Eugenia Campbell
An Army veteran lives through two dangerous tours in Iraq, only to be gunned down within his own home.
Season 23 Episode 13
Originally aired: April 29, 2018
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They were high school sweethearts with a devotion to family and country.
We were all proud of them.
That, hey, my big brother's in the military.
He loved his family.
He had a big family.
He provided Eugena with everything she could want she ate his heart just when their future looked its brightest
a devastating crime stopped to their marriage dead in its tracks
police arrived to a very grisly horrific scene i felt as though my heart had been ripped out my chest as detectives hunt for a killer they discover that there is more to this picture-perfect couple than meets the eye.
There was something going on in the resident that's suspicious.
He was actually telling us about an affair.
It was mean coming in and out into the house.
The potential suspect pool was quite large.
The phone call, it was a gentleman said that he had some information.
Her house is actually burning to the ground at the time.
She come on to you as sweet as honey, but she is meaner than a cover snake.
October 12th, 2011.
Pritchard, Alabama police officer Willie Mabin is in the middle of a patrol shift when Dispatch informs him of a troubling call that just came in.
Dispatch contacted me and advised that there was suspicious circumstance at Gorman Lane.
And I started heading that way, which was on the north side of the town.
As Officer Mabin arrives at the scene, he's met by a frightened 29-year-old Eugenia Campbell and her sister, Satanya.
Upon arriving on the scene, I spoke with Mrs.
Cameron.
She was upset, you know.
Eugenia says she had been afraid to enter the home she shares with her 32-year-old husband, Romano.
She stated when she'd arrived home, her husband's trunk was up on the car and the door was open.
She came home and just felt like things were off.
It just looked strange.
She knew her husband wouldn't have left those items open and unlocked.
They blew the horn.
He didn't respond.
And then they called the police.
There had been a burglary reported at that house the week before, so she felt the need to call 911 before going inside.
When I arrived on the scene, I noticed the same thing, the trunk was up and the door was open.
I advised her to stay out in the vehicle with her sister.
Officer Mabin cautiously enters the home.
Upon entering the resident, I kept calling for Mr.
Campbell and he still didn't respond.
I looked around and I saw some shoes on the floor, but they were face up on the floor behind the sofa.
I didn't see any blur at the time, but I knew he wasn't responding, and I started EMS to the location.
At that time, we really had no clue as to what really transpired.
We need to pull in additional resources from law enforcement and figure out what we need to do to try and get to the bottom of the crime.
For Romano Campbell, the son of an unwed teen mother, his childhood in South Alabama was one of struggle and survival.
He grew up in a place they call Happy Hill.
It was a bad place where it was drugs.
It was all,
it was poverty, it was killing.
Unlike many of his neighborhood peers, Romano refused to succumb to the temptations of the street.
He escaped so many things that he saw growing up.
He was a good child.
Finished school with over an amount of credits, very intelligent.
He just was an athletic person.
He played football for two years.
A track was his love.
He was a big muscle, you know, type guy.
He was feared in school.
But he was cool.
You know, people look at his physique and say, oh, no, I ain't going to mess with him.
During high school, Romano met the young woman who would one day become his wife, the spunky, self-assured Eugenia Singleton.
Eugenia and Romano were high school sweethearts.
She's from Pritchard, Alabama, and he met her.
She was working at Church's Chicken.
And she was an outgoing person.
Outside the box, you know, she was just ongoing.
I could say that would attract him.
they used to take us to the movies just used to have fun you know that's how you know she won me over
although eugenia and romano were still in love they decided to split up when high school ended the following year romano enlisted in the army and began his basic training almost 600 miles away in fort knox kentucky
he was a hard worker he was a dedicated person when it came to the military military.
He loved that military.
We were all proud of him that, hey, my big brother's in the military.
Before his deployment to South Korea in the spring of 2002, Romano paid a visit to his family back in Pritchard, where he ran into his old flame.
We saw him in Wend-Dixie, and she had a little boy.
In the years since their breakup, Eugenia had weathered a rocky relationship with another local guy with whom she had a child, but the father didn't stick around.
This is just your average mother who is just trying to make ends meet.
