Posted on Sun, Jul. 16, 2006
How a good woman met a horrible end
A look at how two disparate lives came together in a brutal crime
By LISA MICHALS
lmichals@thestate.com
Jerry Buck Inman is the kind of person Tiffany Marie Souers wanted to help.
Instead, the 20-year-old Clemson student ended up fighting the ex-convict for her life, authorities say.
Three days before she was strangled May 26 in her off-campus apartment, Souers sought out a prison ministry group, offering to write letters and bake for convicts.
“She wanted a way to make their lives better,” said her mother, Bren Souers. “She thought everybody deserves a second chance.”
Since elementary school, the blue-eyed, blonde daughter of wealthy St. Louis-area parents had spent much of her free time feeding the homeless, counseling teens in crisis or befriending elderly nursing home residents.
Recently, Souers had volunteered for a struggling Easley charity that raised money for children.
She didn’t talk much about those activities with her friends.
She didn’t crave attention.
She just wanted to live her life — go to classes, hang out and, especially, help others.
Her friends and family can hardly comprehend that her promising life ended with a bikini top wrapped around her neck.
But they say her story isn’t about the horrific way she died.
It’s about how selflessly she lived.
‘
REALLY BLINDSIDED’
The last time Erica Cooler saw Souers, she was walking into her ground-level apartment in The Reserve in Central.
It was shortly before midnight May 25 and the two women had eaten dinner at a Mexican restaurant.
“I remember watching her walk to the door and smiling and thinking, ‘We had a really good time tonight, and I hope there are more good times like this to come,’” Cooler, 20, said. “I remember telling her that I loved her before she left.”
Shortly after that, Souers sent a text message to another friend saying she planned to stay home the rest of the night.
The next day, at 1:45 p.m., a friend found Souers dead and called 911. Authorities said she had been assaulted sexually.
About 7 p.m., police broke the news of Souers’ death to her family in the St. Louis suburb of Ladue, Mo.
Souers’ brother, 16-year-old Trevor, was at a friend’s house. Eleven-year-old sister Brianna wasn’t feeling well and was resting. Souers’ parents, Jim and Bren, were readying to have friends over for appetizers.
“We were really blindsided,” Bren Souers said.
DNA evidence eventually linked Inman, a 35-year-old convicted sex offender, to Souers’ death. On June 6, police arrested him near his parents’ home in Tennessee. He had been released from prison in September after serving half of a 30-year sentence for a rape in Florida.
When she picked Souers up for dinner, Cooler said, “for some reason, I felt the need to ask her why she didn’t lock her doors.”
“I remember Tiffany specifically saying, ‘Oh, you know, what are they going to steal from me? If they want that $100 TV, that’s probably the most valuable thing in my apartment. They can have it. I don’t care.’”
Cooler said the conversation’s context stopped at burglary. Clemson and nearby Central are quiet towns where burglary was the worst offense the two women — and most residents — could imagine.
Souers didn’t even mention she had taken a self-defense course in high school.
‘ONE STEP AT A TIME’
Thousands of students stream out of Clemson each May for summer break. Sultry summer air squeezes into the vacancy.
After a brief trip home to see her family in Missouri, Souers was one of the few who headed back to Clemson for the summer session.
On May 25, she attended the third day of her two summer courses — geology from 9:45 to 11:15 a.m.; literature from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Her parents wanted her home for the summer. But she took the electives in anticipation of the grueling civil engineering course work of her junior and senior years.
After class that day, she drove 20 miles to Sharing Inc., the Easley thrift shop that raises money for children’s after-school activities.
She and charity president Faith Clark planned to move the thrift shop next door to attract more shoppers.
That day, they strolled the new quarters — a white house — planning renovations and decorations.
“We were going to make it like a big doll house and have a food pantry out of the back,” Clark recalled. “She was going through and tapping the walls, finding the studs in the walls. How many girls at 20 years-old ... know you have to go around and find the studs?”
Clark fretted about the enormous task. Tiffany Souers didn’t.
“Before she left,” Clark said, “she grabbed my hands and said, ‘Listen, don’t get overwhelmed. I know you’re nervous.... Just take one step at a time.’”
A LIFE OF SERVICE
Souers volunteered so much, it’s difficult to catalog all her ventures and hours of service.
“She had this incredible need — almost insatiable need — to go help and make sure people were better off,” her mother said.
Together, Bren Souers and her daughter launched a St. Louis chapter of the National Charity League, a mother-daughter service organization. Tiffany Souers was in the sixth grade.
Afterward, Tiffany Souers devoted each summer to a different charity: first, a day care at a St. Louis homeless shelter that offered adult education.
The list grew — nursing home volunteer, teen counselor at a local crisis center phone bank, launching a program for the deaf at the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Butterfly House.
Whenever grandmother Donna Souers stopped by, Tiffany Souers inevitably was engrossed in some magnanimous task.
“In her high school years, I stopped by to visit, and she was making sandwiches for the homeless and had it all set up in a production line,” Donna Souers, 66, said.
Tiffany Souers enlisted her grandmother’s help.
“She went back and put a piece of candy with each one,” said Donna Souers, who lives about 20 miles from the family. “I don’t know how many kids would have thought to go back and put a piece of candy in.”
The projects were private missions for Souers. Only after her death, friends learned of her dogged work and wondered where she found the time.
