Sonia Exelby, a 32-year-old woman from Portsmouth in the UK, was found dead in a shallow grave in Marion County, Florida. She had been stabbed and buried in the woods. Her boyfriend back home had reported her missing about a week before police found her body.
According to The Sun, Police think Exelby knew what was going to happen when she flew to Gainesville, Florida. They believe she went there knowing that 53-year-old Dwain Hall would kill her. Hall is now in jail, charged with her murder. When police questioned him, Hall said he first met Exelby online two years ago on a fetish website called motherless.com. That’s where she told him she wanted to die and was looking for someone to kill her.
Hall told police he saw himself as someone who was trying to help her and didn’t want her to take her own life. But he also said he had violent tendencies. According to reports, Hall picked Exelby up from the airport on October 10 and brought her to an Airbnb in Reddick where they spent time together.
Things were clearly not what they seemed at first
Police found a deleted video on Hall’s phone that showed Exelby looking uncertain and clearly upset while Hall asked her questions about whether he could hurt her. In the video, she looked messy and had bruises covering her body. She nodded yes to his questions. Hall asked her why she came there, and Exelby answered that it was because she was an awful person who had crushed everyone who ever loved her.
The next day after arriving, Exelby sent a message to a friend on Discord that showed she was regretting her decision. She wrote that Hall told her there was no way to leave unless she shot him. She said she had been questioning everything the night before and thought he would do it fast so she wouldn’t have time to think too much about it.
Police said this message proved that Hall was controlling her and that she was scared and knew she had made a terrible mistake.
When Exelby didn’t get on her flight back home on October 13, UK police reported her missing through Interpol to law enforcement in Florida. Her boyfriend Stevie posted on Instagram begging for help finding her.
He said he thought she had gone to meet someone and was now in a really dangerous situation. He wrote that he desperately needed her back and even their cat Meryl was missing her. In another recent relationship story, a woman shared how her boyfriend abandoned her on a Royal Caribbean cruise, leaving her stranded.
Police linked Hall to the crime by tracking charges made on Exelby’s credit cards and finding a sticker from a shovel in her grave. Hall had bought that shovel the day before he went to get her from the airport. Police later found the same shovel in his garage with Exelby’s DNA still on it. The medical examiner said she died from being stabbed four times with a knife.
Police also went to search a house in Ohio where they found a knife with blood on it that probably had Exelby’s DNA. It turns out Hall had mailed the knife to a friend who lived there. Meanwhile, Lily Allen recently made headlines for publicly humiliating her ex in a way that shocked many. Hall is sitting in Marion County Jail right now with no chance of getting out on bail. He’s facing charges for first-degree murder, kidnapping, credit card fraud, and illegally using a communication device.
Published: Nov 19, 2025 04:15 pm