Affably known as “Little Man” for his hulking 6’4’’ frame, 24 year-old Mississippi native Carson Sistrunk befriended 20 year-old Sierra Jane Inscoe, a woman he met — and hadn’t known long — via Snapchat. But soon after meeting up for a relaxing night out at a secluded rural area, his was life taken and his vehicle stolen, leaving his small community bereaved and heartbroken.

“This is a case about a young man who met a girl and wanted an adventure. And it turns out that the girl that he thought was fun had a sinister motive,” area prosecutor Laurel Blue Brinkley told Snapped, airing Sundays at 6/5c on Oxygen. “She had told many people that she was going to have a truck by her birthday — and he had a very nice truck.”

What happened to Carson Sistrunk?

At the end of a long Labor Day weekend in September 2022, Carson Sistrunk’s mother, Darlene, grew concerned when her son hadn’t made contact or responded to messages. When Carson didn’t show up for work in the small town of Pearl, Mississippi the following Tuesday, Darlene contacted law enforcement.

“I had a bad gut feeling,” she told Snapped. “I just really started praying and just saying, you know, ‘Carson, where are you?’”

A look at recent records on the debit card Darlene shared with her son showed that Carson’s last transaction occurred at a rural convenience store 50 miles to the south in the town of New Hebron, an area known to locals for its many oil and gas wells amid a broader landscape of open farmland.

Local sheriff’s deputies were alerted to be on lookout for Carson’s vehicle, a silver Ford Raptor truck with a distinctive dark-colored hood. They located the truck at the convenience store in New Hebron, surrounded by a group of onlookers that included Sierra Inscoe — who also happened to be in possession of the truck’s keys.

With Carson still missing, law enforcement questioned Inscoe about her connection with the vehicle and with Carson. She initially denied knowing who Carson was, claiming that she had recently purchased the truck from another local man she knew only through a nickname. She also claimed to have been with a small group of friends — but not with Carson — on the night of his apparent disappearance. Investigators, though, were suspicious of Sierra’s story.

Investigators question Sierra Inscoe

During her interview with investigators, Sierra agreed to show them the remote gas well where she said she had taken her friends, along with Carson’s truck, for a night of partying. Law enforcement noted that she appeared forgetful of the site’s location, redirecting them several times before finally arriving at the well where she claimed to have been on the night of Carson’s disappearance.

Though it was nighttime when they inspected the location, a wrecker accompanied the group to the scene with Carson’s vehicle in tow. Shining a light across the vehicle, “I noticed blood on the bottom of the tailgate,” recalled former Mississippi Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Frank Riley to Snapped.

“You could see the remnants of blood inside the truck in the cracks; some debris that was back there. It looked like it had probably been washed out with a water hose at some point. And up under the truck, there was a large amount of what appeared to be blood on the underside of the bed and on top of the spare tire. I knew that something bad had happened to somebody — or something.”

Sierra explained the blood by claiming that she had hit a deer with the truck, though the vehicle’s bodywork showed no signs of a collision. With Sierra still in custody, forensics specialists recovered bags of clothing from the truck that indicated blood spatter, while also noting blood spatter on the truck’s rear windshield.

“What that implied to law enforcement,” said Brinkley, was “that somebody had been sitting in the back of the truck [and] could very well have been shot.”

Unable to recover additional evidence at the scene, investigators began to suspect that Sierra had intentionally taken them to a different well than the one she had initially described in her account of the night’s events. Riley asked local field workers to be on the lookout at other area oil and gas well sites for any signs of unusual recent activity, and within minutes, a worker responded with word that a body had been found at a separate well location.

Badly decomposing in the late summer heat, the deceased body required off-site crime lab analysis in order to identify it as that of Carson Sistrunk. Analysis also revealed that Carson had been shot three times with a .9mm firearm, and that the diagonal trajectory of the wounds indicated that the shooter had been aiming upward toward their human target.

Sierra Inscoe confesses to murder

With only circumstantial evidence connecting her to the homicide, law enforcement was initially compelled to release Sierra Inscoe from custody. But after followup investigation identified Carson as the murder victim, along with revealing surveillance footage from the New Hebron convenience store where he had last been seen, a warrant was issued for her arrest.

Back in custody, Sierra told investigators more about the still-unidentified mystery man whom she claimed had sold her the truck — a story they eventually rejected as her possible attempt at fabricating a fictional accomplice. Recreating an account of events based on the available evidence, they concluded that she had acted alone in killing Carson, motivated by a desire to claim his truck for herself.

“I believe that Ms. Inscoe lured Carson Sistrunk to a location in New Hebron,” said Riley. “When they met, they traveled from that location to the place that we found him [deceased] at that gas well site.”

“The trajectories of those shots were slightly upward. [It] indicated to us that he was most likely sitting on the tailgate of the vehicle when he was shot, and then he fell into the back of the vehicle,” added prosecutor Chip Lewis to Snapped. 

Further DNA analysis revealed that the blood on the truck belonged to Carson Sistrunk, while the DNA found on the bagged and recovered clothing belonged to Sierra Inscoe. Faced with sufficient evidence for prosecutors to present to a Grand Jury, Sierra was indicted and docketed for trial — but agreed to plead guilty to second-degree murder before her scheduled July 2024 court date.

During her plea hearing, Sierra addressed Carson’s family directly, for the first time admitting responsibility for his murder.

“She gave an allocution that lasted 10 minutes, you know, and I’ll never forget: She opened with, ‘I did it; I’m sorry. I killed him.’ And that was the first time that anybody had ever heard those words out of her mouth,” Lewis told Snapped.

Under her plea agreement, Sierra Jane Inscoe will spend a minimum of 35 years in prison for the murder of Carson Sistrunk. She is scheduled for release, to be followed by five additional years of supervision, in 2059.

“I think the lesson to take away from this case would probably be… to be very wary about who you place your trust in — especially in the world we live in today, where we can instantly connect with people hundreds of miles away,” said Lewis of the deadly encounter; one initiated through a seemingly innocuous contact made via social media. “People just need to be careful.”