What happens when a woman disappears, her boyfriend claims she simply walked away, and the truth remains buried in her own backyard for more than two years? This week on Pushing Up Lilies, I’m examining the heartbreaking murder of 51-year-old Penni Whiteside, who vanished from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in 2022. Investigators eventually discovered her remains inside a wooden hope chest built by her grandfather, buried beneath a backyard fire pit. Her former boyfriend, Sheridan Dirk Fogle, maintained that she had left him, but his story began to unravel as investigators uncovered disturbing evidence. As a forensic nurse and former death investigator, I’ll discuss the challenges of examining decomposed remains, how investigators distinguish cause of death from manner of death, and the importance of witness testimony, crime scene evidence, and documented domestic violence. We’ll also look at the changing statements that led to Fogle’s murder conviction and the devastating years Penni’s family spent searching for answers. Listener discretion advised. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: 00:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies. I’m your host, Julie Mattson.  00:10 Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine-tingling, unusual, and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.  00:24 Do I have some stories for you? Are you ready? Hey, guys. Julie here with Pushing Up Lilies.  00:33 So happy to be back this week, and let me tell you, I am struggling through school, and I would love to hear from those of you who are in grad school or trying to get your master’s or your bachelor’s.  00:48 I definitely know how tough it is, and I’m feeling it this week. Staying up till twelve, one in the morning trying to get homework done.  00:57 I didn’t realize in clinical that you also have a lot of homework. So that’s been something that I’ve been trying to get done and stay caught up with clinical.  01:07 So, I’m doing clinical three days a week, and then I am at the med spa three days a week. So hopefully I don’t look as disheveled as I feel. But the week’s been great.  01:19 I’ve got like four weeks of clinical left. I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Then I have a month off, and then I’ll be going for, I guess, three more months from January to March.  01:31 And then at that point, God willing, I will pass my nurse practitioner exam and actually have my degree. So, after being a nurse for thirty years, it is hard to go back to school.  01:42 It is so hard to go back to school.  01:44 And I appreciate those people who have gone straight from ADN to BSN to MSN or even DNP because when you’re young and you can remember things, it’s so much easier. It’s just difficult when you’re…  02:01 I mean, I’m fifty-eight, so it’s just harder. It’s more difficult. And the good thing is my kids are grown. I don’t know how on earth I got my nursing degree as a single mom.  02:15 I mean, my kids ask me sometimes, and I’m like, “I really don’t know.” It’s kinda one of those things you have to do it, and you just push through. So, if that’s you, you got this.  02:24 And I’m here to celebrate all nurses who love to continue their education, and I think many of you know that I’m planning an education… I guess I don’t even know what to call it.  02:34 Planning an education series for nurses and for others who are interested in forensics and want to learn more about death investigation. Anyway, welcome back to Pushing Up Lilies. I’m Julie Matson.  02:48 Today, we’re gonna head to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.  02:51 And this is a case that’s involving a missing woman and a boyfriend with a history of domestic violence and a discovery in the backyard of an apartment building more than two years after she disappeared.  03:04 So, this case recently went to trial, and the testimony actually revealed some disturbing details about what happened to fifty-one-year-old Penni Whiteside.  03:14 It just tells us how her body was concealed and how the man responsible continued living his life while her family searched for answers.  03:23 What makes this case particularly interesting to me, having worked as a forensic nurse death investigator, is the amount of information that investigators eventually obtained from the scene, the witnesses, and the suspect himself.  03:38 And there are some important forensic questions surrounding the condition of Penni’s remains and what a medical examiner is able to determine when a body has actually been buried for an extended period.  03:51 So, we’re gonna talk about all of that along with the domestic violence history, the investigation, and the testimony that ultimately led to a murder conviction.  04:00 Now, Penni Whiteside was fifty-one years old when she disappeared, and that was in the spring of twenty twenty-two.  04:07 She was originally from Virginia but made her home in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where she lived in an apartment on First Avenue South.  04:15 So, she had a son named Hunter and a brother, David Swisher, who would both become important figures in the effort to find out what happened to her.  04:24 Penni had been involved in a long-term relationship with a man named Sheridan Dirk Fogle.  04:30 And according to testimony presented during his murder trial, the two had been together since around twenty sixteen and had even been engaged at one point.  04:39 Their relationship was far from stable, though, and they reportedly separated several times over the years.  04:46 By the fall of twenty twenty-one, the relationship deteriorated, and there had been documented incidents of domestic violence, and that history would eventually become an important part of the prosecution’s case because it did establish the conflict between them that had existed long before she disappeared.  05:05 Now, the