The romance raced as fast as the motorcycles he rode.
It began with a chance meeting at a Lexington bar on an October weeknight. And before most friends even knew they had gone on a date, Chancey Smith and Amanda Peake had announced their love on Facebook.
She, with her striking looks and bright tattoos, already had led a tragic life. A young widow with two kids who had recently lost a roommate to a drug overdose, Peake was trying to find her way in the world. Sometimes, that path led her to walk on the wild side.
Smith, a member of South Carolina’s Most Wanted motorcycle club, enjoyed hunting and a good party. His decisions did not always bring good results, like the time he pulled a motorcycle stunt with his former girlfriend on the back. He had been out of work because of a knee injury and recently had broken off a long but rocky relationship.
By December, Smith had given Peake an engagement ring and had moved into her Red Bank home.
But the fast-burning romance soon would fizzle.
In mid-March, the two traveled to Daytona Beach with friends for the annual Bike Week festivities. They came home with their relationship on the rocks. He moved out.
Two days later, on March 15, Smith, in an alcohol-fueled rage, would tell a friend he was planning to commit murder-suicide. As the friend desperately tried to stop Smith by calling 911 to warn police about his intentions, the former Marine stormed into Peake’s home and shot and killed her and her two children, Cameron, 9, and Sarah, 6.
It would become one of the Midlands’ most heinous crimes in recent memory. The crime scene was so disturbing that Lexington County sheriff’s investigators will not discuss it. The violent end left families and friends stunned, struggling with grief, unable to understand what went wrong — what drove Smith to kill.
“That doesn’t happen to people I know,” said Melissa Garrick, an old friend of Peake’s.
But domestic violence is pervasive in South Carolina, which ranks seventh in the country for women being killed by men. Thus far in 2011, Midlands victims have included a USC professor, a day care worker and a young mother of five who specialized in handmade children’s clothes.
Smith had a history of violence in his relationships with women but was never arrested for it, according to reports from the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department. Two of Peake’s co-workers at a Columbia tattoo studio said Smith had acted violently toward her.
Murder-suicide is difficult to understand. But domestic violence experts say it results from obsessive love and a need to show power and control, with or without earlier incidents of violence. Control is everything.
“He certainly doesn’t want someone else to have her, and he’s going to have her in death,” said Nancy Barton, executive director of Sistercare, Columbia’s women’s shelter.
Abusive men often are attracted to smart, pretty, outgoing women, Barton said. “Once they get into a committed relationship, then they get possessive because she is his,” she said.
That very well might have been the case with Peake and Smith.
This is their story.
Amanda
A photo of Peake and her children taken at Christmas portrays an all-American family.
Peake is dressed in a crisp, white Oxford blouse. On her left, son Cameron also wears a white shirt. His sister, Sarah, is on Peake’s right in a red jumper and white turtleneck. All three are blonde and blue-eyed and smiling in front a string of green garland.
But look closer at Amanda. A piercing on her chest offers a glimpse of another side. More than 60 tattoos are hidden beneath the blouse.
Friends say those adornments were Peake’s attempt at masking the emotional pain from the death of her husband, Matt Peake, the children’s father.
“She would just say, ‘I do all of this to deal with the pain. Instead of feeling it inside, I can feel it physically,’” said friend Amanda Lynch.
There was a time, though, when Peake led a carefree life.
Amanda Lynne Hartley was born on Sept. 25, 1983, to Carl and Teressa Hartley. She lived most of her life in Lexington County, attending Lexington and then Pelion high schools.
Stories friends tell about growing up with Amanda are typical tales of playful little girls growing into rebellious teens.
For Ashley Carrowan, those childhood memories involve M&M candies and the Three Fountains Skating Rink in Lexington.
As children, Carrowan, Peake and a third friend, Natasha Binggeli, invented a game at Carrowan’s house. They would toss M&Ms over a partial wall separating the kitchen and dining room and try to catch them in their mouths.
“For years, my Mom found M&Ms all over the house,” Carrowan said.
As teens, the girls would sneak cut-off shorts, tank tops and makeup into their skate bags and then change into them once their parents had dropped them off at the rink, Carrowan said. A couple of times, they were caught when a parent would arrive early to pick up the girls, she said.
“It was a chance to steal some independence,” Carrowan said.
