Chapter 1: What is the premise of the Bad Romance episode?
This is Debra Roberts. We're taking a few weeks off from new podcast programming on Wednesdays while we work on a new interesting series to share with you. So in the meantime, we're bringing back some of our installments from our classic series, Bad Romance. Here's this week's episode. Hey there, 2020 listeners. This is Deborah Roberts, co-anchor of 2020.
We've got a new spinoff series we think you're going to want to hear. So we're making it available for you right here on our podcast. It's called Bad Romance. Have a listen.
She works at a bar. He was the maintenance man. Their affair is sudden, intense. But there are three people in this relationship. And late one night, one of them disappears. And there's no trace. The swamps of Horry County, South Carolina are like a black hole. Peachtree Boat Landing is a dark, desolate place. There is no reason for a car to be there abandoned in the middle of the night.
In these swamps, anything can happen. Anything can disappear, even a body. Only a few miles from the dark swamps are these pristine beaches and the bustling boardwalks of the South Carolina coast. Myrtle Beach is about 75 miles of beach, white sandy beaches. We get 20 million tourists a year. The actual permanent population of Myrtle Beach is more like around 30,000.
So this is still a really small town. When I first came down to Myrtle Beach to report on this story, one of the things that I noticed first was this great divide between the tourists on the coast and the locals who live west of the intercoastal inlet. And it was there that in December of 2013, a young woman, just 20 years old, Heather Elvis, disappears.
When people talk about Heather, they smile. because she was so full of personality. She lit up a room when she walked in. She was precious. She had a wonderful life. She had a beautiful life. She lived it the way she wanted. We've always been a tight-knit family. Everybody does for everybody else. She loved to make up.
She wanted to be in front of the camera and behind the camera and design everything that she wore in front of the camera. Heather Alphas worked at a sports bar here called the Tilted Kilt. Tilted Kilt is an Irish Scottish version of Hooters. So the girls wear kilts, they have TVs everywhere, they have a whole bunch of different beers on tap.
Heather might have come off abrasive to some people, but she was just, she was very real. When you're young in Myrtle Beach, you don't think bad things are going to happen. Way before dawn, a week before Christmas, Horry County Sheriff's Deputy Ken Canterbury is on a routine patrol near Peachtree Landing when he catches sight of a parked car. Cars don't usually park here. He checks the vehicle.
There doesn't appear to be anything out of the normal, so he then gets back and continues patrolling. The next day... Someone reported that car as a suspicious vehicle because of the length of time it had been sitting at Peachtree Boat Landing.
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Chapter 2: Who is Heather Elvis and what was her life like before her disappearance?
Officer Canterbury runs the tag. He finds it belonged to Terry Elvis. I had a knock at the door. It was a county police officer, and he was asking if we were missing a green Dodge Intrepid. Oh, yeah, that's Heather's car. And then he goes on to explain that it's been found at Peachtree Landing, apparently abandoned. He said, let's ride down and take a look.
Mr. Elvis immediately suspected something was wrong. He knew that that was his daughter's only mode of transportation. It had no business being at that landing. She never went to that landing. I was just sitting there twiddling my thumbs and waiting, calling Heather's phone. It was going straight to voicemail, which is way out of character with Heather. It really didn't hit me, where's Heather?
Until he started looking through things. Clothes, art, shoes, purses, makeup, you name it, was in her car. But they don't find her phone. They don't find her wallet. They don't find a pocketbook. Just looking into the woods to see if there's anything out of place. And everything looked normal. My panic had really set in. Heather's never done anything like this before. Something's wrong.
What's wrong? That's when police began piecing together the last known movements of Heather on the night she disappeared. So, December 17th, Heather went on a date with Steve Chiraldi. Stephen and Heather had gone to high school together. She was looking forward to that date very much. Stephen says they went to dinner at a place called Bandito's.
After dinner, they went to Stephen's house briefly to watch a movie. His mother corroborates that. Police across the country know that in any missing persons case, the first 48 hours are absolutely critical. Right now, they're leaving no stone unturned. And as part of this initial investigation, they send an officer over to the Tilted Kilt to see if Heather had missed work.
One of the first things that investigators hear from Heather's coworkers is that there is a different man who they should be talking to, other than the man Heather went on a date with the night before. The manager said, you really need to call Sidney Moore. There had been a relationship between the two of them.
Sidney Moore, back in 2013, was a night maintenance man at the Tilted Kilt, which is where he met Heather Elvis. Heather and Sidney started talking.
She noticed that he was good looking, he had a good attitude, and she went for it.
Now, he may have been good-looking, but he was 37, which made him 17 years older than Heather Elvis. What was the actual nature of their relationship? I mean, most people would call it a sexual relationship, but from my opinion of talking to her, they were in love. Sidney and Heather were having sex all the time, anywhere that they could.
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Chapter 3: What led to the investigation of Heather's disappearance?
