Lock’s family questioned texts sent after her disappearance before her remains were recovered and her boyfriend was eventually convicted of second-degree murder.
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — Weeks after Annie Lock disappeared, her phone was still communicating with her family. The messages suggested she was alive, wanted space and did not need anyone to look for her. Her sister noticed something was wrong with the writing but kept replying because she could not know for certain who was sending the texts. Nearly two years later, Lock’s boyfriend, Tyrique Zavier Leroy Williams, has pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received a 15-to-19-year prison sentence.
The messages are one unresolved piece of a case that moved from a family’s private concern to a missing-person investigation, then to the discovery of Lock’s remains and a homicide prosecution. Reporting based on a civil custody filing says some texts sent after Lock disappeared told relatives she needed a break from life and would return later. Her sister said the spelling did not sound like Lock. Yet she responded because the possibility that her sister was still communicating could not simply be dismissed. The verified public materials reviewed for this report do not establish through forensic evidence who wrote those messages, and no complete examination of Lock’s phone has been publicly released.
What the criminal case ultimately established is that Williams accepted responsibility for Lock’s death. In August 2026, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and to desecration of a body or remains to conceal an unnatural death. A judge sentenced him to a minimum of 15 years and a maximum of 19 years in a North Carolina correctional facility. The judgment also gives him credit for 468 days he spent incarcerated before sentencing. Williams had initially been charged with first-degree murder after his arrest in April 2025, meaning the final conviction reflects a different homicide offense than the one prosecutors first pursued.
The unanswered communications began against a backdrop of uncertainty over whether Lock had even been officially reported missing. Fayetteville police say she was last seen Aug. 17, 2024, near Kiana Lane. Her family said Lock had been living with Williams and shared a young child with him. They also said she was about five weeks pregnant. When relatives could no longer reach her normally, they said Williams told them he would make a missing-person report. The family believed he had done so and even sought a welfare check at the apartment. According to relatives, Williams told them Lock was not there.
It was not until October that the family discovered the report they thought existed had never been filed. Lock’s sister told local television reporters she directly asked Williams whether detectives had contacted him and learned that he had not notified police. The family then reported Lock missing. Fayetteville police list Oct. 10 as the official report date, nearly two months after her last confirmed sighting. Five days later, the department publicly asked for assistance finding her. That reporting delay did not by itself answer what had happened, but it became a central part of the chronology once authorities began investigating the disappearance.
A second development deepened the family’s alarm. Williams married another woman around the same period, according to family members and local reporting. WRAL reported that the marriage occurred shortly after relatives learned no missing-person report had been filed. Later coverage said the woman Williams married had given birth to another child about a month after Lock was last seen. The sequence attracted significant attention after Williams’ arrest. Still, the marriage is context rather than a criminal finding. The materials reviewed for this report do not show that the act of marrying was charged as a crime or identify it as an element of Williams’ later second-degree murder conviction.
As fall turned to winter, the family had neither Lock nor a clear explanation for the texts. Police continued searching. In March 2025, Lock’s sister went before television cameras to ask the public for help, speaking about how close the sisters had been and how painful the silence had become. ABC11 reported that a police search warrant said investigators believed Lock had been involved in an argument with her former boyfriend before leaving the apartment they shared on Cliffdale Road. Authorities did not, however, publicly announce at that time that they knew she had been killed. Her official status remained that of a missing person.
The investigation changed sharply on April 13, 2025, when Robeson County sheriff’s deputies recovered human remains from a body of water near N.C. 72 West and Buie Philadelphus Road in the Red Springs area. The state medical examiner confirmed that the remains belonged to Lock. Fayetteville police records identify her as 27, although some later reports gave a different age. The official police age is used here because it comes from the department’s contemporaneous missing-person and homicide releases. The recovery ended the family’s search for Lock alive and shifted the investigation toward identifying who was criminally responsible for her death.
Three days after the remains were found, authorities arrested Williams at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. Army officials said he was in basic combat training with the 35th Engineer Battalion and had arrived at the installation in March. The U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division took him into custody and delivered him to the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office while extradition to North Carolina was arranged. Fayetteville police announced charges of first-degree murder and concealment of death and credited the Robeson County Sheriff’s Office, Army investigators and Missouri authorities with helping coordinate the case.
Williams later appeared in Cumberland County court, where the case continued under the original first-degree murder accusation. A Superior Court calendar in October 2025 listed that charge and an additional offense described as desecration of a body or remains to conceal an unnatural death. The prosecution did not ultimately produce a first-degree murder verdict. Instead, Williams entered guilty pleas in August 2026. The reviewed sources do not provide a complete transcript of that hearing, identify every term of any plea arrangement or disclose the full factual presentation prosecutors made to support second-degree murder.
That distinction limits how far the public record can be taken. News accounts at the time of Williams’ arrest described allegations about Lock’s death, but an allegation made when a person is charged is not the same as a fact established at conviction. The most reliable final description is therefore the one contained in the case outcome: Williams admitted second-degree murder and the concealment-related offense and was sentenced accordingly. The available materials do not give a sufficiently detailed, independently verified account of Lock’s precise cause of death or every act that occurred between her last known sighting and the disposal of her remains.
The phone messages stand apart from the conviction for the same reason. They provide important context for what Lock’s family experienced and explain why uncertainty persisted even after direct contact with her had stopped. But without public forensic findings establishing authorship, it would go beyond the record to attribute the texts definitively to Williams or another person. Her sister’s account is clear on one point: She doubted that the writing looked like Lock’s and nevertheless kept responding because she still hoped the sender might be her sister.
That hope ended at the pond in Robeson County. The criminal case that followed has now ended with Williams serving a 15-to-19-year state sentence, less the 468 days of credit ordered by the court. The guilty pleas establish his criminal responsibility for second-degree murder and for concealing Lock’s unnatural death. They do not answer every question that accumulated during the eight months between her disappearance and the recovery of her remains, including exactly who used her phone afterward. No further criminal proceeding or additional defendant is identified in the verified records reviewed for this report.
Author note: Last updated September 22, 2026.