Human Wreckage True Crime

When Teenagers Become Monsters: The Stacy Hanna Tragedy

• Thomas W

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Some crimes shake the foundations of what we believe people, especially young people, are capable of. We expect violence to come from hardened criminals, from lifetimes of pain and rage. But what if it comes from girls next door? Teenagers, friends, roommates. This is Human Wreckage, and I'm Thomas. Today's story is a devastating one. It's about betrayal, about peer pressure, about the cruelty that escalated so far so fast, it cost a young woman her life. Her name was Stacy Hannah. She was 18 years old. Smart, restless, fierce. A teenager who'd seen more pain than most people twice her age. And like many who live through trauma, Stacy was looking for something better, a fresh start, maybe a little peace. But instead, she walked straight into a nightmare. In July of 1997, Stacy was living in Richmond, Virginia, sharing an apartment with other young women who, on the surface, were just like her close in age, figuring things out, trying to survive. But behind closed doors, something toxic was festering. Power dynamics, jealousy, violence, and it all came to a head in the most horrific way. The women responsible Kelly Ann Tibbs, Stephanie Cull, Tracy Bittner, and Domica Winkler weren't hardened criminals. They weren't part of a gang or a cult. They were ordinary girls. But over a span of hours, maybe even days, they became torturers, and eventually killers. Stacy was beaten, slashed, stabbed, humiliated. Prosecutors later said she suffered over fifty stab wounds. She was bound, gagged, dumped like trash in a wooded creek bed in Hanover County, left alone to die or already dead far from the city lights, far from anyone who could help her. The question we'll ask in this episode isn't just how this happened, but why? Why did three young women barely out of childhood themselves turn so violently on someone they once called a friend? What psychological threads were pulling beneath the surface, and could this tragedy have been stopped? This isn't a story about a single act of violence. It's a story about what people are capable of when anger replaces empathy, and no one steps in to say this has gone too far. This is the murder of Stacy Hanna, and this is human wreckage. Once there, Hannah got a job at a bagel shop and decided that she would stay in town. She subsequently moved into a townhouse in the 200 block of South Belmont Avenue with Kelly Ann Tibbs, 19. Tracy Bittner 19, who was Tibbs on and off girlfriend, was a frequent visitor at the shared home. Two other common guests at the home were Domica Winkler, eighteen, who lived around the corner, and Stephanie Cull, eighteen, who lived in Chester. Hannah developed a bit of an infatuation with Tibbs and one day told her that Bittner had a new girlfriend and didn't want to see her anymore. Stacy was kind of obsessed, said Vaughn. When Tibbs and spoke to Bittner about what Hannah had told her, she discovered that Hannah had been lying, presumably because she wanted to pursue a relationship with Tibbs. The group of girls decided that they teach Hannah a lesson by beating her up. However, what the attackers referred to as an ass kicking quickly escalated with the introduction of box cutters, which, ironically, had been shoplifted by Hannah just the previous day. After an evening of drinking beer on the 27th of July 1997, Tibbs, Bittner, Winkler, and Cull drove Hannah to an isolated popular drinking spot in the county off Cogville Road near the Chesterfield Airport under the pretense that they were going to a party. Once out of the car, the four shouted One, two, three, I love you, and started to kick and punch Hannah. Things took a dramatic turn for the worse when Winkler lifted up a nearby cinder block and threw it on Hannah's head, fracturing her skull. As Hannah lay cowering on the ground, a box cutter was introduced, and the women took turns in slashing and stabbing her. The woman then walked towards the car before deciding to turn back to Hannah, who by now was bruised and bloody, shoved her in the trunk of the car. They did contemplate taking her to the hospital, but decided against it. We gotta get rid of her or she's gonna rat us out, the gang cruelly decided. They drove around for half an hour, briefly stopping once so Winkler could stab Hannah while confined in the trunk because she was getting too loud before they finally stopped at a logging trail off Nash Road. At this second crime scene, all four women stood over Hannah and spat on her as Winkler stole her watch. Cull then got back into the car as the other three dragged Hannah over to a puddle of mud where they ripped her t-shirt and shorts from her, leaving her in just her underwear. As Hannah lay semi-naked in the mud, she was stabbed and slashed at least sixty five times with the box cutter. Two wounds ran fourteen inches from her shoulder to her buttocks. At one point during the attack, Hannah said that she wanted to call her mother and tell