20 MONTHS LATER: Attorney General confirms no court date in prosecution of ‘Final Disrespects' fmr. deputy probate judge

Yahoo

12-04-2025

MARLBORO COUNTY, S.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) – Late on a Friday afternoon in July 2023, two women charged with stealing from a dead man hours after his death walked out of the Marlboro County Detention Center.
The S.C. Law Enforcement Division, also known as SLED, called Tammy Bullock and Charlotte Green to the jail to surrender to felony theft charges. SLED agents had one warrant each for grand larceny against the pair.
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SLED charged Bullock and Green with stealing a pistol, $2,203 in cash, and cigarettes from Hollis Slade's pickup truck. Green was captured on camera admitting to taking cigarettes from Slade's truck. 'Oh, me and Tammy got four packs of cigarettes out of it; figured he didn't need them no more,' Green said in one of the recordings.
Slade, who died several hours before, had installed multiple security cameras around his home. Slade's family told Queen City News Chief Investigative Reporter Jody Barr he purchased the cameras to cover the inside and outside of his home to help him keep watch over his wife, Joyce, who suffers from dementia. If Slade had to leave her to run errands, he the motion-activated cameras would alert his cell phone.
Slade also paid an in-home caretaker to sit with his wife if he had to leave home for a longer span of time.
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The recordings the Slade family provided to QCN show Joyce was inside the home when her husband started complaining of stomach pains in January 2021 and was there when EMS picked him up for the ambulance ride to the hospital.
Hollis Slade died an hour or so later at the hospital.
The Slade family learned of the death soon after when the cameras captured a truck pulling into the driveway, and several people got out. The group, which included Green and then-Deputy Probate Judge Tammy Bullock, started going inside Slade's home and searching his property and pick-up truck. One of the men in the group contacted Beth Slade-Boling, Hollis Slade's sister in Indiana, to tell her of her brother's death.
Those recordings later showed some of the group carrying property out of Slade's home before his sister arrived from Indiana and included video of Bullock telling someone in a phone call they were 'rummaging' thoughout the home hunting for a will.
The caretaker, Linda Hood, would later tell Slade's family about a bag of cash and a pistol she collected and hid in Joyce's dresser. Hood said that a pistol and cash were stolen. Slade's sister reported the theft and what they found in the recordings during a face-to-face meeting with then-Marlboro County Sheriff Charles Lemon.
Beth Slade-Boling told QCN she never heard from the sheriff again.
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The family spent months in back-and-forth conversations with SLED agents, supplying the agents with video recordings, Slade's bank statements, property inventories, and anything else the family thought was stolen from the home before they arrived the following day.
It took 30 months following Hollis Slade's death before state law enforcers filed a charge in the case. On July 28, 2023, with no public notice, a SLED agent with the last name 'Hernandez' drove to Marlboro County and served both women, each with a single count of felony theft.
Beth Slade-Boling told Barr that even though she was a victim, reported the theft to SLED, and provided all the evidence used to charge the women, the agency never informed the family of the arrest or gave them the opportunity to attend the bond hearings.
We also had no idea the bond hearing happened on July 28. In fact, neither SLED nor the S.C. Attorney General's Office told anyone about the arrests, despite the incredible public interest in the two years of news reporting prior to the arrests.
It would take SLED another three days to publicly acknowledge the arrests and to provide information to the public through a press release.
SLED-CHARGES-TWO-MARLBORO-COUNTY-WOMEN-WITH-GRAND-LARCENYDownload
Barr placed calls to both Bullock and Green as soon as a tip came in that both had been arrested in the 'Final Disrespects' news investigation. 'Go f–k yourself, man,' Green told Barr in the July 28 call. Green hung up before we could ask the name of the attorney representing her.
Bullock never responded to our outreach.
The charges remained pending against both women until July 2024, when Barr was conducting a monthly check-in on the state's online court docket and noticed the theft charge against Charlotte Green had disappeared. In an email exchange with S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson's press secretary, Robert Kittle, we tried to find out what happened.