Peake, however, was forced to grow up when she became pregnant in high school. She soon married Matthew Peake and moved to his hometown of Winnsboro.
There, Matt volunteered with the fire department and then got hired at the Fairfield County Sheriff’s Department, where he was a K9 officer.
Peake gave birth to their son, Cameron, on March 1, 2002. Their daughter, Sarah, was born Dec. 16, 2004.
Amanda Peake took a few jobs — at a finance company, a phone company, a vacuum cleaner store. But mostly she raised the children, friends said.
She built a social circle around her young husband’s police and fire department family. Friends would gather at the Peakes’ mobile home in the country for parties, said Garrick, whose husband also was with the sheriff’s department. The men would barbecue, and the friends would stand around a fire, drinking, listening to country music and talking.
After their daughter was born, the couple began having problems, their friends said.
Amanda moved out in the summer of 2007 with the understanding that she and her husband would try to save their troubled marriage, the friends said.
But Matthew Peake died before they could reconcile. He was killed in a house fire on Aug. 5, 2007. He was 24.
That weekend, Peake had joined her younger brother, Josh Hartley, in Myrtle Beach to celebrate his 21st birthday. Once family reached the Peake siblings by phone, the two immediately drove back to Winnsboro.
“Of course, she was hysterical,” Garrick said.
After her husband died, Amanda inherited money from his life insurance policies, friends said.
For the first time in her life, she could buy what she wanted. And she did, said Lynch, a Winnsboro friend.
Lynch remembers the day Peake picked up her first check from the insurance company.
“She literally had no money in her checking account,” Lynch said. “She gets the check from Nationwide and she goes immediately to Best Buy and buys herself a laptop.”
The laptop would just be the start of a spending spree, Lynch said. Amanda bought a house, a car and nice clothes.
And her partying intensified.
“She lived a very normal life until Matt died,” Binggeli said. “Then she became the Amanda everyone wants to know about, with the tattoos and the piercings.”
Peake’s friends from Winnsboro said they began seeing less and less of her. She often left Cameron and Sarah with family and friends, Garrick said.
Garrick said she worried about her old friend’s new lifestyle.
“If she had been out two weekends in a row, I’d say, ‘Amanda, why don’t you come out here and let’s do something with the kids,’” Garrick said.
As Peake’s lifestyle changed, so did her physical appearance.
Before Matt Peake’s death, she had three tattoos. Afterward, Peake became obsessed with tattoos and piercings. She had flowers and stars on her arms. A portrait of her mother. Another, done with invisible ink so it showed only under black lights, read, “True love never dies.” And each breast was adorned with a set of lucky cherries.
A piercing on her right cheek and two on her chest were so involved that a surgeon implanted the base of the ornaments under her skin.
She also had her breasts enlarged, friends said.
“Her way to cope with her broken heart on the inside was to fix up her outside,” Binggeli said.
Peake told friends the pain she suffered on the tattoo table masked the heartache she felt inside.
“The physical pain over the emotional pain levels you out,” Binggeli said.
Peake began working at tattoo studios and eventually was hired as a piercer at Magnetizm on Parklane Road in Columbia. Whenever she went out to bars and nightclubs, she would bring Magnetizm cards to recruit business.
“Basically, it was her job to pull people in to get piercings,” Binggeli said. “She knew how to talk to people and get people to come in and see her when she worked.”
Peake began posing for pin-up girl photos, posting pictures of herself on a website called Model Mayhem. She also affiliated herself with the Gypsy Queens, a national network of female tattoo enthusiasts and models.
Peake met new friends through her tattoo and piercing community and the circle of models.
One of them, Bailey Miller, would become Peake’s roommate. Miller died in the home they shared in September 2010 after overdosing on a combination of drugs, including codeine and ecstasy, according to a coroner’s report.
Brooke Ayers, a Columbia tattoo artist who worked with Peake and also is on the Modeling Mayhem site, said she and other models hope to be discovered by publications such as Skin and Ink magazine or clothing lines who want “edgy” models for their products.
Photos on the modeling websites show Peake in various poses, often showing off the lucky cherry symbols tattooed on her breasts. On the Model Mayhem website, Peake wrote, “I enjoy doing all types of photoshoots from pinup to nude. I am very comfortable with my body so anything goes. I am not up for any kind of sexual explicit images though.”
