Prosecutors said surveillance video, blood evidence and later admissions tied Bornold Alastair Eberhart to the death of Kristen Laymon during a 2023 trip to North Myrtle Beach.
CONWAY, S.C. — After a North Myrtle Beach vacation went fatally awry, a Georgia man has been sentenced to 30 years in prison after pleading guilty in the killing of his girlfriend, whose body prosecutors said he hid on a hotel luggage cart and loaded into a car trunk in September 2023.
The plea brought an end to a case that stretched across two states and more than two years. Bornold Alastair Eberhart, 44, admitted responsibility for the death of Kristen Laymon, 53, after investigators in South Carolina and Georgia used hotel surveillance, text records, blood evidence and later statements from Eberhart to reconstruct what happened. The case had drawn attention because Laymon vanished after the couple checked into a beachfront hotel, and her remains were not recovered until months later in Georgia.
Prosecutors said Eberhart and Laymon traveled from Decatur, Georgia, to North Myrtle Beach on Sept. 22, 2023, and checked into the Wyndham Hotel. They went out that night and came back shortly before 2 a.m. on Sept. 23. Surveillance footage showed the couple arguing in or near their vehicle after they returned, and prosecutors said Laymon opened a car door while the vehicle was still moving before getting out and taking an elevator to the room. About 10 minutes later, Eberhart went up to the room. “This is the last time Laymon is seen alive,” prosecutors said in a summary of the case. The next day, Sept. 24, cameras captured Eberhart moving a luggage cart carrying what authorities later said was Laymon’s body, concealed and wrapped, through the hotel and toward a vehicle in the parking area.
Investigators said the video did not stand alone. Prosecutors said Eberhart was then seen lifting Laymon’s body, wrapped in a sheet, into the trunk. Blood later found in that trunk tested positive for Laymon, according to the case summary released after the plea. Authorities also said Eberhart sent text messages to Laymon after she was already dead, an attempt they described as a cover story meant to make it look as though the two had separated and that he did not know where she was. In those messages, prosecutors said, Eberhart claimed he needed his ride back to Georgia and suggested she had taken the vehicle. Officials have not publicly laid out a minute by minute account of how Laymon was killed inside the hotel room, and earlier reporting in the case noted that the condition of her remains limited what forensic examiners could determine with precision.
The investigation widened well beyond the South Carolina hotel. Police said Eberhart drove back to DeKalb County, Georgia, with Laymon’s body in the vehicle and disposed of her remains there. It took about six months before authorities recovered a body believed to be Laymon on March 9, 2024, after Eberhart eventually admitted killing her and showed investigators where she had been left, according to prosecutors and local reporting from the time. Before that recovery, the case had unfolded as a missing person investigation tied to a vacation that ended without Laymon returning home. Detectives in North Myrtle Beach worked with Georgia agencies to trace the couple’s movements, compare phone and travel records and connect the hotel footage to evidence collected later. The cross state work became central to the prosecution because the killing took place in South Carolina, while the disposal of the body happened in Georgia.
By the time Eberhart entered his plea in February 2026, the case was nearing trial. Prosecutors said he pleaded guilty about a month before jury selection had been expected to begin. He received a 30 year sentence after the plea. Public reports on the case described the plea as one that allowed the court to proceed to sentencing without a full trial on the evidence. The guilty plea meant prosecutors did not have to call hotel employees, detectives, lab witnesses and others to walk jurors through the video timeline and forensic testing. It also spared Laymon’s family a longer public airing of the evidence. Still, the sentence closed only part of the story. Authorities have released a broad outline of the case, but not every detail about the fatal encounter in the room, and there has been no public indication of additional charges beyond the murder count that ended with the prison term.
After the sentencing, Assistant Solicitor Anthony DiChiara said investigators “went to great lengths” to unravel the coverup and credited North Myrtle Beach police and Georgia agencies with pushing the case forward. He said law enforcement left “no stone unturned” in bringing Eberhart to justice. That language reflected the unusual shape of the evidence in the case: no immediate body recovery, a delay of months before remains were found and a prosecution built in large part from surveillance, digital records and later admissions. Laymon’s death also left a personal loss that surfaced in public tributes. Her obituary said she left behind a daughter and described her as someone whose life was marked by laughter, kindness and tenacity. Those details stood in sharp contrast to the grainy surveillance images that came to define the public record of her final hours.
The setting of the crime added to the case’s attention. North Myrtle Beach is known as a vacation city, and prosecutors said the couple had gone there for a getaway before the trip turned deadly. The hotel footage described in court filings and news reports showed ordinary travel images that became evidence: a late night return, an elevator ride, a luggage cart, a parking garage and a trunk closing before sunrise on a coastal trip that should have ended with a drive home. For investigators, those pieces formed the spine of the case. For Laymon’s family, the long gap between her disappearance and the recovery of her remains appears to have stretched the grief over months. The plea does not answer every question about motive or the exact sequence of violence in the room, but it does settle the central criminal case over who killed her.
The case now stands closed at the trial court level unless future filings challenge some part of the conviction or sentence. Eberhart has been ordered to serve the 30 year term, and the prosecution’s account of the killing remains the most complete public record of what happened during the Sept. 22 to Sept. 24, 2023 trip.