Liese Dodd was 22 years old and eight months pregnant when she was murdered in her Alton, Illinois apartment on the night of June 8, 2022. Her boyfriend, Deundrea Holloway, killed her.
Liese was born on August 14, 1999, in Alton, Madison County, Illinois. She was known as a caring person from a young age. When she turned ten, she organized a fundraiser for the Riverbend Humane Society in Jerseyville instead of asking for birthday presents.
She graduated from Jersey Community High School in 2017 and started working at a local Dairy Queen. Customers remembered her as friendly and full of energy. She was saving money because she wanted to work in the medical field, just like her mother, Heidi Noel.
By June 2022, she was eight months pregnant. The baby was going to be a girl. The family had been calling her Baby Bean, and Heidi had already sent out baby shower invitations the Saturday before Liese’s death.
Liese had been in a relationship with Deundrea Holloway for almost two years. It was on and off, and it was not a healthy relationship. At one point, the two had been homeless and were living in a tent near Lake Lichfield.
Liese was working at Dairy Queen during that time, and her boss noticed something was wrong. Liese would show up with black eyes and bruises on her arms. At first, she made excuses, saying her dog had jumped up and hit her.
Eventually, she told the truth. Holloway had been hitting her. Her boss even witnessed Holloway punch her in the face while they were parked behind the restaurant. Liese did not want the police called. That became a pattern. The abuse would happen, and Liese would stay.
In July 2021, things got bad enough that Liese ended up in the hospital. Holloway had allegedly broken her nose and given her two black eyes. People had also seen the couple arguing on the street before.
After one of those arguments, a witness saw Holloway punch himself in the face. By September 2021, Liese texted her boss to say Holloway had beaten her again and that she was staying with her mother because he had made threats. B
ut she went back to him. That kept happening. The relationship never really ended, it just kept restarting.
At the start of 2022, the couple moved into an apartment building in Alton. Their downstairs neighbors quickly became familiar with the sound of their fights. Loud arguments, objects hitting walls, and shouting were not uncommon.
The neighbors had even considered calling the police on previous occasions. Holloway’s own family knew he had serious problems too. His half-sister, who went by PJ, described him as someone who bounced between different people’s homes whenever things got difficult.
His stepfather, Chris Hawk, said the family had been trying to get Holloway mental health help for at least three years. He said the system kept telling them they could not hold someone unless that person had already done something serious.
In early June 2022, Holloway had been sending texts to a friend that showed how unstable he was feeling. He wrote that all the emotions he had been pushing aside were coming out at once. He said he did not know how to let them out without snapping or crying.
He described feeling like he had always been forced to act like an adult, even as a kid, and that the pressure had never gone away. Those messages painted a picture of someone who was close to a breaking point.
On the evening of Tuesday, June 7, Holloway left the apartment with his uncle, who lived in St. Louis. Building surveillance footage confirmed he walked out at around 6:24 p.m. His uncle was supposed to bring him back before 10:00 p.m. that night. He never came back.
Liese returned home from work to find him gone, with no explanation. She texted Heidi at around 9:00 p.m., worried that he had left on purpose. She noticed he had taken some clothes with him.
During that text conversation, Liese told her mother something concerning. She said she had broken a razor earlier that day and cut her leg, telling Holloway she wanted to kill herself. She told Heidi she felt like she just could not get anything right.
Heidi encouraged her to calm down for the sake of the baby, and Liese eventually settled for the night. But she was still too anxious to sleep. At 1:39 a.m., she took her car out for a half-hour drive.
The next morning, June 8, Liese texted her mother at 7:06 a.m. Holloway still had not come home. She went through her regular routine, washing her work clothes, but told Heidi she had a bad feeling. She reached out to Holloway’s family, including PJ, trying to find out where he was.
She also contacted her landlord and asked him to check the building’s security cameras. The footage confirmed Holloway had left with his uncle the evening before. His family hoped he would simply return.
Then, at around 8:00 p.m. on June 8, Liese received a message from Holloway’s uncle saying he was bringing Holloway back and that everything was fine. Heidi expressed concern, but Liese went to pick him up anyway.
Surveillance footage from the building shows Liese and Holloway walking back into the apartment together at 9:11 p.m. While still in the car before going in, Liese sent her mother one last text. She wrote that she was trying to figure things out.