Despite Eugenia's struggles and Romano's impending deployment, the attraction still seemed strong.
We were sitting on the porch one day, and my mom, she loved reading the paper.
And Romano's family was floored when they came across an unexpected wedding announcement.
She says, He done got married.
So she calls him and asks him, and he said, Yes, ma'am, I got married.
Over the next few years, Eugenia and Romano added two more children to their family and settled into a home on a military base near Savannah, Georgia.
The couple couldn't have been happier.
He was a good man, a good father.
Eugenia was living a normal life.
She had children.
She had a husband who worked hard for the family, and she was working to take care of her family like most women are.
They seem to be doing fine, good,
and my son was taking good care of her.
Despite their apparent happiness, Romano and Eugenia's relationship still had its challenges.
Romano Campbell was an Army sergeant, so he served seven years in the Army, two tours in Iraq.
With each tour in Iraq, it grew harder and harder for Romano and Eugenia to keep the fire in their romance burning.
This is a woman who is working to take care of her family, quite a large family, and she has a husband who's gone a lot.
Ultimately, Eugenia's loneliness drove her to find comfort in the arms of another man.
So when he went to Iraq, Eugenia was going with the sergeant.
She got pregnant.
She ended up having the babe and giving the babe up for adoption.
And the military don't really believe in divorce, so they advised him to do a legal separation.
Despite Eugenia's infidelity and pressure from Romano's superiors to separate from her, the couple refused to give up on their marriage.
And when Romano wrapped up his final tour in Iraq, he chose not to re-enlist.
He just wanted his family more.
That's why I think
he wanted to be out.
You know, he wanted to take care of his family.
He loved his family.
He got back together with her.
He loved her.
I believe that she ate his heart.
To help strengthen their family bond, Eugenia and Romano decided to move back to their hometown of Pritchard, Alabama.
They seemed to be doing good and he got on at Superior All.
He decided to get a job working offshore.
And anyone that works offshore, that means you're going to be gone away from home a lot.
So he worked two weeks offshore, two weeks back on land.
So that meant a lot of time away from Eugenia and a lot of time away from the kids.
For Romano, being gone for only two weeks a month was a vast improvement over being in a war zone for years at a time.
And working the oil rigs also paid better.
The finances was great.
Hanka was more than great.
He's always had.
He's never lacked anything.
It appeared Eugenia and Romano had managed to put their troubles behind them and were more in love than ever.
It seemed to be getting along fine.
Everything seemed to be fine.
But in October 2011, a series of events would bring the Campbells reinvigorated romance to an abrupt and brutal end.
I went back in with the EMTs and I did notice blood on him after they was trying to resuscitate him.
EMTs quickly realized there's nothing they can do to save Romano Campbell.
He had multiple gunshots about his body, and we couldn't determine at that time whether they were entrance wounds or exit wounds.
It's clear to the officers that Romano's death is no accident.
This particular level of crime obviously was not a self-inflicted crime.
It was one in which there had to be some type of assailant involved.
Coming up.
As investigators work to track down a killer, they open a Pandora's box of secrets and lies that reveal an unexpected double life.
It did run through our mind that maybe there was some connection with this, but we didn't know exactly how.
Every question we asked him, he just denied, denied, denied, denied.
She said, come to my house now.
My house is on fire.
By the fall of 2011, Eugenia and Romano Campbell had weathered the ups and downs of nearly 10 years of marriage, and their relationship seemed that much stronger for it.
I didn't see any struggling with them.
I didn't see any kind of lack of anything.
She was the perfect wife.
But on October 12th, 2011, police in Pritchard, Alabama discover Romano, an Army veteran who survived two tours in Iraq, dead on the floor of his own living room with what appear to be multiple gunshot wounds.
This is a man who survived IED explosions and then came home to be murdered.
As patrol officers secure the perimeter, friends and neighbors gather to comfort Eugenia.
Inside the house, homicide detectives are getting their first look at the crime scene.
I did observe the victim, Mr.
Campbell, lying behind a sofa or a couch.
His feet were faced up towards the bedroom area where the bedrooms were on the far end of the house.
