How A Grandmother, Her Hairdresser And The Shampoo Boy Conspired To Kill A Navy Vet

Ron Stovall, 30, got up at 3:00 a.m. for his shift as a delivery driver at UPS as usual on Oct. 6, 1998, and, like she always did while he was getting ready, his wife, Angeleka Stovall, made him a lunch to take with him. But, when he walked out their front door in Panama City, Florida that morning, their lives changed forever.

“There was some some shots,” Angeleka told “An Unexpected Killer,” airing Fridays at 8/7c on Oxygen. “I didn’t know what was going on.”

Ron, who was bleeding, ran back into the house, slammed the door, and leaned against it. Someone outside shot through the door, hitting Ron several more times, as Angeleka ran into the foyer from the kitchen. 

“He plops on the ground and the killer tried coming through the door, so I was fighting with him,” she added. “He got his hand through, I grabbed the gun, and he opened the door with his [other] hand and I looked down that barrel of that silver gun.”

The man fired a shot at Angeleka, but he missed.

“I ran back to the bedroom,” she said. "The killer was in the house. He was coming after us. I literally thought everybody was gonna die. And I was so scared.”

Angeleka dialed 911 from behind her bedroom door as she heard the gunman say to Ron, "This is for her" just before another, even louder shot went off.

When the police arrived minutes later, they had to clear the house to ensure the killer was gone before coaxing Angeleka out of the bedroom.

“The wife came out and she was very, very hysterical,” Panama City Police Detective Dan Bates told "An Unexpected Killer."

Ron had been shot three times in the back, once in the hip, and in the back of his head. There were bloody footprints on the kitchen floor with a distinct double-H type pattern.

“They stood over the body and delivered a fatal blow,” Panama City Police Detective Robert Colbert told "An Unexpected Killer." “When you see that type of crime scene, you’re looking immediately for someone who displayed some type of grudge or emotional hatred for the victim.”

In an interview with police, Angeleka described the killer as a white man with brown eyes and brown hair, and possibly a mustache — but it was his final words to Ron that intrigued police. 

“We needed to find out who ‘her’ was,” said Colbert. “And we needed to find out what made this so personal to her.”

When asked who might have done it, Angeleka pointed a finger at Tina Trexler, Ron's recent ex-wife. The former spouses had met in 1989 and had a daughter, but divorced after six years and shared custody. Angeleka, who had a child from a prior relationship, and Ron had gotten married in 1997 and had their own daughter in 1998, after which Ron had filed for full custody of his daughter with Tina.

“There was all of this crazy fighting,” said Angeleka of the custody petition, which had been scheduled for a court hearing in early November 1998. “It was too hard for his daughter. We were just concerned.”

Police invited Tina Trexer in for an interview — and it didn’t go well.

A family photo of Ron Stovall in An Unexpected Killer.

“One of the things that was most alarming when we sat down with Tina is there was no remorse,” said Colbert. “No emotional activity on her part that she was even concerned that he was dead.”

Then she told police that her relationship with Ron and Angeleka was “cordial” and “friendly,” according to Colbert — which was the opposite of what Angeleka had said.

Tina’s alibi was that she was in bed at her parents' house at the time of the murder — and then a lawyer her mother had hired for her showed up and ended the interview.

Police interviewed Tina’s mother, Priscilla Ann Trexler, who everyone called Ann.

“She was the grandmotherly type and was helping Tina get back on her feet and help her get through this divorce,” said Bates. 

She confirmed Tina’s alibi — but police still looked into Tina’s financial records to see if she might’ve hired someone. There was no evidence of that.

Tina did, however, have a boyfriend, Adrian Harris, who had it out with Ron in the past over Ron’s behavior toward Tina. But Adrian wasn’t in Florida; he lived with a roommate near Baltimore, Maryland.

Police headed north to interview him.

“He did acknowledge there was some bad blood between the two of them,” said Colbert. “But he really kind of downplayed the significance.”

His alibi checked out: He’d clocked into work in Baltimore at 7:30 a.m. the morning of the murder, making it impossible for him to have murdered Ron in Florida at 3:00 a.m..

But Adrian’s roommate, Guy, matched the description Angeleka had given police.

Police took pictures of the roommate and went back to Florida to do a photo line-up with Angeleka, who identified him right away.

Police then conducted a search of Adrian and Guy's apartment in Baltimore and found shoes with a double-H pattern on the sole. They brought Guy in for questioning. He said he, too, was at work in Baltimore the day of and day after the murder; his alibi was confirmed by surveillance video from his place of employment. 

“I remembered him being the same person,” said Angeleka of her false identification. “It stuck in my head like that. But I was wrong.”

The autopsy report came in and confirmed that there were two different weapons used to kill Ron: a .357 handgun and a shotgun.

Three weeks after the murder, though, police had no leads … but then they got a tip.