her that she loved her. The gang denied her this last wish. Bittner then cut Hannah's throat. The injury opened her windpipe, but didn't cut a major blood vessel. They then left Hannah face down in the murky water, bleeding profusely from the abundance of wounds she had sustained in the brutal attack. Ultimately, her cause of death was a combination of blood loss and drowning. Almost as soon as the group returned home, they were bragging about the brutal slaying. I cut her throat and it felt good, boasted Bittner to Dana Vaughn, the other roommate of Hannah and Tibbs. Vaughn had come along in the car, but hadn't left the car at all throughout the entire ordeal and claimed she wasn't aware of what had happened. Tibbs also bragged that as she slashed Hannah, she screamed, Give me your heart, bitch, why won't you die? The following day, Winkler, Bittner, Tibbs, and Carl were apprehended and charged with the murder of Stacy Hannah. Tibbs admitted to police that she instigated the beating of Hannah and then joined in on the attack after Winkler hit Hannah with a belt. We were all kind of feeding off each other because when Micah hit her, I was like, yeah, you know, and I kicked her. And I hit her twice. And then Tracy was like, yeah, you know, we're just going to kick her around, Tibbs told Chesterfield police detective Rick Mormando. In Winkler's statement, she told Mormando, I mean nobody deserved to die, but it was just one of those times. One of those times for what? questioned Mormando. When somebody has to die, she responded. When asked why they had killed Hannah, Winkler said that they wanted to teach her a lesson because she has a problem with trying to get everybody to turn against everybody. It was like she was telling sob stories and lies trying to fit in with everybody else. Winkler, Bittner, and Tibbs were all sentenced to life imprisonment while Cole was sentenced to just twenty years in prison. Cull received a lesser sentence because the jury found that she was the least culpable of the four and was caught up in the violence that escalated. Cole had claimed that she wasn't involved in the murder and had acted only as the driver. However, she did confess to slashing Hannah on the thigh and down her back. I did not want them to kill her, Cull said. During Tibb's sentencing phase, her eyes filled with tears as she looked towards Hannah's mother and said, I would like to say I'm extremely sorry for what I've done. It's not only your loss, it's my loss too. Outside the courtroom, Hannah's mother addressed Tibbs' apology. It's a joke, she told reporters. I don't think she's sorry at all for what she did. She could have kept her apology. It doesn't mean anything. Why is it her loss? It was her decision to take part in the murder. I'd like to tell Kelly Tibbs, have a nice life. In twenty fifteen, Stephanie Cull was released after serving eighteen years of her twenty year sentence. She earned time off with good behavior. Coincidentally, her release date was on the eighteenth anniversary of the crime. There's no way to fully explain what drove these young women to torture and kill Stacy Hanna. No amount of courtroom testimony, psychological analysis, or media coverage can give us the kind of closure we crave in stories like this. But what we do know is this Stacy was only eighteen years old. Her life was marked by instability, but not by failure. She was a young woman trying to find her way in a world that had already been unkind. She was vulnerable, yes, but also vibrant. Someone who deserved a chance at healing, at growing up, at building something better. Instead, she found herself trapped in a toxic storm of control, violence, and emotional instability. The people who should have been her friends turned on her in the most vicious, calculated way possible. Over the course of hours, maybe longer she was beaten, humiliated, and stabbed again and again. Over fifty wounds, each one an act of rage, each one a decision. And it didn't happen in isolation. It happened in a shared space. In a home where someone could have stopped it, where someone could have walked away, called for help, or said, enough. But justice doesn't bring Stacy back. It doesn't answer the deeper question. How do people cross that line? How do young women barely out of adolescence commit a murder so cold, so sustained, so personal? The truth is, human wreckage doesn't just appear overnight. It builds. It grows in silence, in neglect, in the places where trauma goes untreated and anger festers unchecked. And when that wreckage collides with the wrong environment with people who feed off power and fear the results can be catastrophic. Stacy Hannah didn't have to die, and she didn't deserve what happened to her. Let her name be a reminder. A call to speak up, step in, and notice the signs before it's too late. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Human Wreckage. We'll be back next week with another story of damage, cruelty, and the people left to pick up the pieces. Until then, take care of yourselves and each other.