A serial killer took 4 women’s lives in SC, NC, but they’re not forgotten. Here are their stories

Edna Suttles was Greenville County’s first female bail bondsman and once owned a restaurant she burned down when she couldn’t get a liquor license. She loved to dance.

Leigh Goodman was a mother to four daughters who, despite three failed marriages, raised them and put herself through college to become an occupational therapist.

Nancy Rego, a call center agent for Eastern Airlines, was meticulous about her appearance and later became a massage therapist. She loved to laugh.

All three were so vivacious, friends and family say everyone looked when they walked into a room.

And all three were murdered by serial killer Daniel Printz, a handyman who charmed his way into their lives, meeting them through dating sites and happenstance. He also killed Nancy Rego’s 88-year-old mother.

Printz negotiated a plea deal with federal prosecutors and was sentenced to life in prison in Suttles’ death only, but he admitted to playing a role in the deaths of the other women.

The court hearing last month served as the end of a years-long mystery for the families, who now are left to remember the light they brought and wonder why this happened to them.

Here are their stories.

Dolores Sellers

Sellers was Printz’s first murder, as far as police and court officials know, but not his first crime. He had a few petty run-ins; bad check, concealed weapon, false title. Then, in 1996, he picked up a 25-year-old woman walking home in Waterford, Michigan about 35 miles northwest of Detroit.

Printz, then 34, lived farther north in Lake Orion. He knocked her out then bound her wrists with duct tape, her ankles with shackles and got her into his 2-year old Oldsmobile SUV, police records show. At some point, she awoke and moved to pick up a flashlight.

He screamed he would kill her, but she found an Allen wrench and stabbed him repeatedly. Printz threw her out of the car and sped off. He was found, arrested and convicted of kidnapping, sentenced to 13 years in prison. He was released from prison in 2009 and from parole in 2011.

He moved to Gaston County, North Carolina and posted an ad offering handyman services. Nancy Rego, who was married at the time, answered. Sometime later, Rego and Printz, who was also married, began a relationship.

Nancy introduced Printz to her mother Dolores Sellers, who was recovering from an ankle injury. At 88, she was still spry. She had lived through the Great Depression and was considered the matriarch of the family. Well loved, was how people remembered her.

She had a son and a daughter.

Justin Holloway, assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of South Carolina, said “she was beautiful, she loved to sing and reminded family and friends of Elizabeth Taylor.”

Nancy’s long-time friend Rebecca Peeler had met Mrs. Sellers on occasion, but her abiding memory was of just how much Nancy adored her mother.

Sellers had been retired for 30 years by then from a Charlotte property management company, where she was general manager. When she died in November 2017, some thought it odd — she seemed in good health other than her injury — but she was nearly 90. No autopsy was done.

Nancy Rego

Peeler and Rego met when they both went to work for Eastern Airlines and spent six weeks in training in Miami to work in a call center. They became the best of friends some years later after Eastern went out of business and they were working for a computer company in Baltimore.

“We gravitated toward each other,” Peeler said. “She was so funny. She loved life. There was a joy about her.”

They had a group of women, all single, who partied together. They went to the steeplechase races in northern Virginia. Once, they donned expensive-looking clothes, rented a Jaguar and put out quite a spread of food and champagne.

“It was a perfectly delightful dress-up day for me,” Peeler recalled. Normal dress for her friend.

They went to a friend’s Kill Devil Hills beach house for girls’ weekends. Nancy was so proficient as a shag dancer, the others said they needed to give up their Southern girl signs.

Then men and jobs sent them to different places. Rego married. Peeler went to Charlotte to care for her father. Then married and adopted five children.

They drifted apart.

Peeler heard later that after Mrs. Sellers died, Rego, 66, and by then owner of her own successful massage therapist business, told people she decided to go “off the grid” with this man named Printz. Costa Rica, a ranch in Texas. Somewhere far, somewhere different.

Every now and then, family members got texts from Rego, but something just seemed off. They didn’t quite sound like her. One year passed to another and Nancy did not come back.

Leigh Goodman

Michelle Goodman describes her mother as “very strong, very smart.”

“She could juggle a lot of things at once,” Michelle said, further describing her mother’s life as complex.

Leigh Goodman married as a teenager and was just 19 when Michelle was born. They lived in Sarasota, Florida. Michelle was 4 years old when her parents divorced and she went to live with her soldier father in his new assignment in Germany.

