The Murder of Bonnie Lou Irvine
A 52-year-old woman from Cornelius, North Carolina went missing in 2008 and after several days, her roommate reported her missing. Police were able to quickly access her activity on the website Craigslist, and soon realized her disappearance was connected to a man she had arranged to meet.
Craigslist is a classified advertisements website that was created by a man named Craig Newmark back in 1995. It started out as first as a email distribution list to his friends, featuring mostly events in the San Francisco Bay area. People can browse the classifieds for job listings, housing options, items for sale, and personals ads. Unfortunately, over the years, it’s also become a place where criminals have often sought out victims, alongside the many dating websites. It’s not unusual to see a headline with the title “Craiglist Killer identified” and there have been multiple crime documentaries featuring victims of the website. The two cases we’re discussing today both have ties to Craigslist.
Bonnie Lou Irvine
In February of 2008, the roommate of 52-year-old Bonnie Lou Irvine, a Cornelius resident, reported the woman missing. Investigators with the Cornelius Police Department looked at her phone and e-mail records and noticed her last communication was with a man named Bernard Lamp, who was going by the name George Lamp. She’d responded to an ad he’d placed on Craigslist earlier in the month. Irvine had also sent Lamp a link to a different website where she had posted more photos of herself. Police learned the website was popular with men seeking sex with prostitutes. Police in Troutman were familiar with the suspect. He had been arrested the previous year for abducting another woman he’d met online after they met up at a local convenience store.
Irvine’s sister told police her sister had been arrested for prostitution-related charges in the past. The Cornelius Police Department called in the FBI Safe Streets Task Force, which included members of the FBI, SBI, and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Departments to aid in the investigation. For two weeks, investigators kept an eye out for Irvine’s car, which was still missing. When they spotted a Volvo matching the description, they ran the tag on it, discovering the tag was registered to Bernard Lamp and was supposed to be on a Ford Contour he owned. They followed him to a service station in Troutman and when he stopped, he was arrested for a violation of his probation.
When they discovered he’d been staying with an acquaintance on Weathers Creek Road in Troutman, they visited the property. It didn’t take them long to find an area in the backyard that looked suspicious. After executing a search warrant, a team began digging and came across a black plastic bag with human hair showing from one end. The FBI’s Evidence Response Team took over the scene for processing.
Lamp was arrested and charged with the murder and first-degree kidnapping of Bonnie Lou Irvine, age 52.
Irvine’s body was found on a property that wasn’t owned by Bernard Lamp. It belonged to a woman named Leslie Belkin, who had purchased land and had a home built on Weathers Creek Road. Belkin had also met Lamp through a personal ad on Craigslist and they had chatted online for several weeks before meeting in person. She said he had stayed with her and her daughter at the apartment she was renting in Troutman during the construction of her home. He helped her move into the house when it was ready and suggested he spend the night alone at her apartment after she moved out, so he could clean it. Belkin allowed Lamp to store some of his personal belongings in her detached garage at Weathers Creek Road and saw him burn some boxes and trash from the move in her backyard.
The Trial
Bernard Lamp remained incarcerated until his trial began almost six years later. Digital forensics played a large part in the trial. One of the witnesses for the prosecution was William Powell, the director for customer service and law enforcement relations for Craigslist. He shared that Bernard Lamp had placed three separate ads on the site. The first one, placed on February 10, 2008, was listed under “erotic” services, and said he was seeking female companionship. He described himself as a good-looking professional male. The second ad was placed on March 2, 2008, and it was seeking a mechanic. He said in the ad that he was using his girlfriend’s Volvo and needed help regarding the car’s alarm system. Lamp explained the alarm had gone off and he had used the remote to stop it, but then he couldn’t use the remote to get into the car. The Volvo was actually Irvine’s car. The third ad Lamp placed on Craiglist, March 13, 2008, was also seeking a female companion.