By all accounts, Peake was beautiful. And she possessed the vivacious personality to match her looks. If she ever took a bad photo, no one knows about it.
“Amanda has that look,” Ayers said. “The beautiful eyes. The lips. She just lures you in. You can’t keep your eyes off her.”
Wherever Peake went, men noticed.
“No matter where she goes, somebody is going to look at her all googly-moogly-eyed,” Ayers said.
So it was no surprise that Peake caught Chancey Smith’s eye.
Chancey
Chancey Smith loved to ride his Kawasaki ZX-14. He nicknamed the motorcycle “The Couch” because it was so big and comfortable.
He was vice president of South Carolina’s Most Wanted, a local motorcycle club affiliated with a national network of clubs that go by the Most Wanted name. Most often, Smith rode side by side with his best friend, Denny Hancock, the club’s president.
“We’d just look at each other, crack the throttle and go,” Hancock said.
Smith would take risks on his bike.
One time, with former girlfriend Nicole Rodgers on the back, Smith tried to pull a stunt. Rodgers fell off. She still wears the scars from that accident but refuses to blame Smith.
“When it comes down to it, at the end of the day, it was just as irresponsible for me to be on that bike,” she said.
Men in the club knew Smith as a goofball who rarely took anything too seriously. At parties, he would construct an oversized cowboy hat from the empty cardboard boxes that once held cases of beer.
Smith’s laugh was notorious.
“It was a laugh you could hear in a crowd of 2,000 people,” said Rodgers, who is president of Ladies Most Wanted, a group of women associated with the men’s club. “You could point out Chancey.”
Smith also had an extensive gun collection. At the crime scene, investigators reported that he had a pistol, a shotgun, rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in his pickup truck.
Smith had the guns because he enjoyed hunting deer or rabbits on his family’s property in Orangeburg County, Rodgers said.
“That’s where he found his peace of mind,” she said.
Chancey Foy Smith was born on New Year’s Eve in 1978 to Phillip and Joyce Smith in Orangeburg. He graduated from Edisto High School and joined the Marine Corps in November 1996. He became a specialist in shoulder-launched rockets and earned the rifle expert badge. He was stationed in Okinawa, Japan, and at Camp Lejeune, N.C., according to his military service records.
He was discharged after three years. Rodgers said it was because he injured his knees after falling during a rappelling exercise.
Smith would spend the rest of his life with nagging knee injuries due to motorcycle wrecks and an on-the-job injury, his friends said.
Rodgers said Smith had been taking painkillers for more than two years for his knee pain but that he wasn’t addicted. At the time of his death, the coroner’s toxicology report found multiple narcotics in his system. While medical experts said one person should not have been prescribed all of those narcotics at one time, none of the drugs in Smith’s system were above normal, therapeutic levels.
Smith spent so much time on crutches that he had a tattoo on his arm of a skull with a set of crutches replacing the traditional crossbones. He had even figured out how to stow his crutches on his motorcycle.
Smith’s friends remember their goofy and carefree friend. But there was a troubled side.
Although police twice had been called to intervene in disputes between Smith and former girlfriends, he had never been charged with domestic violence, according to reports from the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department. His only criminal convictions, for petty larceny and disorderly conduct, came in 2006 when he and a friend were caught stealing 12 steak sauce bottles at 2:40 in the morning from a Waffle House in Lexington.
In September 2003, a former girlfriend called the Sheriff’s Department twice about Smith. In the first incident, she complained to police that her 2-year-old son had tested positive for drugs. The woman turned over a briefcase that contained marijuana, cocaine and crystal meth to investigators and told them that it belonged to Smith, who had recently moved out of her house, according to an incident report. No one was charged with drug possession.
The next day, the same woman called the Sheriff’s Department to report that Smith had vandalized her home. This time, the woman told police that Smith had written “bitch its on” on the back of one photo and “dead” on another photo of the woman and her son, the report said. He left the pictures on a table with a steak knife on top of them, the report said. She also reported that Smith had torn clothes and had broken her son’s toys. Police also reported that Smith had carved “RIP” on the back of her car’s seat and an expletive on the front of the seat.
“Victim is very afraid of the subj (sic), she fears that he will come back while she is sleeping and kill her,” the police report said.