Sidney Moore has a cell phone. Tammy Moore has a cell phone. Tammy Moore used that cell phone to great length to harass and essentially stalk Heather Elvis. They were calling from a pay phone to hide the call. There was a phone call made to Heather that night from a pay phone at the gas station on 10th Avenue. But we have video from that. Did you try calling her? Just a minute? A second?
You sure? Maybe. How about we start again? I did. I called her. What did you say? I asked her to please leave me alone. It sounded like a very innocent explanation, but Heather's roommate, Brianna, tells police a very different account of that phone call. At 144 in the morning, she called me. She was hysterically crying. And she said, Sidney called me.
She told me that he said he left his wife and that he was sorry and that he wanted to see her and be with her. And I told her, don't do it. By the end of the phone call, I was under the assumption that she wasn't going to meet Sidney. That's when everything starts moving in a very different direction. There is no way this story is going to end well.
After interviewing Heather's roommate, Brianna, about that conversation that Sidney and Heather had on the payphone, police begin by reconstructing the movements of Tammy and Sidney that night. They begin by pulling security video from that Walmart in Myrtle Beach. Sidney spent approximately nine minutes inside that Walmart, then got back in the truck where Tammy was waiting outside.
After that, they drove directly to the payphone where you see Sidney make the call to Heather Elvis. Day 20 in the search for missing 20-year-old Heather Elvis. Dozens of cars and horse trailers line the heavily wooded area. While the police look at the Walmart and pay phone surveillance videos, everyone in town seems to be out searching for Heather.
Well, everyone but Sydney and Tammy, because they're busy trashing Heather on social media. Tammy Moore put out a Facebook post shortly after she went missing, calling her a whore, saying these terrible things. We've all heard the term a woman scorned, right? And that's what Tammy Moore was. But when you see these posts, the way she's hounding this 20-year-old kid, it's disturbing.
Using Heather's phone records and her Gmail account, investigators begin to piece together her movements. After that phone call from Sydney at 1.35 a.m., Heather ends up calling his cell phone several times between 3.17 a.m. and 3.21 a.m. Finally, he picks up and the two have a conversation for about four minutes. And it's at that point that Heather gets in her car and begins driving.
We trace Heather's phone all the way to Peachtree Boat Landing. And once she gets to the landing, she's again calling Sydney Moore, 337, 338, 339, 340. It was four phone calls right in a row. This is why this is important, because while Heather was making those phone calls, video surveillance cameras along the route to Peachtree Landing also show a black pickup headed in the same direction.
Right there is the camera that caught what the FBI and the prosecutors say is that Ford F-150 going south towards Peachtree Landing. When you look at a map, it's immediately clear that driving Highway 814 and Mill Pond Road is the quickest way connecting Peachtree Landing and Tammy and Sydney Moore's house. In fact, they're only four miles apart.
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Chapter 4: What were the circumstances surrounding Heather's last known movements?
I think most people thought it'd be several hours for a verdict. We're like, this is a slam dunk. But it wasn't. It was news that a family and a prosecutor hate to hear. I think all of us were wondering, what now? What do we do from here? The hung jury was a painful blow to the prosecutors and the Elvis family, and prosecutors were convinced that Tammy and Sidney were responsible.
Investigators felt sure that the Moores knew more than they were telling, and they thought that maybe if they pressured them hard enough, long enough, one of them would begin cooperating with authorities. That's why prosecutors decide now to pursue an additional charge, obstruction of justice, because Sidney had lied to police. It's over the payphone call where he's denying it.
And then, yeah, we all know he made that phone call. The jury reached the decision in only 50 minutes.
On the charge of obstruction of justice, guilty.
He's found guilty of obstruction of justice and sentenced to 10 years in prison. The Alphas family says today's verdict is the beginning, not the end. I think it'll be like Domino's. I think the first one fell. I think the rest will fall into place. You can't hide it forever.
About two years after Sidney's conviction for obstruction of justice, now it's Tammy's turn to face trial on kidnapping charges. Today, the trial for one of the suspects, Tammy Moore, started. Tammy Moore didn't kidnap anyone. She didn't conspire to kidnap me. For the prosecution, this will not be an easy case to prove. Tammy's not in any of the video, not at the Walmart, not at the payphone.
They'll need something else to connect Tammy to Heather. When you collect evidence, police normally focus on that very tight time that she goes missing at. But we started looking at a much larger time frame. Prosecutors tracked Sidney and Tammy's movements all over town before, during, and after Heather's disappearance. And what they found was damage.
They were chasing her, basically watching her to find out when she may be the most vulnerable. The key witnesses really were those individuals that knew that she was dating Sidney Moore and at the time she thought she was pregnant. Do you know who she was having sex with? Sidney. Who was she scared of? Tammy. I had never been face to face with Tammy up until that point. Who's in this picture?
That's Heather. And how did she feel about Sidney? She loved him. And she's staring into my eyes, and she has this way of being very, very intimidating. I mean, I get goosebumps still thinking about it to this day.
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Chapter 5: What role did Sidney Moore play in Heather's life?
