On Halloween 2020, 19-year-old Livye Lewis was found fatally shot in her car in Hemphill, Texas.
A Relationship Kept Secret
Hemphill is a small community in Sabine County, Texas, with a population of just over 1,000. It is the kind of place where residents know one another and news travels quickly. In November 2019, two young people from that community began exchanging text messages.
One was Livye Lewis, an 18-year-old high school senior. The other was Matthew Hoy Edgar, a 23-year-old man who was married to Montana Bockel and was the father of two young sons. The two met through a shared circle of friends.
Matthew insisted on secrecy from the start. “You do realize you cannot say a word to anybody that we are even texting,” he wrote. Livye answered that she had no plans to brag about texting a married man. A very brief affair followed, and Livye ended it quickly and firmly.
Matthew did not let the matter rest. About four months later, he texted Livye to complain about how unhappy he was in his marriage and admitted that he had cheated again.
Livye held her ground. She told him she was not interested in being a home wrecker. Nearly two months after that exchange, Matthew ended his marriage.
In a message to his wife, he wrote that he was the one who had always been cheating. Four days later, Montana hired a divorce attorney and Matthew moved out. He then returned to Livye.
Livye and Montana did not get along at first. Then the relationship changed suddenly. Montana began seeking out Livye’s company, and the two women started talking constantly.
Livye had planned to attend a college campus that summer. Instead, in the summer of 2020, she agreed to move in with Matthew. She helped look after his sons and redecorated their bedroom with baseball, football and soccer themes. The household was not a peaceful one.
For a time, the couple stayed at the home of Livye’s friend Taylor Barnett, where Matthew drank heavily and shouted at Livye. His behavior became so disruptive that Taylor asked that he no longer stay there.
Text messages from the period show a relationship that swung between affection and fear. Matthew sometimes wrote affectionate messages, such as “good night baby I love you.” Livye’s messages described physical abuse. “I don’t know why you keep putting your hands on me like that,” she wrote. “My body hurt today.”
In August 2020, she wrote a longer message to him. “I want to be in our home with you but I can’t do the way you act when you drink,” it read. “I’m scared of you. You’ve laid your hands on me multiple times. I deserve better than that.”
She also confided in her cousin, Sydney Ebarb, and sent her a photograph showing that Matthew had broken her nose.
On October 4, 2020, Livye’s birthday, Matthew sent a text message to Montana that revealed a hidden side of the situation. “I didn’t cheat on Livye with multiple women just you LOL,” he wrote.
The text showed that Matthew had been carrying on a relationship with his former wife, with Livye unaware of it. Livye ended her relationship with him. A friend warned her that abusive relationships tend to get worse. “I know,” Livye replied.
Matthew soon began seeing another young woman in town. Livye, meanwhile, remained on friendly terms with Montana.
Halloween Night
On the evening of October 31, 2020, about twenty people gathered for a party at the home of a friend, Bobby Ozan. Livye and Montana attended, as did Matthew and the two boys. Livye had been separated from Matthew for less than a month.
Bobby told investigators that Matthew spent the night watching Livye and Montana socialize with everyone except him. When he tried to join their conversations, they said little to him.
Bobby described Matthew as on edge. He was drinking beer heavily, and his mood worsened with each drink. Investigators learned that Matthew had intended to propose to Livye.
Matthew eventually left the party, but he soon came back. Montana told investigators that he returned just in time to hear Livye say she would be staying the night at Bobby’s house. The remark made him furious, she said. He tried to choke her.
Montana went to get Bobby, and when she came back outside, Matthew had kicked in the doors of a car and was punching its window.
Bobby had to pin him against the car so the two women could leave. Throughout the struggle, Matthew screamed at the top of his lungs, “I’m going to kill y’all.”
Livye and Montana left in separate cars, each hoping to get to safety. Montana drove to the house where Matthew’s mother and grandparents lived. Matthew followed and pulled in behind her. When she tried to get out of her car, he turned on her again.
