Howard Ashleman went by many names on social media, but “Homicide Howie” was the most ominous.

Pete Chambers had no knowledge of his employee’s nefarious alter ego when he asked Ashleman to drive his son James Chambers home from work in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on a hot Friday afternoon in August of 2014, according to Dateline: Unforgettable’s “The Bridge.”

James was never seen again and just days later, Ashleman scrapped his truck at a junkyard and stopped showing up for work, sending off alarm bells for Pete and investigators.

From the onset, authorities suspected Ashleman knew more than he was letting on about James’ disappearance, but Ashleman soon left North Carolina, only to resurface at a Florida bible college, where he’d adopted a clean-cut image. 

“Sinner or saint? This was one of the craziest twists I’ve ever seen,” Dateline correspondent Andrea Canning said of what made the case so memorable.

Ashleman continued to play games with authorities for years before the truth about what happened to James that afternoon was finally revealed and the killer was put behind bars.

Who was James Chambers? 

At 28 years old, James Chambers was a man with a full life ahead of him. 

“He’s single. There’s a couple of girls he’s talking to. He’s figuring out which direction he’s going,” his mom Rachel Wellhouser recalled. 

His roommate Brandi Sugrue described James, who spent his weekends working as a lifeguard at Lake Leamon in Wallace, North Carolina, as a people person.

“James was smart. He was very witty,” Sugrue said. “He was caring.” 

What happened to James Chambers?

The mood was light the afternoon James disappeared. He’d just gotten paid from his regular job with his father and planned to head to the lake that night for his part-time gig at the lake. 

Pete recalled asking Ashleman, a 21-year-old employee known for being polite and hardworking, to give James a ride home after their shift ended that day.

“I said, ‘Alright, Howard, do you mind taking James home?’ He said, ‘No I don’t have a problem,’” Pete told Canning.

It would be the last time Pete ever talked to his son. James never arrived at the lake that weekend and didn’t return to work on Monday. 

His panicked mom, who was divorced from Pete, remembered texting him the family’s “safety word” Marco, which was a sign in the family that they needed to get in touch right away, but she got no response.

“I was screaming inside.” Wellhouser remembered. “Five minutes. 10 minutes. An hour goes away. James has always immediately responded to anything.”

As the days continued to pass without any word from James, Pete reached out to the Fayetteville Police Department. 

From the start, veteran Detective Mike Ballard didn’t have a good feeling about the case.

“It was just like he fell off the face of the earth,” Ballard said. “Based on my experience, we weren’t going to find Mr. Chambers alive.”

Who was Howard Ashleman?

When detectives spoke to Ashleman, he said he and James stopped at a liquor store on their way home and then went to James’ place, where they had a few drinks. Ashelman insisted he left James’ home before it got dark and had no idea what happened to him after that.

“When I left him, I went straight home,” he told detectives. “And the neighbors were having a barbecue across the street, so I stopped in there.” 

Ashleman grew up as part of a religious family in Illinois, before moving to North Carolina, where he stayed with some family friends. By all accounts, the 21-year-old seemed to be soft-spoken and polite.

But Ballard believed he may not be telling authorities everything he knew. His suspicions deepened after learning that just five days after James disappeared, Ashelman sold his truck to a scrapyard.

He told police he had destroyed the engine after he “blew it up” doing doughnuts and burning rubber on the road, but the timing seemed a bit too convenient.

“Why would you scrap a truck? If the engine locks up, you replace the engine,” Ballard argued. “Once they crush it, it’s gone. It just didn’t make sense.” 

Pete also remembered confronting Ashleman at work just a few days after James disappeared. He sold the truck the very next day and never returned to work.

Ashleman adopts “Homicide Howie” persona

During another interrogation with police, Ashleman reported being with his friend Reno Parks the night Howard disappeared, but Parks wasn’t talking either. 

