Myrtle Beach man gets life for murder of Penni Whiteside found buried under fire pit

Posted Thursday, October 29, 2026 5:33 pm

David Hucks (via MyrtleBeachSC)

Oct 29, 2026 · @ https://x.com/myrtlebeachnews

CONWAY — Sheridan Dirk Fogle will die in a South Carolina prison. On Thursday afternoon, a Horry County jury convicted the 56-year-old Orangeburg man of murdering his longtime girlfriend, Penni Whiteside, whose body sat folded inside a wooden chest beneath a backyard fire pit off 1st Avenue South for more than two years. Circuit Judge G.D. Morgan Jr. then sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The sentence sits at the very top of the range Fogle faced. A murder conviction in South Carolina carries 30 years to life.

After the verdict, Whiteside’s son, Hunter Smith, said he had spent more than four years trying to make sense of his mother’s death. He said he was glad the case had finally reached an end and hoped the verdict would let him move forward.

The four-day trial in Conway was never really about who killed Penni Whiteside. Fogle had already admitted that to police. The question for jurors was why, and whether a man who hid a body for two years and started a new life across the state could credibly claim he was only defending himself. Jurors rejected that claim. How the case got there says a lot about how it was solved and about what came before.

A neighbor’s hunch cracked the case

The case broke because people who lived next door kept paying attention, not because of a forensic breakthrough.

Whiteside’s brother reported her missing to Myrtle Beach police on May 11, 2022. He told officers that neither he nor anyone else in the family had heard from her since January of that year [CrimeOnline, 2024]. The last time he saw her in person was Jan. 3, 2022, at her apartment in the 600 block of 1st Avenue South.

The property is an old house split into five apartments. The unit Whiteside and Fogle shared sat behind the other four, closest to a backyard that rarely got used, according to neighbor Susan Barnes’s trial testimony. Barnes testified that when she asked Fogle where Whiteside had gone, he said she climbed into a man’s car and drove off. Barnes later photographed the backyard and captured a new pile of wood and a shovel with a scrap of a blouse on it. Those photos went into evidence.

Other neighbors told police that Fogle had talked about burying “something” in the yard. They said he got “territorial” whenever anyone came near the fire pi. Fifteenth Circuit Solicitor Jimmy Richardson described the tip as more hunch than certainty. The witness didn’t know exactly where Whiteside was, he said, only that if she was on the property she was under that fire pit.

The hunch was right. On June 12, 2024, investigators excavated the fire pit under a search warrant. A Myrtle Beach crime scene investigator testified that the soil was so loose her foot broke through the lid of the buried wooden box. Investigators identified the partially decomposed remains at the scene by a tattoo matching Penni Whiteside’s. Prosecutors told jurors the box was Whiteside’s own hope chest, built by her grandfather.

For Horry County residents, the takeaway is plain. The missing-person case sat unresolved for two years. What finally moved it was neighbors’ observations, which became the basis for a search warrant.

Two years of cover stories

While Penni Whiteside lay buried a few yards from her own door, Fogle spent two years telling police she had simply left him.

Police interviewed him twice while the case was still a missing-person investigation. He wasn’t considered a suspect then and wasn’t read his rights, according to the officers who testified [WMBF News, 2026]. In a June 2022 interview, Fogle said he last saw Penni Whiteside on April 19, 2022. He said she showed up with a man he first took for her brother, driving a red Ford SUV. He said he had messaged her on three Facebook profiles, and he pointed officers to old diaries and a Facebook post about faking her death and moving to Mexico.

In a December 2022 interview, he showed officers a May 13 text he had sent Whiteside saying police were looking for her and that he was worried. Prosecutors put a different date on her death. They believe she died sometime between March 16 and April 7, 2022, weeks before the April sighting Fogle described [WMBF News, 2026].

The story had holes that people close to Whiteside noticed early. Fogle claimed she had left her dog behind. Her brother testified that his sister would never leave her dog with anyone. The apartment’s lease was also in Whiteside’s name, not Fogle’s. Prosecutors said he was listed only as an “occupant” [WMBF News, 2026].

After his arrest, Fogle’s account changed. In a later interview at the Myrtle Beach jail, he told officers for the first time that Whiteside had come at him with a knife. He said he grabbed her by the throat and panicked when she fell. He also said he got high, put her body in the box, and kept it in the apartment for about two days. He admitted that messages he sent her weeks later were part of a cover-up.

On the stand, prosecutor Nancy Livesay got Fogle to concede that his claim about Whiteside coming back for her belongings was false. She pointed out that in the two years the body stayed buried, Fogle remarried, moved to Orangeburg and started over. Fogle agreed.

