BALTIMORE, Md. — Living in a home in Northeast Baltimore in the winter of 2014, Charles “Buck” Webster was balancing drug addiction with his role as the patriarch of his family, including his niece, Jessica Tolasky.
“He’s the one who walked me home from my first middle school dance,” said Tolasky, “He sat with me when I learned to crochet and through my first heartbreak.”
Everything came to an end when Webster and his girlfriend, Terril Lehman, disappeared in December of that year.
Jessica had stayed in constant contact with her uncle when it suddenly came to an abrupt stop, and she filed a missing persons report.
Time had stood still for Webster’s family for more than a decade when 45-year-old Scott Barnett walked into a police station last week and confessed that he and his now-deceased girlfriend had murdered the couple, cut their bodies into pieces, and then disposed of them, placing small bags in trashcans throughout the neighborhood.
Jessica found out after a cousin read the gruesome details online.
“Honestly, it was just heartbreaking, and then the detective called me and I was just so shocked that I had to read this on Facebook,” she told us.
Jessica says she recalls her uncle saying he was helping out a couple by letting them live in the basement of the home, but Barnett says Webster extorted drugs and money from them with the threat of kicking them out, which provided motive for the killings.
Webster’s niece also wonders why a man who went to such lengths to conceal his crimes would now confess when he had literally gotten away with murder.
“Maybe he’s sick. Maybe it’s a guilty conscience, and he’s dying. I’m not really sure,” said the grieving niece, “I’m glad, in some aspects, that he came forward, because now we know what happened, but there are details of this murder that I could have lived the rest of my life not reading in the newspaper. It’s one thing to find out that he overdosed somewhere. It is a completely different realm of thinking that he was murdered and dismembered. That’s just awful.”
