Woman Who Kidnapped Husband’s Girlfriend Gets 30 Years In Prison

A South Carolina woman was sentenced Tuesday to 30 years in prison after a jury found her guilty of kidnapping and conspiracy in the disappearance of her husband’s former girlfriend.

Prosecutors said Tammy Moorer, 46, and her husband Sidney Moorer, 42, were responsible for the disappearance of 20-year-old Heather Elvis, a hostess, who went missing from Myrtle Beach in December 2013. The body of the woman was never found.

Tammy was sentenced to 30 years in prison for each charge, which will be served concurrently, Circuit Judge Benjamin Culbertson. The jury’s decision was followed by an 11-day trial and less than four hours of deliberation, the Post and Courier reported.

“This is a story about jealousy and deceit,” Nancy Livesay, Horry County Assistant Solicitor, said in her closing argument Monday. She compared Tammy to the “Evil Queen” in Snow White.

Elvis was believed to be having an affair with Sidney, prosecutors said. Livesay said Tammy became livid when she found about the affair and wouldn’t let the grudge go even when Elvis agreed to back off.

On the day Elvis went missing, the couple drove around looking for her and bought a pregnancy test at a Walmart store, prosecutors said adding that they intended to use it to determine whether Elvis was pregnant with the man’s baby.

According to the prosecutors, the couple lured Elvis to a boat landing that evening. Phone records showed Elvis called Sidney’s number four times around that time. They spoke on the phone for four minutes prior to this. Tammy said she didn’t think much of the phone call and argued that she and her husband didn’t leave the house after that. The Horry County police found Elvis’ car at the boat landing a few days later.

Sidney and Tammy were both arrested and charged with kidnapping and murder in connection with Elvis’ disappearance in February 2014, but the murder charges were later dismissed.

“When you mix jealousy, deceit and just an absolute crazed woman so worried about (Elvis) stealing her husband, that is when unnatural things happen,” Livesay said.

At the hearing Monday, Tammy’s defense attorney, Greg McCollum of Myrtle beach, argued there was a lack of crime scene and enough physical evidence to tie the allegations together.

“You can’t just make a human being disappear and they get back home in time to make pot stickers,” McCollum said.

Tammy cast herself as the victim of overzealous authorities in her earlier testimonies, a report in Law & Crime said.

“When I became a reborn Christian, I became a completely different person than I am now,” she told Livesay on Friday. “I could sit here, and wonder how many married men you’ve slept with, but I’m not going to judge you on that, because that doesn’t mean you killed somebody. It doesn’t mean you’ve kidnapped somebody.”

Fox News reported Elvis’ mother, Debbi, said the Moorers “stole her life, and they’ve ruined ours.”

“No one seems to want to take the blame” for the disappearance, her father said. “We grieve for answers, but we don’t know how to grieve for our daughter."

Sidney is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for obstruction of justice in the case after a trial last year. Prior to this, a trial for kidnapping ended in a hung jury.