The couple’s sons were in the back seat of Matthew’s van, and Montana pressed on her horn to bring someone out of the house. Matthew then left for his own home, a short distance away on the same property. Montana asked to stay the night with Matthew’s mother and grandparents.
Over the next few hours, Montana and Matthew exchanged text messages. Matthew accused her of having played a part in Livye’s decision to stay at Bobby’s.
“You took part in it and you are guilty as she is,” he wrote. He added, “You knew what was going on.” Another message read, “I will take your life her life and his life. Mark my words.”
At 3:22 a.m., Matthew wrote, “I’m leaving better get here and get your kids.” Investigators concluded that he then got into his truck, where he kept his rifle, and went looking for Livye.
Twelve minutes later, a new message arrived. “I’m home I got Livye’s keys and her phone,” Matthew wrote. Montana asked where Livye was. His answer was a single word: “Dead.”
Montana told investigators that she did not call 911 because she did not believe him. Instead, she texted him asking whether she could come to his house. He replied, “Yeah.”
Montana said that Matthew’s mother would not allow her to leave, so she eventually fell asleep. She said she did not know anything had happened until she woke at about 6:00 a.m.
Matthew did not go to bed. Not long after sending his last message, he returned to the place where Livye was, this time in his cousin Zach’s truck.
A Discovery at Dawn
At around 5:00 a.m. on Halloween morning, a motorist driving along a rural road noticed a car sitting by the roadside. The driver’s door was open.
The motorist pulled over and saw a woman slumped across the steering wheel. At first, the motorist assumed she had simply passed out. The motorist shook her and then called 911.
The woman was Livye Lewis. She had been shot in the neck with a rifle, and she was dead. Her car was on Farm to Market Road 83, about two and a half miles east of Hemphill.
Behind her car, Matthew Edgar was found lying on the ground in a fetal position. A black truck that did not belong to him was parked nearby.
A rifle, a pair of shoes and a hat lay on the ground close to where he was found. Matthew had blood on his face, but doctors at the hospital where he was taken found no injuries on him.
Livye’s mother, Darci Bass, heard the news by phone when a friend called to say that her daughter had been shot. She rushed to the scene and begged for information. She wanted to know whether her daughter was alive or dead.
Eventually, she was told that Livye was in the car parked right in front of her. Darci has said that she did not want to believe it because accepting it would make it real.
At about 6:00 a.m., Sheriff’s investigator J.P. MacDonough received a call asking him to come to the hospital to sit with Matthew. During the interview that followed, Matthew said he had no idea why he was there.
He said he had been drinking a bottle of Jim Beam and a few beers earlier that day. He remembered being at Bobby’s party, which was where he said he had last seen Livye. He recalled going home afterward and drinking on his porch.
The next thing he remembered, he said, was waking up in the back of an ambulance. He could not explain how he had ended up on the ground behind a car with a dead girl inside it.
When MacDonough asked whether he had a girlfriend, Matthew replied that he had an ex-girlfriend named Livye. MacDonough told him that she had died. He then swabbed the blood on Matthew’s face for DNA testing and took his clothing into evidence.
MacDonough placed Matthew under arrest for homicide, explaining that Matthew had been found behind the vehicle, that he had a relationship with the victim, and that a weapon lay on the ground close to him. “I didn’t do anything,” Matthew said.
Texas law gave the District Attorney’s office 90 days to present enough evidence to a grand jury to obtain an indictment.
If it failed to do so, Matthew would have to be released on bond. MacDonough asked the Texas Rangers for help, and together the two agencies began to piece together the final hours of Livye’s life.
An Investigation Interrupted
The investigation turned up several important items. Livye’s phone was found in the truck that Matthew had driven to the scene. Her keys were found in the driveway at his grandparents’ house, and they had been handed over to investigators only reluctantly by Matthew’s mother, Cindy Hogan.
