Student, 21, gets into fake Uber as doors lock and she's stabbed to death

With just weeks left until she graduated from university, a 21 year old law student decided to head out for a night with friends for some well deserved fun.

In the early hours of the morning she booked an Uber car to take her back to her apartment. She left the bar she was at with her pals and waited outside for her lift home.

However, unbeknown to her, the car that pulled up was not the one she had booked - it was driven by an evil man who lured her into the vehicle, locked the doors immediately anddrove her away to her death.

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CCTV images of Samantha Josephson showed her getting into a Chevrolet Impala at around 2.10am on 29 March 2019. When she didn’t return home, her worried roommates at the University of South Carolina alerted authorities.

Fourteen hours later her body was discovered by turkey hunters in a field 65 miles away from the Five Points district she had been picked up in. She had been stabbed as many as 120 times in all parts of her body with a two-bladed knife. One wound to the head was so forceful it had pierced her skull.

A pathologist report stated that her body contained just over a tablespoon of blood instead of the approximate four litres the human body usually has. Such was the ferocity of the attack and rapid blood loss, she would have died within 10-20 minutes.

Police began searching for the car that had picked the student up and at 3am on 30 March they pulled over Nathaniel Rowland in the same area he’d kidnapped Samantha. He tried to flee but was apprehended.

When police searched his car they found blood on the seats and in the boot as well as bleach and other cleaning products. At his girlfriend’s home they found a two bladed knife and a bandana and sock - all with Samantha’s blood on. Her DNA was under his fingernails, which indicated signs of a violent struggle.

During his 2021 trial for kidnapping and murder, at which he pleaded not guilty, the jury were presented with a mountain of evidence. His prosecution argued the DNA found on him could not be scientifically linked to Samantha.

However they heard from 31 witnesses, one of whom was Rowland’s former girlfriend. She testified that she had seen him cleaning blood from his car with bleach and saw him cleaning a knife. The T-shirt Samantha was wearing that night was held up in court and it was so blood-stained it wasn’t possible to see the original colour. He was also seen on CCTV in his car circling the area where he later picked up Samantha.

After just an hour the jury found Rowland 27, guilty of kidnapping, murder and possessing a weapon. Judge Clifton Newman sentenced him to life in prison without parole and said the case was the most "severe murder" he had ever heard in his courtroom. "There’s a thousand trails that led to you. All of the evidence, each speck - not simply beyond a reasonable doubt but as the highest standard the law requires - points to your guilt," he said.

Samantha’s mum Marci Josephson read an emotional six-minute statement about the impact her daughter’s cruel death had had on the family. "I close my eyes and I feel what she endured at [Rowland’s] hands 120 times," she said. "Over and over and over, fighting for her life, locked in his car. I pray that when Sami closed her eyes she thought of beautiful things and his evil face was not the last thing she saw before she took her last breath."

She went on to label Rowland "pure evil" and said: "I despise everything about him. His eyes glaring at my family through the trial told me everything I already knew about him. He is pure evil."

Samantha’s parents set up the What’s My Name Foundation to educate on ride-share safety and support charities. Her death brought several changes to the law in South Carolina, which included all ride-share vehicles displaying a sign with their company’s name.

Meanwhile, Samantha was awarded a posthumous political science degree in May 2019 at what would have been her graduation ceremony. She never got to take up the scholarship she had earned at Drexell University to study international law.