“She never even bragged about doing well on a test,” said Sara Schiff, a Clemson classmate.
MODEST DEBUTANTE
Souers kept her suburban St. Louis family’s affluence quiet.
She preferred to drive her Toyota SUV 700 miles between Clemson and St. Louis rather than fly in her father’s jet.
She was presented as a maid of honor at the secretive Veiled Prophet society’s debutante ball in December 2005, but it really wasn’t her scene. She attended as a favor to her father, a St. Louis businessman who belonged to the society.
“I was surprised,” said Kathryn Williams, Souers’ sorority sister in Kappa Kappa Gamma. “She never told me she was a deb.”
Friends marveled at her wardrobe, although she generally wore jeans and a T-shirt to class.
“She was gorgeous no matter what she wore,” said college friend Kate Triplett, 19.
The Tuesday before she died, she drove to Greenville and bought an expensive Coach purse.
She and her father — a business executive for a national appliance replacement parts business — debated issues and ideas all the time.
“Dinners, I tell you, were never boring,” Bren Souers said.
Heading out to spring break in Hilton Head this spring, she abruptly changed plans and went home to St. Louis. Her younger brother, Trevor, and his best friend were in a car accident. Trevor’s friend died.
Souers was a pillar of support in her family.
“She had a calming effect,” Bren Souers said.
COUNSELOR & CONFIDANTE
Souers’ counseling prowess pervades her friends’ descriptions of her. Just about everyone who knew her sought her advice.
Bren Souers once asked her daughter about it.
“So many people love to come talk to you,” Bren Souers said. “What is that?”
“What I am is an active listener,” Tiffany Souers told her mother. “I don’t just listen and think of what I’m going to say next. I listen to every word they’re saying.”
“I thought, ‘What a profound thing to say,’” Bren Souers said.
Tiffany Souers loved taking care of people. She taught her little sister, Brianna, how to read by the time she was 4. In college, she helped friends with projects, drove them home after class and nursed them when they were ill.
“When I would get sick, she’d make hot chocolate,” said Christina Morello, her roommate since freshman year. “She was like the sister I never had.”
Friends said Souers willingly bore anyone’s burden, alongside a challenging engineering course load, a jam-packed social life and charity work.
If it weighed on her, it was tough to tell.
“She was pretty independent,” Bren Souers said. “She was a tough one to get to open up. She was really, really tight with her (Catholic) faith, and I think that’s where she leaned.”
‘
A GIRL WITH PLANS’
In high school, Souers crafted a list of 27 potential colleges to attend, including Clemson and the University of South Carolina.
Since childhood, she dreamed of attending Rhode Island’s Brown University, but a summer camp there scratched the elite school because of cold weather.
Still, the East Coast beckoned.
“It was inevitable that she was going away,” Bren Souers said. “She said, ‘I’m going someplace that’s at least two plane rides away.’”
Visits to the University of Virginia and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ensued.
“Her mom said she came to Clemson, and she just knew it was for her,” Triplett said.
“It was so friendly,” Bren Souers said. “Nobody was walking alone. Everybody was smiling.”
Souers earned mostly A’s and B’s at Villa Duchesne School, a private, all-girls Catholic high school in St. Louis where she played volleyball and lacrosse.
She planned to major in political science in college and head on to law school. She mulled work as an activist or lobbyist.
Yet she excelled in math and physics during high school. Her father encouraged her to consider an undergraduate degree in engineering.
“She suddenly changed her mind on the day we were registering for classes,” Bren Souers said.
Tiffany Souers wanted a civil engineering degree, but law school was still on the horizon.
That is, until a class bridge-building competition at the end of her freshman year at Clemson. Her team won.
“She came home with this T-shirt,” Bren Souers said. “At that moment, she said, ‘This is really fun. I really enjoy building bridges.’”
In the weeks before her death, she started evaluating engineering graduate programs in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.
“She was a girl with plans,” Bren Souers said.
HER LEGACY
Those who knew Souers struggle to talk about her in the past tense, as if her life were inextricably tied to the future.
The bridges she would engineer. The graduate school search. The plans for Sharing Inc.
The memories sometimes carry Bren Souers away, and she impulsively recalls things like, “She had the best laugh.” Then the tears spring up, but only for a moment.
“So many people want to know, ‘Are you going to be an advocate for penalties for sexual predators?’” Bren Souers, 46, said. “I just don’t think I could remember her last hour for the rest of my life.”
Thirteenth Circuit Solicitor Bob Ariail is considering pursuing the death penalty for Inman.
“Putting him to death isn’t going to make me feel any better,” Bren Souers said. “But I would need some sort of guarantee that he would never, ever be out of jail again.
“He had no business being out this time, and if the system is going to fail and let him out again, that would be a problem for me. ... I have two more children. This man shouldn’t be walking free with the ability to hurt anybody else.”
But Inman’s fate isn’t the family’s focus. They are concentrating on preserving Souers’ memory by finding a way to continue her passion for helping others.
Bren Souers plans to form a foundation in her daughter’s name and “carry it out in her spirit of selflessness.”
Tiffany Souers’ friends already are raising money for Sharing Inc.
“People said she was going to make such a difference,” Triplett said. “She made a difference in the time she was here.”
Reach Michals at (803) 771-8532.
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