Hogan offered investigators a different explanation. She suggested that a drug cartel had killed Livye and staged the scene to make it look as though Matthew was responsible, because Matthew owed the cartel $330,000. Investigators did not accept the story.
Investigators also examined the role of Montana. Her failure to call 911 after reading Matthew’s messages raised questions, and so did her friendship with the woman Matthew had left her for.
“I know you don’t believe me,” she told investigators, “but I can’t tell you stuff that I don’t know happened.” Two months after the shooting, she was given a polygraph examination and was told she had failed it, with the examiner saying she had left something out.
After a review involving several agencies, however, investigators concluded that Montana was never at the scene and had no part in the shooting or in any cover-up. MacDonough identified the motive as jealousy.
The case then met an unforeseen delay. In February 2021, the coronavirus pandemic closed the courts, and no grand juries were being convened.
As the legal deadline passed without an indictment, a judge was required by law to release Matthew on bond. The amount was set at $50,000. Darci considered the figure so low that it seemed insane to her.
On March 16, 2021, four and a half months after the arrest, a grand jury finally heard the evidence against Matthew. It indicted him for the murder of Livye Lewis.
In December 2021, Darci walked into a convenience store and saw Matthew come through the door. She rushed at him, throwing whatever she could reach and shouting, “You killed my daughter.”
Matthew filed charges against her for assault causing bodily injury, retaliation and criminal mischief, and Darci was arrested. The charges were eventually dropped.
Livye had loved Matthew and had been good to him, his children and his family, and Darci has said that she only wanted answers about what had happened to her daughter.
The Trial and the Flight
Jury selection in the trial of Matthew Edgar began on Monday, January 24, 2022. Matthew was still free on bond and walked in and out of the courthouse each day.
Because of the emotions the case had stirred across the county, extra security was put in place, and Matthew wore a bulletproof vest on the first day of testimony.
The prosecution presented DNA results showing a tiny speck of Livye’s blood on the pants Matthew had been wearing when he was found. Prosecutors called the finding critical because it placed him at the scene at the time of the fatal injury.
Matthew’s court-appointed attorney, Rob Hughes, challenged the significance of that finding. He argued that DNA can be transferred through simple contact, and that there was no way to tell how long the blood had been there.
He also pointed out that the blood swabbed from Matthew’s face belonged to neither Matthew nor Livye, and that once both had been excluded, investigators did not pursue other possible matches.
Other tests had found DNA from additional people on Matthew, and Livye had been excluded as a source of those samples. Hughes further noted that the rifle had never been tested for fingerprints or DNA, though he acknowledged that it belonged to Matthew.
Hughes conceded that his greatest obstacle was the text messages, together with Matthew’s claim that he had no memory of sending them. In his entire career, he said, he had never had a client who could text, converse and drive during a crime yet remember nothing of it afterward.
After the second day of testimony, the prosecutor told Hughes that he would rest his case the next morning.
On Thursday, January 27, the morning Hughes was due to begin calling witnesses, he received a panicked telephone call from Matthew’s mother. She told him that her son was gone and that he had taken a gun with him. She feared he might kill himself.
Authorities determined that Matthew had waited for the battery in his ankle monitor to die and had then left home, probably on foot.
Local police, a SWAT team, the Department of Public Safety and the Texas Rangers joined the search, along with a tracking dog from a prison unit. The dog followed a trail through the woods for roughly two miles.
The trial did not stop. That same day, Hughes presented the defense case. The jury was not told that Matthew had fled.
After deliberating for about an hour and a half, the jurors found him guilty of murder. The next day, the same jury set his punishment at 99 years in prison and a $10,000 fine, again in his absence.
Eleven Months on the Run
With Matthew still missing, Livye’s friends found it a frightening time, since he knew where everyone lived. Darci Bass felt that nobody was searching for him. She made a wanted poster at home and hung it throughout town.
She also tended the memorial at the place where her daughter died, convinced that Matthew had visited it. “I just felt it as a mother,” she said. “He’s coming here. He’s not far.”
