Chilling Story of Desire and Deceit Uncovered in Murder of North Carolina Antique Store Owner

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 .