That would continue to be the story of her life with her mother — 12 when she went back to live with her mother, back with her dad. Her mother remarried and divorced again. Now she had two toddlers and was on welfare, but she plunged in and earned a degree in occupational therapy from State University of New York at Buffalo.

Leigh moved back to Florida, worked with kids in juvenile detention, married again for a short while and had a fourth daughter.

“Mom always believed that human beings were complex and there was no such things as monsters,” Michelle said. “People are damaged by their circumstances.”

They had great talks about philosophy and psychology. What motivated people to do the things they did. Relationships.

They listened to Fleetwood Mac and Michelle believed every Stevie Nix song was about her mom.

Leigh reconnected with Michelle’s dad, Mike, and they spent a happy five or so years together in Arizona, where Michelle now lives.

Then Leigh was gone.

The cause of her frenetic choices became known. She was diagnosed with two disorders — bipolar (high and low mood swings) and schizoaffective (hallucinations or delusions, and mood disorder symptoms, such as depression or mania.)

She had a breakdown. She’d be homeless for a while, then show up. Or she’d call. Leigh always managed to keep her cell phone.

It became commonplace for Michelle to look out her window and there, unexpectedly, stood her mother. The last time was in 2017 when Michelle was living in Sarasota.

“I hugged her for a long time and said please be careful,” Michelle said.

She was always traveling, her sister Marlene Colbath said. She’d send a text from Cape Cod, Sarasota, places in California. Sometimes, it would be a photo of a road sign to show her location. Leigh was there for her mother’s 80th birthday in Sarasota and in Oregon, where Colbath lives, just before her own 60th.

That was the last time Colbath saw her sister.

Leigh was at a rest stop hitchhiking in North Carolina when a handsome man with blue eyes showed up. She wanted to go to Atlanta because she feared hurricanes and Florence was brewing in the Atlantic.

Her cell phone was powered off on Sept. 11, 2018 and on again a few days later. Leigh was seen with Printz in a North Carolina restaurant about that time. Every now and then MIchelle or her sisters would get a text from their mom’s phone. But she never showed up again.

Edna Suttles

Suttles was known as fun, flamboyant and iron-willed. She was a bail bondsman, restaurateur, sitter to the elderly from the time she was 25 years old. At 80, she was still going to honky tonks and dancing til close.

She met Printz around the same time he was involved with Rego and Goodman, Holloway said.

One day in 2021, the person Edna was sitting with called the Sheriff’s Office to say Edna had not shown up. Highly unusual. The beginning of the unraveling of Daniel Printz’s secret life.

The Greenville County Sheriff’s Office, the FBI, law enforcement in western North Carolina soon were on the case. They were looking for Suttles and in so doing they discovered Sellers, Rego and Goodman. It wasn’t until Printz was arrested in 2021 that people learned the truth. Or at least what he wanted them to believe was the truth.

Holloway described Printz as intelligent and confident.

Printz had some of the victims’ items — debit cards, medications, jewelry — stashed on his property. He had been taking their Social Security payments for years.

He talked in vague terms to agents, saying he wanted to “disclose his sins.” Helped someone kill a relative. Was around when someone else was killed. Someone tried to rob him and he had to kill them. “Hypothetically” helped someone kill someone.

As best law enforcement can tell, Printz administered a lethal dose of medication to Sellers in November 2017. He shot Rego in the chest in January 2018. He met Goodman in September 2018 and killed her within days.

Printz kidnapped Suttles from her Travelers Rest home in August 2021, sedated her with prescription medications, suffocated her with a plastic bag at his North Carolina home, and buried her body on a nearby farm, Holloway said.

Her body has been recovered. The bodies of the other two women never will be. Printz erased them with chemicals and a barrel, family members said.

But they are not gone. Their hardy spirits live on. Their joy in life. No one can take that away from their families and friends.

At long last, Rego will be honored in a service at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Matthews, North Carolina, at 3:30 p.m. July 18.

“Being a victim is not her legacy,” Peeler said.

Colbath hopes her family can get together on Lido Beach in Florida in February for some sort of service.

Goodman said Printz thought her mother was a nobody, but when three of her daughters showed up at Printz’s sentencing, they proved otherwise.

“She was strong. She didn’t compromise,” Goodman said. “I loved that about her.”