The plea closed a case that began when officers searching a Rowan County property found remains behind the victim’s home.
CLEVELAND, N.C. — The guilty plea that sent Stephen Eric Buchanan to prison for decades this spring was the final chapter of a case that first stunned this Rowan County town when officers found Charles Knight’s remains in the backyard of the 72-year-old man’s own home.
That discovery, made during an Aug. 4, 2024 welfare check, drove every stage that followed: the launch of a homicide investigation, Buchanan’s arrest in South Carolina, and a March 19, 2026 plea to second-degree murder and six additional charges. The immediate stakes were both legal and deeply personal. Investigators had to determine what happened on the property, while relatives were left to reckon with a death that authorities said had been followed by efforts to conceal the body and misuse the victim’s belongings.
Police went to Knight’s Johnstone Road address after concerns about his welfare. Officers did not find a man simply out of touch. They found remains in the yard behind his house. Later reporting said part of those remains had been partially buried and that some remains were also recovered from a burn pit. The details turned the property itself into the central witness in the case. The backyard became the place where officers, forensic workers and state agents had to sort through what had happened and what had been done afterward. In a small town where homes often sit close enough for neighbors to notice unusual activity, the idea that a killing had been followed by a burial on the same lot made the case especially hard to absorb.
The concerns that brought law enforcement there did not arise in isolation. Buchanan’s brother later described a chain of events that made him suspect something was badly wrong. He said he had not seen Knight for days and grew more alarmed when Buchanan was using Knight’s car. He also said a neighbor reported a fire burning for three days and an odor that did not seem normal. When he checked the property, he told a British news outlet in 2024, he found what appeared to be human remains in the pit. Those statements were not the formal basis of the criminal case on their own, but they offered the clearest public account of how family concern and neighborhood observation converged before police formally confirmed a homicide.
Once the investigation moved forward, authorities acted quickly. Cleveland police announced in early August 2024 that Buchanan had been arrested in South Carolina on outstanding warrants. Salisbury Post later reported he was extradited to Rowan County and served with multiple new charges. By the time the case reached its resolution, Buchanan had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, concealment of death, possession of a firearm by a felon and four counts of obtaining property by false pretense. Those added counts mattered because they suggested the state had built a broader case around conduct before and after Knight’s death, not just around the killing itself. Yet because the matter ended in a plea rather than a trial, much of the evidentiary detail stayed outside public view.
The public record leaves key gaps. Neither Law&Crime’s summary of the plea nor local television coverage laid out a clear motive. The victim’s cause of death was also not fully explained in the accessible reporting that followed sentencing. That absence gives the case an unusual shape. The outcome is clear: Buchanan admitted guilt and received a sentence of 51 to 63 years. But the exact story prosecutors could have told to a jury about how Knight died, when he died and what physical evidence linked each charge together has not been publicly developed in the same way. In practical terms, the plea ended the need for a public trial, while also limiting the amount of detail released through open courtroom testimony.
Officials treated the sentence as the closing act of a long investigation. The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation said it led the homicide case with assistance from the Cleveland Police Department and the Rowan County Sheriff’s Office. After sentencing, the agency said the work of those officers had brought closure to Knight’s family. That formal statement stood in contrast to the stark physical setting at the center of the case: a home, a backyard, a burn pit and relatives trying to understand how a family dispute or private act of violence could end in a buried body on familiar ground. The small scale of the setting gave the case much of its force. It was not a broad public crime scene. It was a residential yard tied to one family.
Buchanan is now serving the sentence imposed in Rowan County Superior Court, and the case no longer appears headed for a trial. As of April 13, 2026, the public record points to sentencing as the last major milestone, with no new hearing prominently reported after the plea.
Author note: Last updated April 13, 2026.