She had also heard rumors that his mother had been seen buying large quantities of his favorite cigarettes and liquor. In August 2022, Matthew was added to the Texas Top 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list.
A week after Matthew ran, Jeff Coulter, a special deputy with the U.S. Marshals Service, took over the manhunt, working alongside MacDonough.
Coulter did not question Matthew’s family, since he had already heard the cartel story and saw no reason to waste time on it. For nearly a year, he worked with the Sheriff’s Office and agencies around the country to follow every lead.
A tip finally arrived suggesting that Matthew was hiding in a house only yards from his grandparents’ property. The house belonged to a family friend and was surrounded by woods.
Coulter asked two wardens from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to help. They planned to approach under cover of darkness and use night vision to identify him. MacDonough and his deputies waited in vehicles near the driveway, out of sight.
Coulter’s team of four entered the woods at about 4:30 in the afternoon. About 100 yards from the house, they heard barking from a large Rottweiler in the backyard. They could hear male and female voices but could not see anyone through the thick brush.
A violent thunderstorm then rolled in, and the thunder and rain covered the sound of their movement. A second storm struck when they were about 30 yards from the house. It had been 11 months and 2 days since Matthew had fled, and Coulter was determined that it end that night.
At around 8:00 p.m., a man stepped off the back porch and walked to the side of the house. One of Coulter’s men recognized him as Matthew Edgar. MacDonough and the deputies moved up the driveway to cover the front door.
When the lights came on in the house, Coulter and his three men sprinted the final 30 yards, rounded the corner and shouted for everyone to come out with their hands up.
Matthew threw himself against the wall, saying, “I’m going to jail for something I don’t even know nothing about.” He greeted MacDonough by name, and MacDonough greeted him in return.
Matthew asked whether MacDonough had proven his innocence yet, and MacDonough answered that he had not. Matthew also called out, “Please don’t shoot my mother,” and said that his mother was in the house.
Cindy Hogan came out, and Coulter said she acted surprised to see her son. Matthew was taken into custody at about 8:30 p.m. on December 28, 2022.
On January 3, 2023, Matthew was brought back before the Sabine County court and formally sentenced to 99 years in prison, with a $10,000 fine. Livye’s grandmother, Janice Lewis, and Darci both addressed him directly in court.
According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, he becomes eligible for parole on May 31, 2052. Because he had been a fugitive, he gave up his right to appeal, and the court of appeals dismissed the appeal that had been filed on his behalf.
Darci has said she hopes to be present when he comes up for parole, and Livye’s friends say that Darci will not be alone.
A grand jury indicted Cindy Hogan on October 25, 2023, on a charge of hindering apprehension or prosecution of a known felon, relating to December 28, 2022. She turned herself in on November 6, 2023, and was released the same day on a $20,000 bond. She is still awaiting trial.
Remembering Livye
Livye Heathyr Lewis is remembered first for her kindness. Her mother, Darci, called her a perfect child, loving and selfless, and said she went into nursing because she loved caring for people.
A straight-A student, Livye finished high school with a scholarship to a local college. She once said that imagining her future and the goals she would reach made her excited. Her plan was to become a nurse and then a physician assistant.
She had already begun that work. Livye was a certified nursing assistant at a local nursing home, and the residents there adored her. It was a demanding job, and she considered it her passion.
That is also where she met Taylor, a fellow nursing assistant nearly six years her senior who had a young daughter. The two clicked immediately, and Livye soon began staying at Taylor’s home all the time, where she fit in right away.
Bayley Williams, who met Livye in kindergarten, remembers a girl who wanted stability and had no interest in childish games. She was, in her friend’s words, ready to be grown up.
Darci wants more for her daughter’s legacy than the circumstances of her death. She does not want Livye to be known only as the girl who was killed in a small town.
She wants her remembered for the way she carried herself and for the happy person she was to those around her. Each morning, Darci gets up and recalls the good things, and she is saving money to buy a headstone for her daughter’s grave.
Recent Comments