The 2018 murder of Milton Sawyer sent shockwaves through the community of Elizabeth City, North Carolina. 

“It shouldn’t have happened here,” Dateline correspondent Dennis Murphy said in voiceover heard in a preview for the “Righteous Obsession” episode of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered. “Not in this tidy, manicured subdivision that just seems to cry out: It’s a safe place.” 

The quaint community’s sense of peace was shattered in the early morning hours of August. 2, 2018, when Milton’s wife, Angel Sawyer, rushed to a neighbor’s home covered in blood.

She claimed that a masked intruder had broken into the couple’s home just after midnight, bound them up and attacked them as part of a brutal robbery. 

She survived, but her husband Milton, the owner of an antique store, did not. 

“It was such a shock,” Milton’s brother Bill Jones recalled.

And when detectives began to dive deeper into the murder, they soon discovered the motivation behind Milton’s death went much deeper than a robbery-gone-wrong.

“Dark tale of lust”

“No one here in Elizabeth City, a sleepy North Carolina waterfront community, could imagine that this beloved local businessman and his wife could figure in such a truly dark tale of lust, obsession and manipulation,” Murphy revealed in the teaser clip for “Righteous Obsession.” 

Prosecutor Kimberly Pellini described the sordid details of the real-life twisted tale — a case that was also covered on .