Liza’s Last Run: Retracing The Tragic Final Hour Of The Heiress Whose Murder Rocked Memphis

MEMPHIS – Eliza Fletcher’s final run started off one week ago like so many before.

Before the 34-year-old pre-kindergarten teacher, marathon runner, and heiress to a wholesale hardware fortune stepped onto the sidewalk in front of her Memphis home in the predawn darkness of Friday, September 2, she’d pulled her hair back into a ponytail and grabbed her cellphone and a water bottle. It was 4 a.m., and most of the homes along Carr Avenue — a quiet street in the city’s Central Gardens neighborhood — were still dark. The only sounds were the rustle of leaves, gentle gusts of wind, and the low hum of distant traffic.

The woman known to friends as Liza — and as “Mrs. Fletcher” to the students she taught at the all-girls St. Mary’s Episcopal School — loved to run. Three years ago, she ran the St. Jude marathon, which doubles as a fundraising event for the local St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and placed 22nd among women.

Closing the American flag-emblazoned front door to the picturesque home she shared with her husband Richie and two sons, Fletcher, wearing purple Lululemon shorts and a pink athletic top, passed the porch swing and two shade trees in the front yard as she made her way to the sidewalk. She set off toward the University of Memphis campus, some four miles away.

The route would take her from her tree-lined and tidy street east toward the school, and it was at the intersection of Central Avenue and Zach H Curlin Street, near the university where, according to police, a 38-year-old career criminal kidnapped her.

The predawn darkness, combined with an abundance of trees and signage, offered her killer the opportunity to stalk her quickly and stealthily. Depending on which direction Eliza was running and whether or not she paused at the intersection, she may not have seen him approaching her until he pounced.

She was reported missing at around 7:45 a.m. when police received two calls, one from Richie and one from the University of Memphis.

Grainy surveillance video would show Fletcher being grabbed and shoved into a dark SUV, and the crime scene, with the water bottle, smashed cell phone, and, oddly, a pair of the suspect’s shoes, told more of the horrifying story.

Other pieces would come together over the ensuing days, as family and friends hoped and prayed Fletcher could somehow still be alive. Police arrested Cleotha Abston, who has since identified himself in court as Cleotha Henderson, the next day. His GMC Terrain had been on the surveillance video, the shoes at the scene bore his DNA, and witnesses saw him cleaning the SUV and his clothes shortly after Fletcher vanished.

Just what Fletcher endured in her final moments may never be known, and may be too awful for her loved ones to imagine. After Henderson’s arrest, and as a city on tenterhooks prayed for a miracle, the news only got grimmer. Police hauled away a dumpster near his brother’s home. The picture that emerged of Henderson, who had previously served time for kidnapping, and was described by a female neighbor as a “creepy pervert,” offered little in the way of hope.

Late Monday, police announced they had found a body decomposing in the summer heat on the front steps of a dilapidated, abandoned home in South Memphis, about eight miles from the crime scene, and near Henderson’s brother’s home. By Tuesday morning, they confirmed the city’s worst fears: It was Liza.

This is the abandoned house in South Memphis where Eliza Fletcher’s body was found. (Google Street Images)

Court documents reveal how police likely knew early on they were dealing with a murder and how they were able to quickly zero in on the suspect and the body. An affidavit alleges Henderson was captured on video cruising slowly past his quarry, then stopping to wait for her to pass. The same document describes what happened next as a “violent” struggle. Another police affidavit revealed that investigators found a trash bag containing Fletcher’s shorts less than half a mile away from where her body was found.

Henderson had been sentenced to a 24-year jail term for abducting a Memphis attorney in 2000. But he was free to cruise the desolate, early morning streets of Memphis on the day Fletcher was grabbed because he’d been let out of jail early in November 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic.

Just a few months before Henderson had been freed, Fletcher was living through her own changing circumstances brought on by the pandemic. In a video she posted to her YouTube channel, she’s seen at home during what appears to be a virtual learning session and addressing students off camera.

That video, of Fletcher holding up one