That was the last message she ever sent. Heidi texted her at 10:49 p.m. to check on her. There was no reply.
The downstairs neighbors arrived home at around 9:30 p.m. that night. They noticed straight away that the upstairs apartment door was slightly open, which was not normal. They heard muffled sounds, like someone in pain trying not to be too loud.
Then the screaming got louder. Much louder. At around 9:45 to 9:50 p.m., the neighbors described hearing four to six heavy, rhythmic thuds. They said it reminded them of the sound of someone chopping wood, steady and deliberate, with full force behind each hit.
After the last thud, everything stopped. The screaming, the shaking, all of it. Silence.
Someone was heard stepping outside briefly before going back upstairs. The lights in the apartment kept switching on and off. The neighbors waited outside, expecting one of the couple to come down as they usually did after fights. Nobody came down.
One neighbor texted the landlord to describe what they had heard. The landlord tried to contact Liese. No response. The neighbors decided to wait before calling the police. They never heard anything start back up, because by that point, it was already too late.
At 11:57 p.m., Holloway appeared on the building’s surveillance footage. He was carrying a white laundry basket. He had changed his clothes and covered his face. He walked out toward a nearby smoke shop and disappeared from view.
He went back inside and came out again a short time later, still carrying the basket. At one minute past midnight, footage from a nearby business captured a white laundry basket being thrown into a large red dumpster on the street, along with some clothing.
The next morning, June 9, a construction worker arrived at the dumpster to throw away drywall from a nearby job site. He found clothing scattered around and inside it, including shoes with blood on them. He also found a short serrated knife with blood on the blade.
At around 1:00 p.m. that same day, Heidi arrived at Liese’s apartment. She had not heard from her daughter in more than fifteen hours. She let herself in. Two minutes later, she came back outside visibly shaking.
She called 911 and told the operator that her daughter’s head had been cut off. First responders arrived and found Liese’s body in the bedroom. What looked like a towel wrapped around her head was actually concealing the fact that her head was gone.
It had been severed. There was no murder weapon in the apartment, and Liese’s head was not there either. Holloway had put it in the laundry basket and thrown it in the dumpster the night before. The baby did not survive either.
Investigators focused on Holloway immediately. The surveillance footage had captured his movements clearly. That evening, police executed a search warrant on his mother’s home. In the trash can outside, they found the clothing from the footage and his cut-off dreadlocks wrapped in toilet paper.
Holloway was not there. PJ told investigators he had shown up at the house at around 2:30 a.m., banging on the door and acting nervous. The next morning, she found him in the bathroom cutting off his dreadlocks, which he had been growing for two years.
He said he wanted a fresh start. He showered, changed into clothes his mother gave him, and left his old ones near the sidewalk before they were put in the trash. His grandmother noticed he had Liese’s ID, debit card, and apartment keys.
He gave no explanation for having them. That afternoon, he left on foot saying he was going to cut grass.
At 1:45 a.m. on June 10, investigators received a call from the Gillespie Police Department. Holloway had been picked up that afternoon for cannabis possession.
During his time in custody, he refused to give his name, paced around, and at one point banged his head against the wall. Officers from Alton came to arrest him on suspicion of Liese’s murder.
On June 13, 2022, Holloway was charged with two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of intentional homicide of an unborn child, dismemberment of a human body, vehicle-related offenses, and concealment of a homicidal death. His bond was set at two million dollars.
He was later found mentally unfit to stand trial and was sent to a state institution for treatment. In January 2024, he entered a guilty plea. On January 17, 2025, he was sentenced to 60 years in prison. He will have to serve at least 52 years before he can be considered for release.
Heidi spoke after the sentencing. She thanked the law enforcement agencies involved in the case and described the outcome as the tragic result of a two-year domestic violence relationship.
She urged anyone experiencing abuse to make a safe plan to leave, and told people to believe someone who threatens their life. She said that if a person can say it, think it, and talk about it, they can carry it out.
She said Liese should have been alive, raising her daughter. Instead, she became a casualty of domestic violence. The family’s GoFundMe page raised thousands of dollars, all of which Heidi said would be donated to a local domestic violence resource.