The Panama City Beach Police Department called after arresting a suspect in a home invasion who had two handguns and a short-barreled shotgun. The person arrested, Antonio "Tony" Alberto Perez, had a length criminal record and was suspected in other homicides.

While they waited on ballistics evidence from his guns, investigators interviewed Perez — who did meet the description Angeleka gave of the shooter. In that initial interview, Perez was relaxed and joking with investigators, including about other acts of violence, but denied involvement in the Stovall murder.

Investigators didn’t buy it — so they got a search warrant for Perez's storage space. There, they found workboots with a double-H on the soles; those were sent to the crime lab. After the search, police got confirmation that test rounds from his guns matched the slugs taken from Stovall's body.

The interviewed him again, at which point he said he’d loaned his guns to another person — and added that he’d heard Ron Stovall was dealing drugs and that’s why he was killed.

But police knew from their own investigations that Ron wasn’t dealing drugs; the people Perez fingered were also ruled out. 

Still, they couldn’t figure out why Perez would have killed Ron Stovall.

Then they looked at his cell phone records, which indicated that he had been in a relationship with a local hair salon owner, Kimberly Miller. 

Miller told police that Perez used to work odd jobs at the salon, including sweeping up and shampooing customers’ hair. She also mentioned that she knew about Ron Stovall’s murder because a client had recently called in to cancel an appointment, saying her ex-son-in-law had been murdered.

“When Kim Miller indicated that she styled Tina’s mother Ann Trexler’s hair, law enforcement was pretty stunned by that,“ Bay County prosecutor Joe Grammer told "An Unexpected Killer."

“Ann had told Kimberly the Trexlers had to get a second mortgage on their home to provide legal assistance to Tina,” said Colbert. “At that point, we were trying to determine exactly who she was. She hadn’t really been on our radar at all. We knew that she was Tina’s mom, we knew that she was Tina’s alibi at the time of this crime. “

Police brought the 52-year-old in for an interview; she told them she had nothing to do with it, that she had loved Ron, and that she wanted a lawyer.

At this point, police found out that Perez’s shoes matched those at the scene, and they went back for another interview with him. He admitted he killed Ron and said Ann Trexler paid him to do it.

“He had met Ann at the hair salon,” said Colbert. “She was complaining about Ron and that the two of them had worked out a deal for Tony to kill Ron in exchange for about $10,000 to be paid to Tony.”

Tony Perez was charged with first-degree murder on Nov. 10, 1998.

But phone records didn't connect Perez and Ann Trexler — they did, however, show a number of phone calls between Miller, Perez, and Trexler.

“There were phone calls between the Trexler house and Kim Miller at strange hours of the night for strange amounts of time that could not be explained away by saying ‘We’re setting up our rinse and set,’” said Grammer. “Another thing, we were able to show that Ann Trexler received a phone call from Kim Miller the morning right after Ron’s death.”

Police determined that Miller had likely been the middleman in the murder plot, and Ann Trexler the instigator. But the evidence was all very circumstantial until police looked into Ann’s financial records and found withdrawals that coincided with the amounts Perez told police he was paid.

Still, they determined that it wasn’t enough to arrest Ann Trexler without corroboration. Prosecutors offered Miller a reduced sentence in exchange for testifying against Ann Trexler and, eventually, she agreed.

“Kim sang like a songbird,” said Jim Appleman, State Attorney for the 14th Judicial Circuit of Florida Appleman. “She indicated that, on many occasions, Ann Trexler ranted and raved about Ron Stovall, how bad he was that he was going to remove her granddaughter. She wished that somebody would ‘take him out’ and it got more and more and finally Kim said, ‘OK, if you’re really serious, I know someone who might help you.’”

Miller also described the murder in great detail, and admitted the call from her to Ann Trexler after the murder was to confirm that Ron was dead.

“Ann Trexler’s thought pattern was, ‘Ron Stovall’s getting ready to take my only precious granddaughter away from me and I won’t have visitation, and he left my daughter, he married somebody else, he should not be able to get away with this,’” said Appleman.

On Feb. 15, 2000, Ann Trexler was charged with murder.

Perez pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life without parole. Kim Miller initially received five years probation. 

Ann Trexler’s trial began in 2001; she took the stand and testified that she wasn’t involved in the murder. On May 14, 2001, however, the jury found her guilty and she received a sentence of life in prison without parole.

Ann Trexler remained incarcerated in the Lowell Correctional Institution Annex in Ocala, Florida. Antonio Perez died in prison in 2010. Kimberly Miller was charged with having or introducing contraband into a detention facility while awaiting sentencing, and serving seven and a half years in prison on that and her plea-reduced charge for accepting money to conceal a crime. She is currently serving probation for several possession of a controlled substance charges dating to 2019 and 2020.

For more on this case and others like it, watch "An Unexpected Killer," airing Fridays at 8/7c on Oxygen, or stream episodes here.