November 10, 2014.
Whitney Burr was planning a party for her son’s first birthday which was three days away. At the time, she was pregnant with her second child. Whitney and her mother, 35-year-old Lesley Woodman, were supposed to go to Party City that day to get supplies for the celebration.
“The last time I spoke to her was the night beforehand,” Whitney told Dateline. “But then, all that day, I couldn’t get her on the phone — and she always answered the phone. So I just didn’t feel right about it.”
Whitney’s boyfriend at the time drove her and their son over to the home Lesley shared with her boyfriend Ellis Lee Bentley in Bessemer, Alabama, to check on her. “The door was open and the screen door was closed,” Whitney said. “I walked in alone.”
As Whitney made her way through the house looking for her mother, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. “It just looked like a normal day and nothing was missing,” she said. “Nothing was broken. Nothing was — I mean, everything was where it was supposed to be.”
Whitney then made her way to her mother’s bedroom where she made a horrifying discovery.
“She was in the bed,” Whitney said. “Someone came in and shot her in the — in the face.”
Jimmie Guyton is Lesley’s mother and was living in Florida when her daughter was murdered. However, she happened to be driving through Alabama a few days prior to that. “I just decided to stop by her work,” she told Dateline. “We had a good conversation. She told me that she loved me and I told her I loved her.”
Jimmie describes her daughter as a curious, talented, joyous young woman. “Lesley was real funny and outgoing,” she said. “People from her work used to compliment her on how sweet she was and how understanding.”
Jimmie remembers her daughter’s life as vibrant, reminiscing on her childhood as a cheerleader, gymnast, and an academically gifted student. “She was in a special class at school for kids who were smart and they give them extra work,” she told said. “She was a delightful little girl. She hardly ever cried — she just had that old spirit.”
Whitney Burr says her mom “doing really, really well” when her life was cut short — and said that their mother-daughter bond was strong. “We were very close,” she said. “She was very much my best friend.”
Around 2012 or 2013, Lesley started dating Ellis Lee Bentley, who goes by Lee. Lee says he and Lesley met because Whitney was friends with his daughter. “I liked her, you know, right off the bat,” he said, joking that Lesley “wouldn’t go out with him” the first few times he asked. “I asked her out ‘about every day and, uh — [she] finally did. And from the day we started dating, we didn’t really leave each other’s side.”
Lesley was an infectiously cheerful person, according to Lee. It was of the many qualities that made him fall for her. “You’d be in a bad mood and she’d come around and, I mean — you’d be in a good mood,” he told Dateline. “She was always happy. Never — I never really seen her down.”
Lee says he and Lesley moved into their home in Bessemer about six months after they started dating.
On the night of November 9, 2014, Lee remembers Lesley saying she was going to buy supplies the next day for her grandson’s first birthday party. “I remember her being real happy about that,” he said. “That was a big, big deal.” Lee told Dateline he left for work the next morning while Lesley was still sleeping. “I didn’t wake her or nothing when I left. I mean, I’m sure I gave her a kiss, you know what I’m talking about? Like I did every morning.” He remembers leaving the house around 8:00 a.m. “I was running late,” he said. “I ran out the door and I didn’t lock the door. I — I always lock the door.”
What Whitney saw later that day has haunted her for a decade. “A lot of the time, the only thing I can see is her in that manner — when I found her in the bed with a hole in her face,” she said. Whitney, who was 18 years old at the time, says she was hysterical after finding her mother. “I tried to call the police, but I couldn’t,” she explained.
Her then-boyfriend, who had been waiting outside in the car with their son, eventually came in the house to see what was going on. “He ended up calling them for me.” He also called Lesley’s stepfather, Robert Guyton. “He took the phone and explained to [him] what happened, because I couldn’t,” Whitney said.
It was up to Robert to tell Jimmie her daughter was dead. “Bob picked me up from work and we went down the street to my friend’s house and he told me that she was gone — that Lesley was gone,” Jimmie remembered. “I said, ‘What do you mean, gone? Where’d she go?’ And then he finally said, you know, that she had been murdered.”
The kind of heartbreak of losing a child, Jimmie told Dateline, cannot be put into words. When she heard the news, part of her brain wouldn’t let her believe it. “Of course, that was horrible,” she said. “I loved her more than anything, and I just couldn’t feature not having her.”
For the past decade, Lesley’s family has tried to think of anyone who could have wanted to harm her. “She had a lot of friends,” Jimmie said. “But nobody that we knew that meant her any kind of harm.” Whitney agrees. “There was nobody that crossed my mind,” she said. “Everybody loved her.”
Whitney also shared a detail about the way in which she found her mother’s body she still wonders about today. “The odd part was that her pants were pulled down,” she said. “She was definitely asleep, because my mother slept with her hands together. And that’s how — that’s how I found her.”
Lee Bentley told Dateline the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office questioned him several times in the months following Lesley’s murder. “I was telling them anything I knew,” he said. “We didn’t have nobody that would ever do nothing like this to us, you know? And it wasn’t a bad neighborhood.”
Lee says the only thing taken from the house was a small lockbox that belonged to him. “That’s all they took,” he said. “I used to keep money in it. And that’s the only thing I can kinda figures that would be why they would just take that one thing.”
Jimmie and Whitney both told Dateline about a house near Lesley and Lee’s home in Bessemer that had been burglarized on the same day Lesley was murdered.
Dateline reached out to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office public information office multiple times for comment on the case but has not heard back. In 2017, Sergeant Wayne Curry of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office told a local TV station he believes the burglary, in which he said a gun was among the items stolen, and Lesley’s murder are connected. However, “we haven’t ruled out anything,” he said. “We haven’t ruled out any reason because we just don’t know.”
Lee Bentley says the aftermath of Lesley’s murder left him feeling lost. He kept living in their home for a short period until he “couldn’t stay there” anymore. He says he now chooses to reflect not on Lesley’s death, but on the happy memories he has, like their first date. “We talked till daylight,” he said. “I miss her every day.”
He also longs for the day Lesley’s case is solved. “For a while, it consumed me,” he said. “I wanna know who did it so bad. I wanna know who come in my house and just violated — I mean, yes, I would love this case to be solved. Anything in my power I would do for this case to be solved.”
Whitney Burr, now the mother of five, realizes the pain of losing her own mother — and finding her in the way that she did — is something from which she may never fully heal. “It was really, really hard,” she said. “It still is. I can’t say it, you know — it’s been 10 years, but it’s just as hard as it was day one.”
Jimmie Guyton takes comfort knowing that whoever killed her daughter will be brought to justice. “I would like to see them punished,” she said. “But I — I don’t have to see it to know that they will be. Because down the line, when they have to stand before God, He knows what they did. And He’ll deal with it. “
Anyone with information about Lesley Woodman’s murder should contact the Bessemer office of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office at (205) 481-4201.
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