However, no charges were filed in the case after the woman failed to return phone calls or respond to letters from investigators. Domestic violence experts said it is common for women to decide not to cooperate with police.
In an October 2009 Lexington County Sheriff’s Department report, Smith is the one who called police during a fight with a woman.
In that case, Smith and Rodgers were breaking up, and she was moving out of his Rabon Road house. The two were in a dispute over their child’s Social Security card, according to the report. Smith and Rodgers each told officers that neither had been assaulted. Rodgers was given the card and her belongings, the report said.
Smith and Rodgers later got back together. While the relationship was rocky, it was never violent, Rodgers said.
“Chancey never raised his hand at me,” she said.
Their three-year relationship ended in October 2010, Rodgers said.
Signs of trouble
Almost immediately, Smith ran into Peake while he was at a Lexington restaurant with his friend Hancock.
Friends on both sides said they aren’t exactly sure when the two began dating.
“With the way things are nowadays, you don’t know when anybody starts dating until it’s Facebook official,” Hancock said.
Two people in their social circles said they started dating around Halloween. That’s when Smith hosted the motorcycle club’s annual Halloween party.
By the Christmas holiday season, Smith and Peake were engaged.
Peake quickly fell into the Most Wanted social circles and, pretty soon, her younger brother, Josh Hartley, had joined.
Several of Peake’s old friends said she never introduced them to Smith. But those who did know him said there were signs of trouble.
Ayers said Peake told her about fights.
“He did crazy stuff,” Ayers said. “They would have arguments. He would destroy the house. Pick up beer bottles and throw them. Yell at her. Accuse her of stuff.”
To Ayers’ knowledge, Smith never hit Peake.
The relationship was deteriorating, police said, when the couple decided to join South Carolina’s Most Wanted on a four-day trip to Bike Week in Daytona, Fla.
Lexington sheriff’s investigators said something happened in Daytona that caused the relationship to finally split when they returned home on Sunday, March 13. But Smith’s friends from the motorcycle club insist nothing extraordinary happened.
There is speculation.
Some said Smith thought he had discovered that Peake held a secret job as an escort in Columbia. There was an ad on a website for adult services that had photos of Peake and was billing someone named “Ms. Mandylynne” as “Santa’s naughty little helper.” The woman’s rates started at $200 an hour, the ad said.
But Peake’s closest friends and family insist she did not work as an escort. They said someone must have stolen Peake’s modeling photos and used them on the site.
“Amanda had no time to do this stuff,” Binggeli said. “It would be really hard for Amanda to do this behind all of our backs.”
Geno Cruz, Peake’s boss at the tattoo studio, said Amanda came home from Daytona with a bruise on her leg where she said Smith had slammed a car door on her. She told co-workers they had broken up.
Whatever the cause, the breakup was painful. But no one saw the violence coming.
Both Peake and Smith expressed their dismay over the breakup on their Facebook pages.
At 2 p.m. on Tuesday, March 15 — just hours before her death — Peake posted a letter to her friends entitled “My deepest apologies.”
In it, she described how much she had changed since her husband died. She said she had pushed people away to avoid the pain of losing someone again.
“I hope that to anyone I have hurt or betrayed in the last 4 years that you understand that I am truly sorry and I plan on doing nothing but becoming the Amanda that everyone knew and loved again!” she wrote. “I have a lot of work to do with working on myself and trusting people again but I am gonna try my hardest to accomplish that.”
She also praised her children as “amazing” and thanked the friends who had stood by her over the years.
As for Smith, he spent that Tuesday moving his belongings out of Peake’s house. He drank beer all day.
Hancock said he spoke with Smith on the phone and he sounded depressed.
Rodgers said she talked to him about 5:30 p.m. and they argued over her decision to change their daughter’s day-care provider. They already had an ongoing dispute over child support money, she said.
Before hanging up, Smith told Rodgers he was trying to be a good father and started apologizing.
“He said, ‘I’m sorry for even making you think I’m a bad dad. I can’t take any more fighting. Tell Whitney I love her and give her a kiss for me,’” Rodgers said.
At some point, Smith posted a message on Facebook that said he needed help, his friends said. Police also said Smith sent a text message to a friend, saying he would kill Peake if she didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear.
That’s what led a childhood friend to go to Smith’s Rabon Road house.
He found Smith drunk and distraught.
