Alex’s murder, public reporting does not show that a separate murder indictment for Susan was obtained before his death. His confession established his responsibility in the eyes of investigators, but his death meant there would be no criminal trial or conviction for Susan’s killing.
Susan’s case had traveled an especially painful path. For much of the investigation she had been regarded as the person responsible for taking her daughter, only for later forensic work to reveal that she had apparently been a victim from the beginning. The renewed investigation, the forensic evidence recovered from Webb’s home, his eventual confession and the discovery of the buried remains finally provided an explanation for what happened after Susan and Alex vanished from Beckley in August 2000. More than two decades after their disappearance, investigators concluded that Larry Webb had killed Susan during the dispute over money, killed Alex to conceal the first homicide, and hidden both victims on the very property where they had last been known to live.
