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National weather records confirm what Terry Guy says is true. November 6, 2003 really was the hottest November day in the history of Spartanburg County.
For the Chesnee native, that day has also proven the single longest of his 50 years on earth.
At 2:50 that simmering afternoon, the plant manager at Reeves Brothers Inc. lost both his 30-year-old stepson and his wife of 17-years in a quadruple homicide at Superbike Motorsports. The half-decade since the tragedy has brought Guy many blessings — grandkids, another wife, and a new son just to name a few. What those years haven’t brought him, however, is an answer to the question that has picked away at him for some 1,700 days. Who was behind the Superbike massacre?
Reconstructing
a Slaughter
Guy’s conception of the nightmare that took place that 84-degree November day is detailed and chilling:
Until 2:30 pm rolled around, the only employees at Superbike were shop owner Scott Ponder and mechanic Chris Sherbert. Sales manager Brian Lucas was off looking at houses with a real-estate agent and Beverly Guy (the store’s accountant, Scott’s mother and Guy’s wife) had yet to return from taking Scott’s grandmother to the hospital.
“Mrs. Ponder was dying of cancer,” Guy recalls. “Even though she wasn’t affiliated with that family (the Ponders) at all anymore, Beverly took her to chemo(therapy) that day and got back around 2:30. Mrs. Ponder told me later that night that Beverly physically had to pick her up and put her on the couch because she was so weak.”
While Beverly was helping Ruth Ponder back into her house (which was directly across the street from the bike shop), Lucas returned to Superbike. When Beverly left Ruth’s home and walked across Paris Bridge Road to the shop’s parking lot, she found Lucas and her son talking to someone outside. Hearing the phone ring inside the shop, she jolted in to answer it.
Guy claims it was Scott’s friend Noel Lee on the other end, calling about tickets Scott had scored him for a motorbike event at the Bi-Lo Center that night. When Beverly told him she had seen the tickets on her son’s desk, Noel said he would take a shower then drop by the shop to pick them up.
A few minutes later at 2:46, case investigator Anthony Lachica claims Superbike’s last customer completed a credit card transaction. As he left the shop, he noted two critical things: 1) the presence of a young, thin white man in the store showroom and 2) that Beverly was arguing with someone.
Moments later, while his wife was in the shop bathroom, Guy believes the killer attacked from the back of the building, ambushing Sherbert in the garage as he put oil into a motorcycle. After slaying the mechanic with several close-range shots, the killer then walked through the double doors and into the showroom, passing the bathroom as he headed towards the entrance.
“Supposedly, [the killer] went right by the bathroom, went out [to the parking lot], Brian [Lucas] saw him coming out the [front] door, so he started running that way – towards the door,” Guy explains. “He shot Brian, then he shot Scott. Then, Brian was laying there, crawling towards the door. He went over there and shot Scott a few more times as he was trying to get away. Then, as he walked back into the place, he shot Brian again in the chest.”
Guy’s narrative accounts for why Scott’s body was found in the parking lot and Lucas’s in the doorway. It also helps explain Scott’s frantic attempt to call his wife just before the final shot hit him at 2:50 pm. In addition, it may tell us why neither Scott nor Lucas was able to reach the 357-Magnum that everyone knew Scott kept in the shop for protection. And finally, Guy’s reconstruction of the massacre solidifies Lorraine Lucas’s theory that her son wouldn’t have made a run for it.
“I think Brian would stay there to defend them all,” she said a few weeks ago. “I don’t think he would have tried to escape, I really don’t.”
Guy believes the killer was heading back towards the garage when Beverly opened the bathroom door, bringing the two of them face to face and sealing her fate.
“Supposedly, when she stepped out, she stepped in front of the killer because, the first time [she was shot], she was shot was in the face,” he says.
Five more shots followed in rapid succession, all hitting Beverly in the front and dropping her to her final resting place between the bathroom and double doors leading out to the garage.
Guy was at Reeves Brothers when his mother paged him that afternoon. Upon calling her back, she informed him there had been a shooting at Superbike and didn’t know if Scott and Beverly were okay. With the phone still swinging from the ringer, Guy ripped out of the plant parking lot towards Chesnee, cranking his air conditioning to combat the wayward November heat.
“I know I was driving over 100,” he recalls. “I was trying to get the law to stop me so they could take me up there (to Superbike). But of course I didn’t run into one because every one in Spartanburg County was up there at the cross forks (where the shop was).”
His mind buzzing with dread and despair, Guy asked the first cop he saw to escort him down to the crime scene. He claims the officer went to obtain Sheriff Coffee’s permission, then returned and took him, along with Lucas’s wife Robin, across the street to Ruth Ponder’s home. There, Coffee broke the news both of them feared most – All four Superbike workers were dead.