Frustrated, Wellhouser and a volunteer from Klaas Kids, a nonprofit aimed at helping to search for missing people, began to pore through Ashleman’s social media and made a chilling discovery. Ashleman had 12 different Facebook accounts all under different names and aliases, the most disturbing of which was “Homicide Howie.”

“I never knew much about people until I took one apart…just to see how it worked,” one post read. 

In another, under the alias “Adrian Ashleman,” he wrote, “Call me a cannibal or a carnivorous animal cause I tear off your face.” 

Many of the posts were about violence, weapons or burning things. Wellhouser passed the information the pair uncovered to police, but it wasn’t enough to definitively link Ashleman to any crime.

“When I’m seeing some of the posts he’s putting up, he’s terrifying me, because he’s out there,” Wellhouser said.

Where was Howard Ashleman hiding?

In the Summer of 2015, Ashleman was charged in a domestic violence incident, but the charges were ultimately dismissed when the woman didn’t show up at a pre-trial hearing.

Although detectives and the district attorney’s office considered Ashleman the “prime suspect” in James’ disappearance, they didn’t have enough evidence to charge him.

Pete turned to respected private investigator David Marshburn for help. Marshburn was able to arrange a search of the property where Ashleman had been staying and found what appeared to be discarded car parts from Ashleman’s scrapped truck.

“That was like a gold mine. We start inspecting it and sure enough we’ve got blood spatter on the side window. It’s still there, we’ve got blood spatter on the radio,” he said.

The items were collected by police and Marshburn went to jail, where Parks was now locked up, to confront him with the photos. 

According to Marshburn, Parks alleged that the night James disappeared, Ashleman had pulled up outside the neighborhood barbecue, walked to the back of his truck, opened the tailgate, pulled out a gun and shot through the back window, striking and killing James. He said Ashleman initially tried to burn the body, but when that didn’t work, he dismembered it. Then Parks and Ashleman took the remains, which were stuffed into large plastic garbage bags, and tossed them over a concrete bridge.

Unfortunately, however, no DNA was discovered on the blood spattered car parts and Parks later refused to speak to police or verify the account he gave to Marshburn.

Ashleman had once again evaded justice and this time he disappeared, fleeing to Florida where he enrolled in Hobe Sound Bible College.

Video on social media showed a much more clean-cut Ashleman donning a suit and singing a hymn as part of a religious quartet. He was also dating a young 17-year-old from the school, named Hannah Jones.

The stark transformation shocked investigators. 

“He’s a true chameleon and he will morph and change into whatever he needs to change into to survive,” Detective Larry Donegain remarked. 

Was Howard Ashleman convicted? 

After discovering his whereabouts, Marshburn warned the college and the young girl’s parents that they could have “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” in their midst. 

He also contacted the Martin County Sheriff’s Office’s Detective Dan Dulac, who brought Ashleman in for questioning. Dulac tried to appeal to Ashleman’s new found religion and desire to “be a good Christian,” but he still wouldn’t talk about what happened the day James vanished.

After leaving the station, Ashleman went to see Jones, who secretly recorded their conversation.

“Did you do something though?” she asked him. 

“Maybe,” he replied. 

Jones’ mother turned the recording over to authorities and a few hours later, Ashleman called Dulac and said he wanted to confess. However, he later changed his mind after seeking advice from a public defender.

 It wouldn’t be the last time Ashleman provided James’ family with false hope. 

He arranged to plead guilty and confess several other times only to fail to show up before an agreement could be made, running off the final time to marry Jones. 

But by then authorities felt they had enough evidence against him and arrested him in December of 2017.

After years of playing a frustrating game of cat and mouse, Ashleman agreed to plead guilty to second-degree murder in exchange for 20 years behind bars. 

Ashleman told authorities that he shot James through the back of the truck, much like Parks had described, after a heated argument broke out between the two coworkers. 

As part of the deal, he led authorities to a bridge where he believed he’d tossed James’ remains into the creek below, however, the body has never been recovered. 

Wellhouser continues to search mile after mile in the densely wooded area for her son.

“It’s all I got left to give him and he’s worth every mile,” she said.