Search warrant identifies woman found dismembered near Falls Lake as homicide victim

A newly released search warrant has identified the woman whose dismembered remains were found near Falls Lake as Brittany Elizabeth Wilkinson, transforming a long-running Wake County mystery into a named homicide case. The warrant says the North Carolina Office of the Chief Medical Examiner found evidence that body parts were removed with an edged device, and investigators ruled the death a homicide.

Wake County deputies were called on July 12, 2025, to the 14000 block of Creedmoor Road, also U.S. 50, after human remains were reported near the Highway 50 Boat Launch State Recreation Area. The scene sat close to one of the county’s best-known recreation areas, but the first public word from the Wake County Sheriff’s Office was limited to the fact that positive identification was still pending.

The warrant says Wilkinson was last seen alive on Nov. 8, 2024. Raleigh Police’s Homicide Unit opened a missing-person investigation on Dec. 6, 2024, after suspecting she may have been murdered. It also says Raleigh police were told on Sept. 26, 2025, that the body had been identified as Wilkinson, adding a key piece to a timeline that stretched across more than a year.

Even with the new identification, the case remains unresolved. The warrant indicates investigators have linked the death scene to a person of interest, but no one has been charged. The filing does not say how Wilkinson was identified, what led detectives to focus on that person or what happened in the months between her disappearance and the discovery of her remains.

The case is likely to draw close scrutiny in Wake County, where another homicide involving hidden remains already left a deep mark. In 2021, Brittany Samone Smith’s body was found in a suitcase near the Neuse River, and that case led to murder convictions. The Falls Lake case now joins that small but chilling list of local investigations in which a body was concealed, a woman was missing for months and the full story emerged only piece by piece.

North Carolina’s missing-person system underscores the scale of the problem behind cases like Wilkinson’s. The N.C. Center for Missing Persons receives more than 10,000 missing-person reports each year and was created in 1985 to coordinate with local, state and federal agencies. For Wilkinson’s family and for investigators in Raleigh and Wake County, the central questions now are how she died, who is responsible and when prosecutors will act.