This is a man who had just gotten home from work.
He worked off short.
He had just walked in the door.
The keys were still on the door.
The trunk of his car was still open.
There wasn't an extreme amount of blood on the victim's body at the time, and nothing appeared to be disturbed so we were kind of puzzled.
Numerous things ran through my head.
It could have been a burglar that broke into the house right before Mr.
Camel came home and Mr.
Campbell starred him
or it could have been somebody else waiting outside
and came in and shot him.
There were a lot of possibilities at the time.
One thing police do know is that this isn't the first time they've been called to this residence.
About a week before Mr.
Campbell was killed, I responded to that location with regards to a burglary.
There had been a prior incident where the wife of the victim had called and reported a burglary at the house.
In an attempt to gather information, detectives invite Romano's wife, Eugenia, and her sister Satania, down to the station for an interview.
She stated that her and her sister had went to the casino down in Bilixa and that Mr.
Campbell had called her and told her that he was coming home a little later and she decided to spend the night over to her sister's house and just come over the next day.
Romano worked offshore so he was out for two weeks and then he'd be home for two weeks.
On this particular occasion, his wife was not at home that night, and so she was not present at the time of his murder.
Eugenia explains she she had a good reason for not wanting to be at home alone that night.
Miss Eugenia, she had reported a burglary at the house maybe about a week prior.
She was scared to stay there by herself.
So she had been staying with her sister.
My sister Warras interviewed also.
She gave the same alibi saying that they was in Biloxi at the casino and said afterwards they came home.
Investigators ask the sisters if they know anybody who might want Romano dead.
Neither of them can think of a single person.
However, Eugenia tells detectives that whoever broke into their home the previous week had stolen Romano's nine millimeter pistol.
I thought it may have been a connection that person that broke in before might have been there when Mr.
Campbell came home.
Romano and Eugenia would have been in what we call the urbanized areas of the city of Pritchard, whereby typically it's characterized by a lot of low employment, typically a lot of high crime as far as burglaries and things of that nature.
And every now and then shootings.
You have a lot of areas that are rough, and it wouldn't be unexpected for there to be a burglary or robbery gone bad that turns into a murder.
Back at the crime scene, the CSI officer has yet to uncover any evidence to support an armed robbery theory.
Nothing appeared to be disturbed, so we were kind of puzzled at that time because normally if this was a typical home invasion where the victim came home and encountered someone in the house, there would have probably been a struggle or things would have been missing like TVs, game systems.
So we basically looked throughout the house.
We noticed that items of value were not taken.
We didn't find a point of entry prior to Mr.
Campbell opening the front door.
We checked the perimeter and didn't find anything out of place.
Any windows broken.
The back door was kind of in shambles, but it was from a prior burglary.
One of the curious things about the investigation from the very beginning was Romano was shot multiple times.
At the scene, we only found two shell casings.
And what was interesting, both those shell casings were found under furniture or under something where they would have been hidden.
And so it appears as if someone picked up the shell casings in an attempt to hide their evidence.
That is very unusual from a burglary standpoint.
Is it possible that the thief had returned to rob the house once again and ends up using Romano's own gun against him?
While it seems like a long shot, investigators aren't willing to rule anything out just yet.
we basically had no clue other than he was killed inside the residence and somebody evidently was inside the residence or came in in the residence while he was returning home
in the meantime investigators face another difficult task informing Romano's mother Patricia of her son's death
my mom is a chaplain chaplain for Pritchard Police Department.
When detectives reach out to Ms.
Campbell, the case takes another unexpected turn.
On the day that Mr.
Campbell was found murdered in his house, when his mother was notified, her house is actually burning to the ground at the time.
Everyone was coming to my house, my neighbors and My sisters and everybody was coming there because of my loss of their house and fire.
But they didn't have any idea that I was losing my firstborn son.
One day, this woman lost everything.
She lost her son, and she lost her home.
It was just a devastating day.
I've been on that side of the fence consoling that family, but now I need somebody to console me.
We're talking about my child is laying in here on that floor, dead.
It was a feeling that
I wasn't in reality.
