NEWS

What to know: Audible podcast focuses on disappearance, death of Spartanburg's Tamika Huston

Linda Conley
Herald-Journal

Tamika Huston's disappearance and death in 2004 stunned family and friends in Spartanburg.

The Spartanburg Public Safety Department conducted an extensive search for the 24-year-old. Christopher Hampton, an acquaintance of Huston, led police to Huston's body in August 2005.

Attention will be focused on Huston's case again now that Kevin Hart and Charlamagne Tha God’s SBH Productions present a 10-part podcast series on Huston's disappearance, called "Finding Tamika," that will launch on Audible March 3.

Tamika Huston

Here's what you need to know about Huston's case:

►Tamika Huston was reported missing to Spartanburg Public Safety officers by her aunt, Rebkah Howard in June 2004, but she disappeared a month earlier. Extensive searches were conducted, but investigators did not get a break in the case until January 2005, when a key found months earlier in an abandoned car led them to an apartment previously leased by Christopher Hampton,

► On Aug. 12, 2005, more than a year after Huston's death, Spartanburg Public Safety investigators arrested Hampton, charging him with murder. Within hours he confessed and led officers to a makeshift grave near Duncan where Huston's remains were found.

► Circuit Judge John C. Few of Greenville sentenced Hampton, 25, to life in prison without parole in April 2006. Hampton admitted to burying Huston's remains, later digging them up and decapitating the body, throwing her head into a trash bin, according to then Seventh Circuit Solicitor Trey Gowdy. Hampton asked for a sentence of 40 years, 10 years more than the minimum sentence.

Jailhouse interview:Tamika Huston's killer: No more secrets

 Huston's funeral was held in November 2005 at the Saint Michael Ethiopian Orthodox Church, 3010 Earl Place, NE, Washington, D.C. She is buried at Fairfax Memorial Park in Fairfax, Virginia.

Anthony Huston makes a public appeal for information at the time of his daughter Tamika Huston's disappearance in 2004.

► In January 2017, Anthony Huston, Tamika’s father, was found dead in a murder-suicide, according to the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Office. He was found dead inside his Moore home on Serendipity Lane in the Sunset Summits community.