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An Iowa woman who confessed to killing her stepmother in a Snapchat post received a unanimous "guilty" verdict this week, the Gazette reports.
Samantha Bevans, 35, was found guilty of first-degree murder in relation to the 2022 suffocation death of Jodie Bevans by a Benton County jury on Monday (May 20). Bevans is scheduled to be sentenced on June 14 and faces a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
Bevans had previously shared a Snapchat video in which she was seen smiling and jumping around while saying, "I killed her myself" while being encouraged by her boyfriend, Tacoa Talley, to "keep going." Talley was previously convicted of first-degree murder in relation to Jodie's death in 2023.
Bevans claimed that Talley was controlling her and blamed him for her stepmother's death while appearing in court last week, claiming she was angry at and trying to get a reaction out of him and said she didn't know what was real and what wasn't at the time because Talley was manipulating her.
Samantha claimed she initially put a pillow partially over Jodie's face and held it down, but couldn't go through with it after her stepmother threw up. Samantha said Jodie was still breathing when she left the bedroom and thought her stepmother was still alive before Talley, acting alone, held Jodie down and suffocated her.
Special Agent Holly Witt of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, however, revealed in a rebuttal testimony that Samantha told her and another investigator that she fully covered Jodie's face and showed how she was "grinding" her foot on top of the pillow. Jodie Bevans' official cause of death was asphyxiation and she was reported to have had abrasions on her face consistent with a pillow smothering, according to a state medical examiner's testimony.