Aftermath
From the second he arrived at the crime scene that sultry 2003 day, Guy has questioned the Sheriff’s Office’s handling of the investigation.
“They just botched everything that night [of the murders] because there must have been over 100 people walking around down there [at the shop],” he says. “There is no telling what they walked over.”
Like everyone else who heard the news, the widower was flabbergasted to discover officers had somehow mixed-up Scott’s and Lucas’s DNA samples and never even tried to obtain fingerprints from those closest to the victims. After all, 2004 records show 22% of all US murders that year were committed by family members, and a whopping 78% of murder victims knew their killer.
Yet, Guy claims he cannot comprehend why the Sheriff’s Office was so reluctant to interrogate friends and family of the deceased.
“I had to practically beg them to give me a lie detector test,” he recalls. “They said they didn’t think I had anything to do with it (the massacre), and I told them that wasn’t what I was after. I told them, ‘I know damn well I didn’t have anything to do with it. But it isn’t just me. I want everybody who may have had anything to do with it to take one.’”
Finally, after some seven months had elapsed, Guy obtained a lie detector test. Lachica could not immediately produce a list of other family members who took the test. He did however assert that “there’s been a lot of them” administered and that Noel Lee, who first discovered the bodies, had taken and passed one.
Like his new in-laws, Tom and Lorraine Lucas, Guy also remains critical of the way Coffee directed the investigation and closed it off to the public.
“You never saw him on TV or anything asking the people for help,” he says of the former sheriff. “And he wouldn’t let people do their jobs. For me, the biggest thing was that he was a micro-manager, and officers always had to get his permission.”
Speculation
Guy says Sherbert had a well-known history of drug use and that Scott had bailed the mechanic out of jail in the month preceding the shooting. Furthermore, he alleges that Sherbert had a court date November 11 for a long-standing drug charge.
“Scott told me [Sherbert] was looking to go to jail for about ten years,” recalls Guy.
The widower believes Sherbert may have considered disclosing evidence incriminating others to reduce his own impending sentence.
“Since he was shot first, you’ve got to wonder - were they out to get him?” asks Guy. “You could always get him at his home, but [authorities] know what you’re there for then. But if you get him in his place of work, that throws in ten other scenarios.”
Lachica denies that Sherbert was facing serious charges or imprisonment but concedes he did have a history of misdemeanors.
“He was a nickel and dime guy,” says the investigator. “We’re talking petty stuff – maybe a CDV (Criminal Domestic Violence charge). He may have had an open container or a possession of marijuana . . .”
Guy believes an accomplice dropped the killer off somewhere on Fish Camp Road, which runs almost parallel to Paris Bridge Rd. From there, he could walk undetected through the field behind the shop and ambush it from the back. Indeed, there are segments of that road where the shop is clearly visible even today. At least one of them is just a mere 264 feet from Superbike.
Guy feels an accomplice probably dropped the killer off at the Fish Camp Rd. bridge that goes over Buck Creek (roughly 0.22 miles from the shop) and that another accomplice may have been signaling from the bike shop roof. Not only did Guy find a water bottle up there months after the murders, he asserts a person on top of the roof can see both Paris Bridge and Fish Camp roads without drivers seeing them.
Though he appears to know as much about the case as anyone else outside the Sheriff’s Department, Guy remains haunted by several questions. Why were the shop’s rear and side gates open that day? Why did 70-80% of Superbike’s sales come from Internet purchases made by out-of-state customers? How could the last customer have heard Beverly arguing with someone if Guy never heard her raise her voice in the 20-years he’d known her?
He continues to seek answers to those questions with his new wife and partner against crime. On Christmas Eve, 2004, Guy married Katy Lucas, Brian’s younger sister. The unlikely couple now have an 18-month-old son named Tyler whom Tom and Lorraine Lucas get to see on a regular basis.
Yet three years before the bond of new life could bring them together, Guy and the Lucases were forever linked by the inexplicable slaughter at 6842 Paris Bridge Road on an 84-degree November day. Now, Guy has joined his father-in-law on the Crimestoppers board and is doing everything he can to keep the Superbike case from getting cold.
“You think stuff like this happens in New York or Chicago, not Spartanburg, Boiling Springs or Chesnee, SC,” he explains. “I told Governor Sanford, ‘This is the only quadruple murder that’s ever happened in a business in SC. Do you want to leave office knowing that you didn’t solve it and it happened on your watch?’ I think that’s a legitimate question. Are we putting enough resources into it?”
If you have any information about the Superbike Massacre, please call Spartanburg Crime Stoppers at 58CRIME or the Spartanburg Sheriff’s Department at 503-5409.
A reward of $ 125,000 is being offered for any information leading to a conviction in this case.
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