Self-defense versus the evidence

The defense asked jurors to believe that Fogle killed Whiteside to protect himself. The evidence gave them little reason to.

Defense attorney Elizabeth Tilley told the jury in her opening that the couple had a “toxic” history and that Fogle’s own statement to police described self-defense [The Sun News, 2026]. She argued that every citizen has a right to defend himself and that the state had not dealt with that claim.

Assistant Solicitor Jonathan Rogers answered that Fogle had told police he strangled Whiteside, put her in the hope chest and buried it. Rogers called strangulation an intentional and malicious way to kill someone [The Sun News, 2026].

Fogle was the only defense witness. He described the two of them as each other’s “twin” and said they split up once or twice a year over a relationship of more than five years. He repeated that Whiteside attacked him with a knife, but said he “blacked out” while she died. He also admitted he kept using drugs afterward, including while he put her body in the box.

The physical evidence pointed the other way. Dr. Susan Presnell, a forensic pathologist with MUSC in Charleston, ruled the death a homicide. She relied in part on the suspicious way the body had been hidden. Presnell testified that Whiteside was found face down with an arm twisted beneath her, her body folded in half to fit inside the chest. Sgt. Laken Bull, who sat in on a jail interview, testified that he didn’t believe Whiteside ever had a knife and that Fogle “snapped.” On cross-examination, Fogle agreed with the officer’s word.

The defense’s argument had a basic weakness. A self-defense claim asks jurors to trust the defendant’s account of a moment no one else saw. Fogle’s account came only after two years of concealment, after the body was found, after his arrest, and with a self-reported blackout at the key moment. Livesay also noted that the only time Fogle cried during four recorded interviews was after he was in custody in Myrtle Beach [WMBF News, 2026]. That left jurors to weigh whether his remorse was for Whiteside or for himself.

The warning signs, and a delayed day in court

The record shows Whiteside’s danger was documented before she disappeared, and her family’s wait for a verdict ran longer than it had to.

Fogle’s arrest warrant described a history of domestic violence between him and Whiteside [WBTW, 2024]. The Sun News reported that police went to the couple’s apartment in November 2021 after Fogle allegedly punched Whiteside in the chest and knocked her down. About a month later, he reportedly took her credit and debit cards [The Sun News, 2024, as cited by HubPages]. Fogle pleaded no contest to a domestic violence charge in early 2022, and Whiteside was the victim. Judge Morgan let prosecutors bring up that conviction at trial. The couple had been together since 2016, got engaged, and broke up in the fall of 2021 [The Sun News, 2026]. Prosecutors believe she was dead within months [WMBF News, 2026].

Put together, the sequence is stark: a documented assault, a breakup, and then a woman who stops answering her family. It raises a question local agencies should be able to answer. When a woman with a recent domestic violence case against her partner is reported missing, and that partner is still living in her apartment, how quickly does he become a focus of the investigation? Here, officers interviewed Fogle twice in 2022 without treating him as a suspect.

The trial itself was also delayed. It was set to begin July 27, 2026, but Tilley asked for more time after a fire damaged her home the week before [The Post and Courier, 2026]. Judge Benjamin Culbertson granted the continuance. He noted from the bench that the South Carolina Supreme Court had once reversed him for refusing a defense request for more time.

Richardson used the delay to raise a broader concern. He said last-minute continuances have become a growing problem in Horry County courts and that they waste weeks of prosecutors’ preparation and state money spent bringing in witnesses. Whiteside’s family declined to comment at the time. This week, they finally got their verdict.

What’s next

The sentence is final at the trial level, but a few threads are worth watching.

A possible appeal. The defense created at least two issues it could take to a higher court. Before trial, Tilley tried to throw out the search warrant that led to the body, arguing it violated Fogle’s Fourth Amendment privacy rights. Judge Morgan refused. On the final day, she asked for a mistrial over redacted material mentioned in the prosecution’s closing. Morgan denied that too, saying he could tell jurors to disregard it. As of Thursday evening, early reports did not say whether Fogle plans to appeal.
The kidnapping count. Fogle was charged with both kidnapping and murder [The Post and Courier, 2026]. Early verdict reports focus on the murder conviction. We are working to confirm how the kidnapping charge was resolved.
Questions for local agencies. We plan to ask the Myrtle Beach Police Department how missing-person reports involving a known domestic violence history are triaged. We will also ask the 15th Circuit Solicitor’s Office for data on the continuance trend Richardson described.

If you or someone you know is in an abusive relationship, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-7233.