With the cause of the fire unknown, investigators are concerned that someone is specifically targeting the family.
And it did run through our mind that maybe there was some connection with this, but we didn't know exactly how it fitted.
He is shot inside his own home.
And then the same day, you have his mother, whose house catches fire.
Something was off.
Coming up, as the investigation moves forward, a new witness could change everything.
And the identity of Romano Campbell's killer will stun both friends and family.
I had a phone call, and it was a gentleman who said that he had some information on the case.
Some of the questions that we asked him, he was evasive to.
He was just straight out lying.
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In Pritchard, Alabama, Romano and Eugenia Campbell's life together has tragically been cut short.
32-year-old Romano has been gunned down in his own home.
And before his family has even had a chance to process what's happened, another tragedy strikes.
You have a mother who, on the same day her son was murdered, across town, her house goes up in flames.
You think those two things may be connected.
Surely this isn't a coincidence.
Well, basically, that day, everything was still up in the air.
We basically had no clue.
It could have been very well some connection, but we were unsure at that time.
Mobile County arson investigators are dispatched to Patricia Campbell's residence.
and begin combing through the wreckage.
It doesn't take them long to determine the source of the fire.
The fire department determined that this was an electrical fire,
that these two incidents were not related, that this just happened to be a situation where a woman had really bad luck.
In one day, this woman lost everything.
She lost her son and she lost her home.
It was just a devastating day.
I was dealing with the loss of everything.
All my memories.
I was dealing with a whole lot.
But what kept me function was my faith in God.
The mystery of Patricia Campbell's house fire has been quickly solved.
But across town at Eugenia and Romano's residence, investigators are no closer to determining who killed Romano or why.
There were a lot of possibilities at the time, but we didn't have the key ingredients or key components to just put everything together.
Investigators had hoped an interview with Romano's grieving widow Eugenia and her sister Satania might generate some new leads.
But neither woman could think of anybody who'd want to harm Romano.
When police speak with the rest of Romano's friends and family, they say the same thing.
I talked to his boss, even one of the shipmates.
He dropped off prior to coming to his residence.
And
all of them talked very highly of him.
We couldn't find out one person that we knew that he may have gotten into some type of altercation or wanted him dead.
Romano Campbell was a man who was not a criminal.
He wasn't a bad man.
He was a great man.
He served our country.
He served tours in Iraq.
He provided for his large family.
He loved his wife.
He was a hard worker.
He was a model citizen.
He's the type of citizen that we take pride in and that we celebrate.
The following morning, the coroner's office performs an autopsy on Romano's body and uncovers a chilling new detail.
He was shot 16 times.
You could tell anger was in that, you know, because if you're going to kill him, you know, you could have used one or two bullets.
You didn't have to.
The whole clip.
If this had been a regular home invasion, maybe a person that's trying to flee would have maybe shot once or twice.
But being that he was shot multiple times means he was ambushed.
It was an overkill.
It takes one bullet to kill.
If it was a robbery, you know, one shot, you know, somebody trying to get away, they're not gonna flood you with that many bullets.
When I heard about that, I knew it was a passion.
By examining the lividity of Romano's body, the coroner's office is also able to determine time of death.
So he shot in the early morning hours right when he got home around midnight.
Now that the coroner has established a timeline, investigators fan out across the Campbells neighborhood, looking for anybody who may have seen something that night.
We spoke to a few neighbors in the area.
A couple that stayed next door, we asked them, did they hear any gunshots or did they see anyone?
at the residence or what time of the day it was that he returned home or so.
And they really didn't have any clue.
We didn't have any witnesses at the time.
The time of morning that it happened, normally everybody sleep.
So I didn't think that we would get anything to solve the case.
Although the canvassing effort yields no eyewitnesses, several of the Campbell's neighbors do report seeing a lot of unusual activity around the home in the last two weeks.
Some of the neighbors had told us that some other people had started coming to the house and one neighbor actually had took down a license plate plate number.
Police traced the license plate to a vehicle registered to a man who lived in the area.
And we tracked him down, interviewed him, and he was actually telling us about our affair.
Investigators are stunned that they are now interviewing Eugenia Campbell's lover.