Kittle, in a July 15, 2024, email response, confirmed, 'The theft charges against Charlotte Green have been disposed of. I can't comment any further on that.'
The following week, Barr went to the Marlboro County Courthouse to pull Green's case file. Nothing in the file showed a dismissal. Barr asked the AG's office why it believed the charge was dismissed. Kittle never responded with an explanation.
'Charlotte Green's case is still pending, and it says so on the public index, according to our attorney,' Kittle responded to Barr in a July 23 email.
Green's case was never dismissed, despite what the AG's office told QCN, according to court records Barr reviewed in person. That dismissal didn't happen until Oct. 17, 2024.
When Barr went back to the Marlboro County Courthouse in November 2024, to review the Bullock/Green case file, the only indication of a dismissal was the word 'Dismiss' scribbled on the July 2023 arrest warrant, along with '10/17/24' and an illegible signature that appeared to be that of Assistant Attorney General Joel Kozak.
There was no other document in the Charlotte Green case file indicating a formal dismissal of the charge.
A search of the Public Index for Charlotte Green's name today shows no sign of the July 2023 case, and when Barr requested the court file earlier this year from the clerk's office, he was informed it no longer exists. The AG's office will not explain what happened to the Green prosecution and why the AG dismissed her charge.
The felony theft case against Tammy Bullock is still pending. Bullock faces an AG prosecution over both the Hollis Slade theft case as well as a gun charge from a few days following Slade's death in an unrelated incident.
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Bennettsville Police Department investigators charged Bullock with pointing and presenting a firearm in February 2021. Bullock's roommate, Shanda Nash, told Barr that the pair were arguing in the home they rented together one morning when Bullock stood over her, pointed a gun at her head, and threatened to kill her.
'And she had the gun right to my face and was like, 'I'll f—ing shoot you, Shanda,' Nash said during an interview at her Bennettsville home on August 31, 2021. By the time we got in touch with Shanda Nash on August 25, more than six months had passed since she said Deputy Probate Judge Tammy Bullock stuck a pistol in her face and threatened to kill her.
The women became roommates around October 2020, according to Nash, but Bullock had once lived in the home with an ex-boyfriend. When that relationship ended, Bullock rented half the home to Nash and Nash's 17-year-old daughter, she said.
The argument that morning started over Nash's daughter after she said Bullock went into her daughter's bedroom to 'get onto her' about not having a job.
Marlboro County court records show that in December 2021, Bullock asked for a venue change and for the court to dismiss the gun charge against her. A court date was never set to hear either of Bullock's motions.
Bullock's weapons charge prosecution was set for trial on the Jan. 6, 2025, Marlboro County trial docket, but neither Kittle nor the victim, Shanda Nash, knew anything about the trial when Barr contacted both in late December.
Nash said the Attorney General's Victims Advocate office never informed her of the trial date or any sort of status on the case since it happened.
In an email response on Jan. 3, 2025, Kittle wrote that Bullock's trial was not happening.
Nash told Barr she called the Attorney General's Office on Jan. 3, asking about the trial and why she was never informed of it. Nash said the office told her Bullock was set to take a plea deal in the case.
'System sucks,' Nash told Barr on Jan. 4.
The S.C. Attorney General's Office agreed to prosecute the felony gun charge against Bullock, along with the felony theft involving the Hollis Slade estate. It took three and a half years from the gun incident until Bullock was indicted on the charge in August 2024.
A review of Bullock's case file at the Marlboro County Courthouse earlier this year does not show AG Alan Wilson has attempted to indict Bullock on the felony theft charge involving the Hollis Slade estate.
Both of Bullock's charges remain pending, and no court date has been set, AG press secretary Robert Kittle confirmed to Barr on Friday, April 11, 2025.
Queen City News will continue to update our 'Final Disrespects' investigation as developments happen.
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