Prosecutors also called several different members of the FBI to the stand to discuss evidence they had uncovered during the investigation. Police had discovered some women’s clothing in the garage of Leslie Belkin’s home where Lamp was storing some of his things. Material found on the clothing appeared to be blood, but the amounts were so small they couldn’t conclusively confirm what it was. Analysts also tested hair found in the plastic bag Irvine’s body was wrapped in and hair from a black purse found in the trash of Lamp’s brother’s home. The hairs were not a positive match for either Irvine or Lamp.
Neighbors of Leslie Belkin’s had seen Lamp driving the victim’s Volvo and noticed him emptying something wrapped in a blanket or tarp out of the back of the car and into the garage right after Irvine went missing.
The Verdict
On February 6, 2014, the jury found Bernard Lamp guilty of the first-degree murder of Bonnie Lou Irvine. They took three hours and 40 minutes to deliberate over two days. The state of North Carolina decided to seek the death penalty, and the judge began a hearing with the attorneys to see what factors the state wanted to present in support of the death penalty. The jury was not present during the discussion. The judge ruled that the kidnapping conviction in the other Iredell assault case could not be presented as a factor, but Lamp’s previous crimes in Virginia and Ohio could. Lamp blew up during the hearing, said he didn’t want his attorneys to speak for him, wanted to represent himself, and claimed innocence in the murder of Bonnie Lou Irvine.
Lamp didn’t end up firing his attorneys, and they represented him in his sentencing hearing. District attorney Sarah Kirkman and Assistant District Attorney Carrie Nitzu asked for the death penalty, explaining that Lamp’s three prior felony convictions showed a pattern of violent behavior. The prior convictions were for robbery in 1978 and 1980 in Virginia and a robbery and abduction conviction in 1989 in Ohio. They also brought up the victim’s violent manner of death. Lamp’s defense attorneys, Vince Rabil, and David Freedman, said those felonies took place years before Irvine’s murder, so there was no pattern of escalating behavior. They brought up Lamp’s childhood, with school records that called him a “confused little boy” in elementary school and a hospitalization for barbiturate poisoning at age four. Lamp’s parents were deceased so they could not be present at the trial to provide any support.
The jury sentenced Lamp to the death penalty. The death penalty had not been recommended in an Iredell County case since Andrew Ramseur received it for murdering Jennifer Vincek and Jeff Peck during a Statesville convenience store robbery in 2007. One of the main questions I had while researching this case was why it took so long for the case to go to trial. Lamp was arrested in 2008, but his case didn’t make it to trial until 2014. Part of it had to do with the fact that this was a possible death penalty trial and there haven’t been a lot of those in Iredell County.
A Delay in Processing Evidence
One of the biggest factors, according to one of Lamp’s attorneys, Vince Rabil, was the wait time involved in evidence being processed by the FBI—some pieces took as long as four years. Lamp’s trial and incarceration while he waited for trial ended up totaling more than $250,000 in expenses. Lamp was shuttled back and forth between Statesville and Raleigh from the time he was arrested until the trial began. Other notable trial expenses included almost $17,000 for DNA testing, $4,000 for computer forensics, and $30,000 for one of the defense attorneys, as Lamp was proved indigent before the trial began.
In May 2016, Bernard Lamp died of natural causes in a Raleigh hospital while still on death row.
You may be thinking the same thing as me. It is really possible for a violent offender like Bernard Lamp to have committed no other crimes between the years of 1989 and 2008? He was known to have lived in different places and seemed to hop from residence to residence. He moved in with his girlfriend in Troutman not long after meeting here, and it appeared as though he was messaging other people online the whole time he was living with her. What caused Bernard Lamp to snap and kill Bonnie Irvine, or had he just been lucky enough not to get caught previously? I guess we may never know.
The Statesville Record and Landmark did extensive reporting on this case, and I would like to give a shoutout to Donna Swicegood for her excellent work in covering the case from start to finish. The television series, “Web of Lies,” featured this case on the episode titled “Mr Fix It” in 2015. Bonnie’s story appeared in Episode 114 of my podcast, Missing in the Carolinas.