I was quite surprised at that.
Point blank, detectives asked the man if he had anything to do with Romano's murder.
He denied even knowing Mr.
Campbell and basically stated that he and Eugenia had just a very casual, very friendly, very short-term relationship.
After a little investigation in that matter, we kind of ruled him out.
He gave us an alibi for that day where he was at, and it did check out.
But just as investigators are about to release the man, he reveals another interesting piece of information.
During the investigation, we did find out that she was having numerous affairs.
She had multiple men in her life that she appeared to have some type of sexual relationship with.
When detectives inform Romano's family of Eugenia's alleged infidelity, they're not entirely shocked.
She had so many affairs with different guys.
It was a disgrace to our family.
She had had multiple affairs while her husband was working offshore.
She lived a completely different life for those two weeks that Romana was out of town.
We looked at those
people she was having an affair with as being possible suspects.
So of course they're going to look at these lovers.
They're going to question them because that would obviously be a motive in this case.
If the statement about Eugenia's revolving door of lovers is accurate, then the pool of potential suspects just got a whole lot deeper.
We believe that the potential suspect pool was quite large.
And so we had to go through all of these individuals.
Is this person potentially involved?
Where was he at the time?
Investigators begin tracking down Eugenia's alleged lovers one by one.
So lots of these men were interviewed.
We were able to exclude some of them because they might either have been in jail at the time, out of town, they were found ultimately through phone records.
With this new information about all of her affairs, detectives begin to question Eugenia's involvement in the murder.
In a follow-up interview with detectives, Eugenia doesn't deny cheating on Romano, but she remains adamant she had nothing to do with his death.
And given her rock-solid alibi from the night of the crime, investigators believe she may not have been there when Romano was murdered, but they still have suspicions.
Eugenia had called Romano 30 minutes before he was scheduled to arrive home.
So we were very curious about that.
I would say that Eugenia was probably at the top of the list of potential candidates to have committed this crime, but we did not believe that she was there.
I don't think she was the shooter, but I thought she had something to do with it.
With no evidence at the time, I couldn't just stand on that alone.
So we started looking elsewhere in investigation.
With no other leads, the case begins to lose momentum.
For Romano's family, it feels like they're living through a nightmare.
I felt as though my heart had been ripped out of my chest.
Every day, I got up with a challenge.
Every day,
and it felt like I was walking alone.
It felt like it was so dark.
And I just wanted just a little peek of sunshine.
As for Eugenia, it seems that the loss of her husband, coupled with the public revelation that she'd been unfaithful to him, made life in Pritchard unbearable.
Turns out it wasn't too long after that that Eugenia moved to Biloxi, Mississippi.
Two and a half years transpire with no new developments in the case.
The family did a great job of convincing me of that justice had not been served fairly.
It was to the point, though, we could not tie all the dots and measure all the pieces together to figure out the who, what, where, and why.
More than two years later, in 2014, Police receive a phone call from a man in the nearby town of Ocean Springs, Mississippi that changes everything.
I was sitting at my desk and the dispatch called and advised me that I had a phone call.
It was a gentleman who said that he had some information on a case.
So I took the call.
The guy introduced himself.
And he said that we had a homicide in Pritchard.
And that the gentleman that did it basically confessed to him.
And once he told us us that, I immediately asked him, did he know for sure what case it was?
And he stated that it was the husband of Eugena Campbell.
So I contacted Sergeant Martin and told him that we were going to take a ride to Mississippi.
Coming up, is this the break investigators have been waiting for?
Or will it prove to be yet another dead end?
We threw everything we had at him.
March 2014.
It's now been over two years since Eugenia Campbell's husband, Romano, was brutally gunned down in their South Alabama home.
But just when it seems the case might never be solved, a Mississippi man named Ross has come forward, claiming to have information about the murder.
So I contacted Sergeant Martin and told him that we was going to take a ride to Ocean Springs, Mississippi.
We proceeded to drive down to Mississippi and we met him at a local gas station there.
According to Ross, a 27-year-old friend of his named Frank Williams had recently made a disturbing confession to Ross and his brother.
