Samantha Josephson Thought She Stepped Into an Uber Cab, Not a Murderer's Vehicle

 

You’re tired after a night of carousing in a bar with your friends. It’s about 2:00 a.m. and you want to go home. None of fellow students has a car so you do the logical thing — call an Uber.

That’s what Samantha Josephson, a student at the University of South Carolina thought she was doing. Only it wasn’t an Uber.  But by the time she realized that it was too late.  She couldn’t escape  the car because the  child safety locks had been engaged.

It was video that led people to   Nathaniel Rowland, the man charged with her murder. You can see Samantha waiting calmly at the curb as the black 2017 model year Chevy Impala comes around the corner and pulls up at the curb. Samantha appears alert and entirely in command of herself as she gets into the back seat of the car.   That video is the last time anyone except the killer saw her alive.

The events leading to Nathaniel Rowland’s arrest unfolded in a matter of hours — fourteen hours after Samantha was reported missing to be exact. Next day, March 30, 2019 at about 3:00 a.m, an alert   police officer spotted the black Chevy   Impala only blocks from where Josephson disappeared.  

When the officer did a traffic stop, the suspect took off running but was caught.  Police say he had a companion with him who agreed to cooperate with the investigation. 

 In subsequent days, investigators found bloody clothes and cleaning products in a dumpster behind Maria’s house. Other video evidence shows Rowlands going into a store attempting to sell Samantha Josephson’s cell phone.  A forensics team found Samantha Josephson’s DNA, fingerprints, and strands of hair in Rowland’s car.  According to prosecutors, a bladed knife tool that Maria recognized as one she’d seen before was also found.

Today is the third day of the trial of Nathaniel David Rowland on charges of kidnapping and murder of the twenty-one year old woman.  The defense strategy is simple. They allege that Nathaniel was passed out drunk at a party when someone took his car, picked up Samantha and murdered her.   

The defense team hopes to create reasonable doubt by attacking the   evidence cops have accrued.  In   opening statements,  the lead defense said that DNA found on the murder victim did not come from the accused but from other unknown persons. 

The prosecution is led by Byron Gibson, a towering and articulate black man who led off with what seemed a damning opening statement. He revealed a host of facts to the jury and outlined for them what they would hear in the coming days.

Samantha’s cell phone was found in his car along with his own.  They were tracked together until approximately 2:27 a.m., just twenty minutes after she got into Rowland’s car.

According to prosecutor Gibson, Rowland’s phone continued to ping after Josephson’s powered off. Authorities were thus able to track the vehicle to the defendant’s family home in New Zion, South Carolina.   Rowland’s home is just two miles from  the isolated rural dirty road where two turkey hunters found the dead body of Samantha Josephson.  The location of the victim’s body is estimated to be sixty-five or seventy miles from where Samantha first stepped into a predator’s vehicle after an evening at the Bird Dog Lounge.

   If Rowlands is found guilty, it will be partly because he’s one of the dumbest criminals in homicide history as well as one of the most brutal.  Samantha had more than thirty stab wounds all over her body from head, neck, and even her feet. A forensics pathologist report says that she had over one hundred total wounds inflicted upon her person by her assailant.

All things considered I don’t see how any defense team could keep Rowlands from being convicted of the charges, barring an anomaly like jury nullification.