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When Eva Benefield’s uncle Dave called with “some really bad news,” she thought of one person.
“She killed him, didn’t she?” Benefield recalled asking before her uncle confirmed that her father, Doug Benefield, had been fatally shot.
Benefield said she instantly suspected her stepmother, former ballerina Ashley Benefield.
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“At that point, I knew about the countless allegations she had made against my dad,” Benefield, who has documented her father’s case on TikTok, told Fox News Digital.
“There was something about her that made her obsessed with the idea that my dad was not a good person,” she said. “She had called the cops multiple times on my dad. She had called CPS on my dad. I knew there was no boundary and no limit — she was going to do anything she could to frame my dad in a negative light. When my uncle said, ‘Your dad’s been shot,’ who else was he spending time with in Florida? I just knew.”
In 2024, Ashley was sentenced to 20 years in prison after being convicted of manslaughter in the 2020 shooting death of her estranged husband. Now, in her memoir, “Ghost Girl: Surviving the Black Swan Murder,” Benefield is reflecting on her father’s death, their relationship and the years leading up to the fatal shooting.
Benefield was still in high school when her mother, Renee Benefield, died from a heart condition. As the family reeled from the loss, Doug made his daughter his top priority.
Benefield described her father as gentle, patient and endlessly curious — an artist who was always learning something new.
“Those nine months between my mom passing away and my dad marrying Ashley were probably some of the best memories I have with my dad,” she said.
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“We were close. I was always following his lead. He would have all of these projects in the garage, and I would just sit with him, watch him. Those nine months when it was just the two of us, we were really leaning on each other. Anything I needed, he was there for me.”
More than a year before he was killed, Doug nearly walked away from his second marriage, which was plagued with problems.
“‘That’s it. I’m done. I’ve tried everything to show her that I’m a good guy, that I love her, and she just won’t believe me. She keeps making these allegations against me,'” Benefield recalled him saying.
“He was going to pack up and leave,” she said. “He was going to come back to Charleston.”
Instead, Benefield urged her father to stay one more day so her younger sister, Emerson, could celebrate Easter with him.
“I told him, ‘She’s at the age where she’s going to remember that,'” Benefield said. “You need to stay and be with her, and then you can come to Charleston tomorrow. He was like, ‘You’re right. We’ll open Easter baskets. I’ll be back in Charleston tomorrow.’”
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“And that was it,” she continued. “I think that was the one time I saw him think about leaving and say he was going to do it, and then he didn’t.”
Looking back, Benefield can’t help but wonder if that decision changed everything.
“I think he stayed in Florida for one too many days after that,” she said.
Within a year after losing his first wife, Doug, 54, married Ashley Byers — later Ashley Benefield — a 24-year-old former swimsuit model, just 13 days after they met.
“I had just an off-putting feeling,” Benefield said. “Within three days, my dad went from having no love life since my late mother died to being married to a 24-year-old. I thought they were dating casually, not married. It was the day after meeting her that I learned they were married.”
Benefield said she quickly realized Ashley was “not the sweet girl she marketed herself to be.” In “Ghost Girl,” she described how her home became increasingly hostile after Ashley moved in.
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Benefield alleged her stepmother began isolating her from her father, blaming her for household conflicts, reading her private journal, publicly embarrassing her and seeking to push her out of the family dynamic.
“I really wanted her to like me,” Benefield wrote. “But I could tell she did not like me at all, and it wasn’t even personal. I was just in the way.”
“There were moments where I felt it was inappropriate,” Benefield told Fox News Digital. “I’d come home from school, and she would be sitting in a bra and underwear on the kitchen counter, waiting for my dad to get home. She took me to the grocery store one time and showed me she had a gun in her bra. She started a screaming match between us. My dad wasn’t yelling back, but she was yelling at my dad over little things I did that upset her.”
Benefield said Ashley also attempted to erase her late mother.
“She came in and got rid of everything that reminded me of my mom in my room,” Benefield said. “There were pictures on the walls of my mom and me. There was a letter from my mom. She took down everything. It was all gone.
“She was asking my dad to say that my mom meant nothing to him. That stung because I knew that wasn’t true, but she needed to hear that. She needed to see that the house was rid of everything that reminded him of my mom. She caused a lot of arguments, and they were over little things. She was driving a wedge between my dad and me.”
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In 2017, Ashley launched the American National Ballet, a Charleston-based dance company. Doug threw himself into the venture. When the company collapsed later that year, Ashley returned to Florida while pregnant with Emerson.
Doug increasingly spent his time in Florida trying to repair his relationship with Ashley and be part of Emerson’s life. Benefield stayed behind in Charleston to finish high school, later writing that she wanted to distance herself from the turmoil surrounding her father.
“At a certain point, I asked my dad to leave me out of their relationship,” Benefield said. “I knew it wasn’t going to get better. I just felt, ‘I’ll turn 18, and I can move out if she’s still around.’ That was my plan. But my dad thought things would get better. She would try to convince him that things were getting better, and he felt, ‘We’re finally figuring our issues out.’ Then she would accuse him of all these false allegations. But I do think he felt things would turn around.”
“It never got better,” Benefield said.
In September 2020, Doug was killed at the Lakewood Ranch, Florida, home where Ashley was staying with her mother. The shooting came as the estranged couple was embroiled in a contentious custody dispute over their daughter. Ashley was arrested in November of that year.
Ashley claimed she shot and killed her estranged husband, 58, in self-defense, arguing she opened fire on the Navy veteran after ordering him out of her house and alleging he refused to comply and hit her in the face.
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“I thought he was going to kill me,” Ashley testified during the trial. Investigators said she showed no visible signs of physical abuse after the shooting.
Ashley accused Doug of psychologically abusing her, but prosecutors argued the allegations were unsupported by the evidence. They noted she made the allegations in an effort to gain sole custody of their daughter.
Benefield would later come face-to-face with Ashley in court.
“It was a weird feeling, knowing this was my dad’s killer,” Benefield said. “When I saw her, I felt, ‘My dad is really dead. This is the girl who killed him.’ I got angry. But I was there to get justice. I needed to show her that I’m strong and she’s not going to get away with this.”
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During her victim impact statement, Benefield said, “What hurts me the most is not the thought of not having my dad anymore because I will always have him around in spirit. … What breaks my heart the most is thinking about how he found you at such a vulnerable part of his life.”
WATCH: Ashley Benefield sentenced in ‘Black Swan murder’ case
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Ashley was charged with second-degree murder but was convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter after nearly seven hours of deliberations. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
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Today, Benefield said she’s focused on moving forward while carrying the lessons her father left behind.
“I wish he could have gotten out of that situation,” she said. “But I would want him to know that his daughter turned out OK.”
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