A 19-year-old North Carolina woman was found bound, stabbed and dead inside her own apartment, the brutal endpoint, investigators allege, of months of systematic torture inflicted by the man she called her boyfriend.

Isabella Mary Alexandria Stroupe had turned 19 just months before officers arrived at her east Charlotte home in the early hours of 1 May 2026. She was pronounced dead at the scene at the apartment on Yateswood Drive. What followed, laid out in chilling detail across court affidavits, painted a picture not of sudden violence, but of prolonged, calculated cruelty carried out behind a closed door.

At around 3.35 a.m. on 1 May 2026, officers from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department's (CMPD) Hickory Grove Division were dispatched to a QuikTrip petrol station on Albemarle Road, after a call from Thomaz Kenon Hamilton, 24, who told dispatch that his girlfriend had stopped breathing.

When officers and medics arrived at the apartment, they found Stroupe dead. She was wearing minimal clothing and was bound with a tow strap, according to the affidavit. The scene was not consistent with a natural death.

Crime scene detectives searched the residence and recovered a knife wrapped in cellophane with suspected blood on it, a baseball bat, a sword, multiple broken mobile phones, blood-stained clothing and a mattress soaked with what appeared to be blood. The apartment, investigators said, told its own story.

Beautiful girl, that looks like my niece, is savagely raped and murdered in Charlotte, NC. A hotbed of bestial crime.Thomaz Hamilton, 24, charged with 1st deg murder & 1st deg rape of Isabella Mary Alexander Stroupe, 19. Two other Black males charged with lesser crimes.pic.twitter.com/Jr2QXTbceX

Hamilton gave detectives a voluntary interview. He told homicide investigators that he was in a dating relationship with Stroupe and lived with her. He claimed that during the incident, he was having sexual intercourse with her when she suddenly appeared to suffer a heart attack. He insisted no one else was in the apartment.

Investigators were not persuaded. On 4 May, detectives were contacted by the Mecklenburg County Medical Examiner's Office, which advised that Stroupe's cause of death was homicide, and that she had sustained multiple injuries including broken and fractured bones and stab wounds.

The affidavit's language was explicit about the scale of what Stroupe had endured. It stated that 'Stroupe was being tortured over a period of several months and that Stroupe would have been physically unable to provide consent for vaginal sexual intercourse.' That determination effectively dismantled Hamilton's account entirely.

The following day, the CMPD's Violent Criminal Apprehension Team (VCAT) located Hamilton, and he was taken in for an interview with detectives. He was formally charged on 5 May 2026.

Source: International Business Times UK