After failing to reason with Smith, the friend called 911. The call would last 12 harrowing minutes.
“I have a friend who’s been drinking,” the caller told a dispatcher. “I’ve been trying to talk some sense into him. He is now loading several weapons and about to go to his girlfriend’s house. He is armed and dangerous.”
Later the caller told dispatchers, “He’s talking about murder-suicide.”
But Smith’s friend did not know Peake’s name or address. He urged dispatchers to get officers to Smith’s house as soon as possible. Smith drove away before officers arrived, and Smith’s friend followed him, narrating their route toward Peake’s house in Red Bank to the 911 dispatcher.
Police arrived at the house at 10:11 p.m., but it was too late to save Peake and her children.
Officers found Peake dead in her bed, two gunshot wounds to her head.
The children were together in the bottom of a bunk bed. Sarah Peake had been shot once in the head and already was dead. Cameron was still breathing but died on the way to the hospital. He had a gunshot wound to his head, and the coroner’s autopsy would later find a wound on his left thumb that indicated he had put his hands up to defend himself.
Smith was lying dead on the floor of Peake’s bedroom. A silver and black .40-caliber pistol was nearby. He had shot himself in the throat. The coroner’s toxicology report later found his blood-alcohol level was 0.262 percent, far beyond the 0.08 percent limit that South Carolina uses as evidence of intoxication.
The deaths ripped through the families and friends like a hot knife. The pain, they say, has not subsided.
The parents of Peake and Smith declined to be interviewed for this story but gave their blessings for their children’s friends who agreed to talk.
Just as Facebook served as a forum for the ups and downs of the relationship between Peake and Smith, it now is a place where Peake’s friends turn to express grief.
A page entitled “In Loving Memory of Amanda, Cameron, Sarah Peake” has more 5,700 followers. Almost daily, someone posts a message to Peake about how much they miss her.
A message posted Oct. 12 simply says, “Hugs!”
Others pour out their hearts.
“It always hurts not having y’all around but the last few days has been the worst in a while,” a friend wrote in September. “I miss & love yall so much.”
Peake and Smith had mutual friends. Some of those friendships were ripped apart as people sided with one or the other. Those disputes, too, have surfaced on Facebook.
“Everyone is hurting, EVERYONE! But right now is not the time to be jumping down anyones throats or trying to fight anyone,” a March 21 posting said. “I’ve been hearing stories and its GOT TO STOP!”
Each man in Most Wanted wears a patch on his motorcycle vest where the names of deceased members are embroidered. Smith’s name is not on the patch. It never will be.
“We don’t condone what he did,” Hancock said.
Smith’s friends in the Most Wanted club said they occasionally ride their motorcycles to his grave in Orangeburg County and talk about the killings. They still don’t understand what drove him to kill Peake. And, most of all, they cannot fathom why he would kill her children.
“He was a great guy,” said Jon Buckner, a Most Wanted member who served as a pallbearer at Smith’s funeral. “I miss him. Why did he do what he did? It came out of left field. I’ll never understand.”
Every friend of Peake’s who agreed to talk about her described a fiercely loyal friend, a person who just knew when to show up with a hug and a kind word.
Binggeli credits Peake with saving her life. In her late teens, Binggeli got addicted to heroin. At one point, she overdosed and realized she was in trouble.
At home alone, Binggeli said the only phone number she could remember was Peake’s. Peake answered even though she was on her honeymoon and, from afar, managed to get rescue workers to Binggeli’s house.
A few years later, Peake stayed by Binggeli’s side after her first child died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
After Peake’s funeral, Binggeli found herself partying at Columbia’s annual St. Patrick’s Day festival in Five Points. A recovering addict, Benggeli said she felt herself slipping in a direction that could lead to old habits.
In the past, those were the moments she would dial Peake. Without her friend to lean on, Binggeli called 911 and asked dispatchers to send someone to her house. She spent a week in a rehab facility to pull herself together.
“Amanda was my rock,” Binggeli said.
Diana Harmon, the mother of Peake’s childhood friend Ashley Carrowan, said Peake always had a big heart and was a beautiful person. She hopes people don’t judge Peake in death by her tattoos and piercings, her modeling photos and her reputation as the life of the party.
“There is nothing in this world that makes it right to take the lives of those two innocent children and Amanda,” Harmon said. “It’s heartbreaking.”
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