But a jury needs facts, needs proof that Tammy was involved in Heather's kidnapping. Everything we had was circumstantial. But the circumstantial evidence we had, I don't think could be contradicted. Like the cell phone tracking. Tammy and Sydney, both of their phones began following around Heather Elvis' phone after November 2nd.
And on the night of December 18th, both Sydney and Tammy's cell phone pinged on the same tower near the payphone, proving they were together that night. Is Tammy and Sydney's phone in the area of this payphone at 1.30? Yes, they are. Immediately after that phone call, she calls her roommate.
My exact words were, do not call Sydney back, don't do anything rash, go to sleep, and we'll talk about it tomorrow. When is the next time that you've heard from her? I haven't.
When prosecutors presented video surveillance footage showing that Ford F-150 driving back and forth from Peachtree Landing, just before and just after Heather disappears, they were actually able to call a person who teaches forensic video analysis at Quantico. The work that we do includes help with questions of primary identification.
Is it your opinion today, after looking at everything you've looked at, that indeed it was the same truck as the known truck, which belonged to Tammy Moore? Yes. The state rests, but the defense has a surprise for them. When the state rested, they excused the jury. It was pretty clear Tammy wanted to say something. When she said, yes, I want to testify, there was a gasp in the room.
Any prosecutor will tell you that's an amazingly big risk, but not as big as the risk she takes by sitting down with 2020 in violation of a gag order that had been imposed on her. And Tammy didn't want her attorney present. There are people who say that you wore the pants in the family, that you were really the powerhouse here. The man that makes the money is the one that's running the house.
I paid the bills. After he had the affair with Heather, did you actually handcuff him to the bed? Never, never. Were you angry enough that your husband cheated on you that you were ready to kidnap? Absolutely not. It seems that the prosecution to some degree thinks that you are the linchpin here, not Sydney. They change it according to what they need to say.
These were Facebook posts, triple coupons, buy low, school's all done. So it looks like you are putting together a timeline. It starts with early in the night, 1.47. My sister texts me. 3.10, I pull into the driveway. I text her I got the ad and that I'm home. So I want to make sure that everything that I did was accounted for, that it's looking normal, just like any other day in my life.
It seems like everybody is lying here, except you. And that's why I am terrified of tomorrow, because I feel like this town is gonna crucify me because of all the lies and all of the that's happened. What happened to Heather Elvis? Today, Tammy Moore took the stand in her own defense. Tammy thinks, in my opinion, that no matter where she's at, she's the smartest person in the room.
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Chapter 6: How did the affair between Heather and Sidney impact the investigation?
I was almost afraid to open them. Even though Tammy Moore's trial is over, the Elvis family have to still go through the trial of Sidney Moore. In September 2019, after a hung jury and a conviction for obstruction of justice, Sidney Moore thought that he might have a chance. You can't abduct somebody.
You can't do all the things they're saying they're doing and not leave some trace of physical evidence. We're going to show you. But it's not the same old case. Prosecutors have something new, something pretty shocking. And it's on tape. This DVD... is a copy of the video surveillance system that was in Nomura's house. Remember, there was no tape from the day Heather disappeared.
But this is from a few days later. And what that security camera video shows is Sydney and Tammy spending hours cleaning their F-150 pickup truck. And not just cleaning the truck, but focusing on the rear passenger side.
About 30 minutes into cleaning the truck, Sidney starts a burn pile over in the side yard and starts burning some of the rags that they're cleaning with, and that continues throughout the whole time they're there. To me, that just screams guilty. The defense claimed that burning the trash is common in the Moore's neighborhood. I need an additional witness, Mr. Bell.
Your Honor, the state has nothing further to say. After six years, multiple trials, three convictions, and a lot of heartache, the Elvis family braced themselves for the verdict. As for the prosecutors, Nancy Livesay and Chris Helms, all they could do was wait and hope. The verdict came back after two hours of deliberation.
We, the jury, by unanimous consent, find the defendant, Sydney St. Clair Moore, on the charge of kidnapping, guilty.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Like Tammy, Sydney was also sentenced to 30 years on each charge to run concurrently. And the jury, they thought it was pretty clear. They tried to raise reasonable doubt, and that was their job, to raise reasonable doubt. But they didn't do their job, because I wasn't doubting. Were you? No. I know the right people are behind bars. I have no doubt about that.
The perfect solution would be to find Heather Elvis alive, but I don't believe that'll ever happen. Sidney and Tammy Moore say they are innocent of all charges. In June of 2023, they asked the South Carolina Court of Appeals to overturn their convictions for kidnapping and conspiracy to kidnap. That petition was denied. Yeah, for six years now, they've met at Peachtree Landing in Socastee.
This event brings other families who have lost loved ones or are missing loved ones during a time of year when family really means the most. If I could talk to Sidney, I would want to tell him that this has been just a really long nightmare for everybody. but he could make it better if he would tell the truth. I hold out hope that I'll turn around one day at the front door and she'll walk in.
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