Nearly thirteen years after 20-year-old Heather Elvis vanished from the Myrtle Beach area, two people are serving 30-year prison sentences for kidnapping her — and her family still has no body to bury. It’s one of the strangest paradoxes in modern American true crime: a case with convictions, but no confirmed victim’s remains, no confession, and no definitive answer to the question that opens every article ever written about it. Where is Heather Elvis?
Who Was Heather Elvis
Heather Rachelle Elvis was born June 30, 1993, and grew up in Horry County, South Carolina. By 20, she was working as a waitress at the Tilted Kilt pub in Myrtle Beach while training toward a cosmetology license, and living with her roommate, Brianna Warrelmann, in an apartment in Carolina Forest. Friends and family described her as warm, sociable, and looking forward to the future — she’d just landed a new job and was, by most accounts, trying to move on from a relationship that had complicated the last several months of her life.
That relationship was with Sidney Moorer, a married repairman roughly twenty years her senior whom she’d met through her restaurant job. The two began an affair in the summer of 2013. When Moorer’s wife, Tammy, found out, the relationship ended — messily — sometime around late October or early November 2013. Text messages later entered into evidence showed Tammy sending Heather angry, confrontational messages, while also, contradictorily, telling police she and Sidney had “an open marriage” and that his affairs didn’t bother her.
The Night of December 17–18, 2013
On the evening of December 17, hoping for a fresh start, Heather went on a first date with a new man, Steven Schiraldi. He dropped her back at her Carolina Forest apartment at roughly 1:15 a.m. — the last person known to have seen her in person.
About twenty minutes later, at 1:35 a.m., a call came into her cellphone from a payphone at a nearby gas station. It lasted a few minutes. The caller was Sidney Moorer. Shortly afterward, Heather called Brianna, who was out of state visiting family for the holidays. During the roughly ten-minute call, Heather — described by Brianna as sounding “hysterical” — said Sidney had told her he was planning to leave Tammy and wanted to meet her. Brianna urged her not to go, telling her to get some sleep instead.
Phone records show Heather then called the payphone number back nine times between 2:29 and 3:05 a.m. What happened after that has never been established with certainty. Her cellphone activity stopped in the early morning hours of December 18. In the early hours of that same morning, a patrolling Horry County police officer logged an odd sight at the Peachtree Landing boat ramp on the Waccamaw River in Socastee: Heather’s green Dodge Intrepid, parked crookedly across several spaces. Its significance wasn’t understood until roughly a day later, when her worried family reported her missing and investigators connected the abandoned car to her disappearance.
Extensive searches of the Waccamaw River and surrounding woods and marshland — by police, dive teams, and hundreds of volunteers — turned up nothing. Heather Elvis has never been found.
From Missing Person to Murder Investigation
Suspicion fell quickly on Sidney and Tammy Moorer. Investigators built a case around a cluster of circumstantial evidence: surveillance footage reportedly showing the Moorers’ black Ford F-150 truck traveling toward and from Peachtree Landing in the hours Heather disappeared; cell-tower data placing their phones in the same general area; footage of Sidney at a payphone calling her; and — perhaps most damning in jurors’ eyes — surveillance video, obtained days later, of the couple thoroughly scrubbing down their truck and then burning the rags they’d used. Prosecutors also introduced footage of Sidney buying a pregnancy test at Walmart that same morning, part of their theory that Heather may have believed she was pregnant with his child, and that this — combined with Tammy’s fury over the affair — supplied a motive.
In March 2014, a grand jury indicted both Moorers on charges of kidnapping and murder. The murder charges, however, would later be dropped: without a body, prosecutors concluded they couldn’t sustain them, and the case proceeded on kidnapping and related charges instead.
Trials, Convictions, and a Decade of Appeals
The legal process that followed stretched across most of a decade:
- 2016 — Sidney Moorer’s first kidnapping trial ended in a deadlocked jury and a mistrial. The jury in that trial never saw the truck-cleaning surveillance footage.
- September 2017 — Sidney was convicted of obstruction of justice, for lying to investigators in the first 48 hours of the case, and sentenced to 10 years.
- October 2018 — Tammy Moorer was convicted of kidnapping and conspiracy to kidnap and sentenced to 30 years.
- September 2019 — Sidney, retried on the kidnapping charge — this time with the truck-cleaning video included as evidence — was also convicted of kidnapping and conspiracy to kidnap, and sentenced to 30 years, to run concurrently with his obstruction sentence.
Both maintained their innocence throughout, and both pursued years of appeals. In June 2023, the South Carolina Court of Appeals affirmed both convictions, ruling that prosecutors had presented sufficient evidence — including the cell data, surveillance footage, and the timeline of Sidney’s motive to “appease Tammy’s anger” over the affair and a possible pregnancy — for a jury to convict. In October 2024, the South Carolina Supreme Court declined to review Tammy Moorer’s case any further, effectively closing off her remaining state-level appeals. Sidney separately lost a Supreme Court challenge to his obstruction conviction.
Neither the Court of Appeals’ rulings nor the Supreme Court’s denials were the end of it, though. In 2025, both Moorers filed for post-conviction relief — a separate legal avenue from a direct appeal, focused on claims that their trial lawyers failed them. Sidney’s attorney filed in March 2025; Tammy followed in October 2025, arguing her defense team mishandled witnesses and evidence, failed to bring in an expert to challenge the state’s vehicle-identification testimony, and — in an unusual added claim — had her sign away the rights to a book about her own arrest and trial. Both are currently serving their sentences at Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville, South Carolina; under their current terms, Sidney’s projected release date is March 2044 and Tammy’s is May 2043.
A Case Without a Body
Sidney and Tammy Moorer have never wavered from their claim that they don’t know what happened to Heather. That leaves the Elvis family in an agonizing limbo: two people have been legally held responsible for taking her, but there has been no confession, no burial site, and — despite everything from cadaver-dog searches to river dives to national tip lines — no remains.
The case became national news in the years that followed, the subject of a “Dateline” special, an “Snapped” episode, true-crime podcasts, and a 2025 documentary, “Vanished: The Heather Elvis Case,” built around interviews with investigators and the family. Heather’s parents, Terry and Debbi Elvis, and her sister Morgan have spent years as public advocates, marking anniversaries with vigils at Peachtree Landing, giving interviews, and pressing prosecutors and investigators to keep looking. At a candlelight vigil marking ten years since her disappearance in December 2023, family and friends gathered lanterns in hand at the boat landing where her car was found, a scene that has by now repeated itself for over a decade of anniversaries without resolution.
So, Where Is She Now?
Legally and factually, Heather Elvis remains a missing person. She has never been declared dead, no remains have ever been recovered, and Horry County’s cold-case investigators have said publicly they still hope new information — potentially from someone close to the Moorers who eventually decides silence isn’t worth keeping — could lead them to her. The kidnapping convictions answered, in the eyes of two separate juries, the question of who took her. They have not answered the harder one her family has been asking every year since 2013: where she is, and whether they will ever get the chance to bring her home.
