Charlie Carver’s Facebook page tells the story of a man in love.
On July 1, Carver posted that he and his girlfriend were expecting a daughter. On Aug. 1 they bought a house, and on Sept. 1 they were married.
That’s what horrifies Carver’s friends and family. All the happy new milestones on his timeline were logged retroactively on Oct. 1, more than a month after he and his girlfriend Kala Brown disappeared.
ADVERTISEMENT
Carver, 32, and Brown, 30, went missing from their Anderson, South Carolina, apartment on Aug. 31. Carver’s car vanished. Their cellphones went dead. Even their beloved Pomeranian dog was left to pace the home without food or water. But someone was still posting to Facebook under Carver’s name, sending messages to his friends and writing an ominous new history of the couple’s life.
“I wish I could tell them to stop,” Carver’s younger sister Katie told The Daily Beast of the Facebook posts, her voice breaking. “If they know where he is, bring him home.”
Last week someone posing as Carver uploaded and deleted an old picture of the couple, Brown’s best friend Lindsey Mayson told The Daily Beast.
The caption said “‘we are fine,’” Mayson said, “which is not him. His Facebook posts have been hacked. It’s not him posting.”
The most recent entry still visible on Carver’s page is from Oct. 2, over a month after he and Brown disappeared. “What color ribbon supports the people who can’t keep their nose out of other people’s business?” the post asks.
It’s not like the couple to disappear like this, people close to them said. Carver and Brown seldom go a day without speaking to family or friends. So after a few days of silence from her son, Carver’s mother asked the building manager at couple’s apartment complex to check on them. The manager found their door unlocked and the apartment uninhabited, Brown’s mother told a local Fox affiliate.
If Carver and Brown had gone on an unannounced vacation, they’d left their essentials behind. Kala’s glasses and contact lenses were still in the apartment, as were the couple’s medications. Kala’s dog, Romeo, had been left inside alone, his crate mysteriously missing.
“That dog is her baby,” Kala’s mother told NBC News. “She’d never leave him like that.”
Carver and Brown were last heard from on Aug. 31, when Brown texted a few friends, and surveillance footage showed Carver leaving work.The previous night, Brown had called her friend Mayson to make dinner plans for Thursday.
“That was about 6:45 that night,” Mayson said. They’d planned to get dinner with Carver, whom Mayson had never met. “That’s what that Thursday night was supposed to be about. It was meeting them and having dinner with them and getting to know each other.”
Brown had spent August newly in love and newly uneasy. She and Carver had just moved in together after a few months of dating. But Brown grew worried as the month drew on. She felt she was being stalked, she confided in Mayson. Carver was in the middle of a divorce—and Brown saw his ex everywhere. (The Daily Beast is not naming Carver’s ex because she has not been identified as a suspect or person of interest.)
“Followed, sitting outside the apartment complex watching. All kinds of really crazy scary stuff,” Mayson said of the ex’s alleged behavior. “[Brown] made a comment at one time that she didn’t feel comfortable at all; that she was scared.”
Police said they haven’t identified any suspects, and that as of Wednesday, they had no new leads.
“There’s no new evidence to point any new direction,” Lt. David Creamer of the Anderson Police Department told The Daily Beast. “There’s no new leads, but we’re looking at every angle.”
Creamer added that, to his knowledge, the department had not taken action to search for the IP address of the person using Carver’s account.
“To do anything like that, we’d have to issue a search warrant to Facebook,” he said. “I don’t know if we’ve done that but I’m pretty sure we have not done that… You’d have to serve [Facebook] with a search warrant to search their records for an IP.”
Reached by email on Wednesday, a Facebook spokesperson responded in under 90 minutes, referring The Daily Beast to Facebook's policies for law enforcement. If served with a search warrant or a subpoena in connection to a criminal investigation, Facebook will turn over user information including "recent login/logout IP addresses ... and location information."
“They said they’re hoping to tell us something soon, but they’ve been saying that for a couple weeks,” Carver’s sister Katie said.
While the search stretches into its second month, police are encouraging locals to look out for Carver’s missing car, a 2002 white Pontiac Grand Prix with South Carolina plates and an LSU decal on the back window. The couple’s family and friends have spent weeks distributing “missing” fliers and trying to raise funds to hire a private investigator.
The person using Carver’s Facebook account is also sharing the missing persons reports.
Since Carver went missing, his Facebook has shared dozens of posts about the missing couple, including pleas for prayers from Carver’s sister Katie. The missing persons posters, uploaded in the missing man’s name, are sandwiched between sinister memes.
“Sometimes late at night I dig a hole in the backyard to keep the nosey neighbor’s guessing,” reads one macro image shared by Carver’s account on Sept. 24.
“End gun violence now! Bring back the sword,” reads another image from earlier that day.
A post from Oct. 1 shares the final lines of The Eagles’ song “Hotel California”:
“Last thing I remember, I was running for the door. I had to find the passage back to the place I was before. ‘Relax,’ said the nightman. ‘We are programmed to receive. You can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave.’”
The person using Carver’s account isn’t just posting statuses. They’re messaging his friends.
“im just missing to everyone else,” Carver’s account told one friend in a series of September messages shared with The Daily Beast. “We [are] both ok. there is only one person that knows where we are … the person that means the most to me and kala she know where we are and we are coming that way for ever.”
The person declines the friend’s pleas to video chat. But elsewhere, the person claiming to be Carver appears to break character.
On Sept. 26, the person using Carver’s account confronted one of the friends commenting on Carver’s new Facebook posts.
“Well i would keep my nose clean and out off it. And how do you know my hubby?” the person wrote. Friends began speculating that Carver’s estranged wife had hacked his Facebook, or that someone was trying to frame her.
Still in Carver’s voice, the person defended Carver’s wife. “She didnt hack my page she has the password to my facebook,” the person wrote.
While Carver’s Facebook continues to post in his absence, the couple’s loved ones remember the real people they hope will come home.
“My brother was a really good guy, is a really good guy,” Katie said. “He’s an aspiring writer. We were actually working on a graphic novel together.”
Carver had recently been promoted at the paper company where he worked, and loved his job. He is a comic book lover, especially of the Marvel comics, an interest he’d shared with Katie since childhood.
“The last time I heard from him was the Sunday before he disappeared,” Katie said. “He’d sent me some stupid meme because we were always going back and forth just kidding with each other. I didn’t have time to respond immediately, so the last thing I said to him was ‘wow.’”
Brown is an animal lover, and a steadfast friend, those close to her said. “She was a really nice person, really upbeat and outgoing. They just worked together really well,” Katie said.
“She’s one of those friends who would always be there,” Mayson said. “No matter what. You need her, she’s there.”
Now the couple’s friends are searching for clues the best way they can: by messaging the person who claims to be Carver.
“Who is this?” Carver’s friend Katrina Mega messaged the account in September, adding “You can post comments but you can’t respond to me[?]”
“I was reading something,” came the cryptic response from Carver’s account.
“Where are you,” Mega asked. “Are you OK is this even really you”
“Yes im fine,” the person on Carver’s side wrote.
Mega repeated the question.
“Is this really you?”
No one answered.