What he told us was that he and Frank had been talking.
Frank was just
some kind of way just started, just rambling and telling him some things.
He spills the beans.
He ends up telling these two guys in Biloxi that he killed a man named Romano Campbell and Pritchard.
Investigators asked Ross if Mr.
Williams explained why he'd murdered Romano Campbell.
He basically told us that Eugena and Frank had been dating at one point.
They'd moved to Biloxi, Mississippi.
They started a new life there.
In fact, they had a child together.
Years had gone by.
Apparently, they got into some sort of falling out.
He moves in with his friends.
Once a warrant was signed for the arrest of Mr.
Williams, we contacted the Marshal Service to try and locate him because we were not sure exactly where he was.
Ultimately, he was actually arrested at his mother's house in Pritchard.
So as soon as he was arrested, he was taken to the Pritchard Police Department.
Frank Williams proves to be a tough nut to crack.
We threw everything we had at him.
Well, where were you at this time?
Well, I wasn't there.
I was never there.
Well, did you and Eugenia have a relationship together?
No, she was just my friend.
We just talked to each other and stuff like that.
Every question we asked him, he just denied, denied, denied, denied.
But he was kind of nervous about some things.
I can tell some of the questions that we asked him, he was evasive to, and a lot of things he was just straight out lying about.
We just put the hammer down on him and told him, Look, if you want to sit here and continue lying about this, we already know certain things that you've already told another person.
We just put everything out in front of him and just told him, Look, regardless of what you say right here, you're still going to jail.
There's an awful lot about this entire scenario
that I know.
One thing
after another.
Okay.
I'm going to be honest with you.
And this is what I don't want.
Don't go down by yourself.
Okay.
You basically, at that instant, said, okay, I'm ready to talk.
And you basically told us the story from beginning to end.
According to Frank, it all began in August of 2011 when he first met Eugenia Campbell.
From the time y'all met,
how long was it before y'all started a sexual relationship?
About two weeks.
Okay.
He knew that she was married.
Her husband would go off to work out of town, and then he would come back.
Frank admits that he fell hard for Eugenia.
Not long after the two began sleeping together, Frank introduced Eugenia and her four kids to his family.
I met her and, you know, she just said she didn't have anybody to help her.
She said she was married, but she was in the process of getting a divorce.
Initially, he told them that Ramono used to be very abusive to her and she wanted to basically get out that situation.
Eugenia had informed him that her and her husband had some domestic instances with each other and that she was basically tired of it.
Eugenia told him that she wanted to hire him to take her husband out, which means to kill him.
She made the comment to him that if something would have happened, she would collect Social Security benefits for the children and there was life insurance,
substantial life insurance that would help her be able to support the children and then she would be able to give him half of that life insurance policy.
Initially, he kept putting Eugenia off off and did not want to get involved.
However,
when he learned of the level of domestic violence that she claimed that caused her to go to the hospital, he decided that yes, that he would kill her husband.
Okay, from that point on to the time that she
first asked you to do this for her, to kill her husband,
how long was that?
From the first time y'all had sex until she asked you to kill her husband?
About a month and a half.
Okay.
She basically tormented me.
Okay,
Frank claims that in the weeks leading up to the murder, Eugenia spelled out her plan for eliminating her husband.
The break-in was staged.
It was kind of ironic that the only thing that was stolen at the time at the first break-in was a nine-millimeter hand pistol.
And the two shell cases that we did find on scene was a nine millimeter hand pistol.
Frank says says on the night Romano was due back from his stint in the Gulf, Eugenia left her kids at her sister's house, then met up with him to put the second part of the plan into action.
She picked him up, took him over to the house, let him in, and gave him the gun, and he waited inside.
Frank tells detectives that once he was inside the residence, Eugenia returned to her sister's house.
and waited.
She left her car there, again, to make it appear as if she's at home, like Ramana would expect when he arrived home.
He said he sat there for a while inside the house waiting for her husband to return.
Finally he said when her husband returned he was already inside the house.
Even when he came home tell me what happened.
He came home and he came to the door and when he came to the door I was standing right there in the hallway.
And once he got right there behind the couch between the door and the hallway where I could see him, I shot him.
All right.
How many times did you shoot?
About.
Until the gun stopped.
Until the gun stopped.
What did you do then?
All right.
He advised he also had a Nike gym bag around the gun so when he shoot, it would catch all the bullets.
One of two fell out the bag, and that's how we got shell casings.
He said he called her.
And he told her to come pick him up and she was going to pick him up and meet him on the back road.
There's a convenience store right on the other side of a very small patch of woods from their house.
He basically left the house, walked through that little cut, and was picked up by Eugenia at the convenience store.
The next day, she called the police and the police discovered his body inside the house.
Frank says that despite carrying out Eugenia's plan to a T, he never received his half of the $200,000 insurance payout, even after he and Eugenia moved to Biloxi together.
He was mad at her.
She owed him some money.
She had never given him the money, and he was worried that she was trying to cheat him out of that money.
With Frank's confession on the record, police formally charge him with first-degree murder.
He was distraught after it, and that's what I believe led him to telling us everything what had transpired.
We did arrest him.
and charge him with the murder of Mr.
Campbell.
Coming up, after charging Frank Williams, investigators turn their attention to Eugenia Campbell and find out what a wicked game this wife and mother of five had really been playing.
She had a gambling problem.
I think the Lord hit her a couple of times, but the devil won in the end.
On March 26, 2014, Frank Williams, the 27-year-old lover of Eugenia Campbell, confessed to firing the 16 bullets that killed Eugenia's husband, Romano Campbell.
But Frank claims that Eugenia was the crime's true mastermind.
When he confessed to his part of the murder and also confessed to Eugenia's part, and it was her idea, her planning, she set this plan in motion.
We then signed a warrant for her arrest.
They arrested Eugenia the next day, the 27th of March, 2014.
I never forget.
Her story is she didn't do it.
She put it all on him.
He did it.
Detectives continue to dig deeper into Eugenia's personal life and discover the reason she was so desperate to cash in.
on the ample military benefits her husband had accrued.
She had a gambling problem.
Said that she stayed out at the casinos a lot.
She was spending more money in gambling than she should be and not using it for around the house.
She done let all the bills get behind.
My theory was she had to get rid of him for that purpose because of her gambling addiction.
With her gambling addiction revealed, and with multiple sources acknowledging Eugenia's attempts to hire a hitman, investigators take another run at eliciting a confession from her.
She was brought in by the marshals and she was questioned by the DA officer.
Initially, I believe her story was the same as his.
She kind of denied, denied, denied until they basically dangled all the evidence in front of her and informed her that, hey, the gig is up.
We know what happened.
Almost a year after she had been arrested, we went over to the jail, brought brought her in, and she gave a complete confession.
Nearly five years after Romano's murder, in a Mobile County criminal court, both Eugenia Campbell and Frank Williams plead guilty to the murder of Eugenia's husband, Romano.
Honestly, I was quite surprised.
that they both decided to plead guilty and just leave their sentence up to the judge.
I was quite surprised at that.
Both Ms.
Campbell and Mr.
Williams were sentenced to a life sentence.
That's a long time to think about what you've done.
I can't use the word satisfied,
but I got justice.
I think the Lord hit her a couple of times, but the devil won in the end.
She was a horrible person.
When she killed him like that, it really showed it just what type of person she was.
It really did.
Eugenia is currently housed at Tutweiler Prison for Women in Wetumka, Alabama.
She will be eligible for parole in March 2029.
She will be 48 years old.
On Boxing Day 2018, 20-year-old Joy Morgan was last seen at her church, Israel United in Christ, or IUIC.
I just went on my Snapchat and I just see her face plastered everywhere.
This is the missing sister, the true story of a woman betrayed by those she trusted most.
IUIC is my family and like the best family that I've ever had.
But IUIC isn't like most churches.
This is a devilish cult.
You know when you get that feeling where you just, I don't want to be here.
I want to get out.
It's like that feeling of, like, I want to go hang out.
I'm Charlie Brent Coast Cuff, and after years of investigating Joy's case, I need to know what really happened to Joy.
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