Investigators said anonymous contacts encouraged Lilyana Rose Wagner’s violent thinking before she killed her mother and later pleaded guilty.
TIFTON, Ga. — Months of work on a 14-year-old girl’s phone transformed the investigation into Rachel Suzanne Wagner’s 2024 death, according to Georgia prosecutors, revealing conversations with anonymous online contacts, an intense interest in mass shootings and writings that later helped explain why her daughter would plead guilty to felony murder and aggravated assault.
The digital trail became one of the most consequential parts of the case against Lilyana Rose Wagner, who is now 16 and serving a life sentence. Tifton Judicial Circuit District Attorney Patrick Warren said investigators with the Tifton Police Department and Georgia Bureau of Investigation found that Wagner had communicated across different apps with people who encouraged her to commit violence. Prosecutors also said she maintained those communications after her mother was dead. In August 2026, Wagner admitted criminal responsibility and received a life sentence carrying a minimum of 30 years before she can become eligible for parole.
Authorities have released relatively little about the people on the other side of those conversations. Their names, locations and ages have not been made public in the reporting reviewed for this story, and there has been no publicly announced prosecution of an online contact for Rachel Wagner’s killing. Warren nevertheless highlighted the communications when announcing the resolution of the case, saying the material showed that people interacting with the teenager did more than passively observe her interest in violence. Investigators concluded that some encouraged her to act on it. That finding made the phone evidence important not only for chronology but for understanding the environment prosecutors said surrounded Wagner before the homicide.
The messages were not the only evidence of that interest. Investigators said Wagner had built an online presence around school shooters and mass-casualty events and had considered carrying out an attack at her former middle school. A handwritten confession later recovered in the investigation described the killing of her mother as a last-minute choice made instead of the contemplated school attack. Wagner referred in the writing to perpetrators of previous mass shootings as influences. Authorities have identified the existence of that reference without any need to publicize the names she listed or amplify the notoriety she appeared to seek through her fascination with past attackers.
Wagner’s private diary added another layer. Warren told WALB that investigators found writings that they believed helped establish events and thinking before Rachel Wagner’s death. The district attorney said the evidence included Wagner’s fixation on attackers and a concern that her mother would discover self-inflicted markings tied to that fixation. Prosecutors treated those writings as part of the motive evidence. Because Wagner pleaded guilty, however, the state was not required to introduce the diary page by page before a jury, and the full document has not been publicly reproduced in the reporting reviewed for this article.
For investigators, the search through digital material came only after a series of events that initially had no obvious public connection to an online subculture. On Nov. 19, 2024, Wagner was involved in a vehicle crash in Crawford County, away from her Tifton home. She was the only person in the vehicle. When she told officers that she lived with her mother, authorities learned that Rachel Wagner, 51, had not appeared for work and was not answering her phone. Crawford County law enforcement contacted the Tifton Police Department and asked officers there to check on her.
Tifton officers went to the home on East 18th Street and found Rachel Wagner dead in bed. Investigators determined that she had been killed by a single gunshot to the back of the head. The welfare check established that police were dealing with a homicide, and the broader investigation began. Authorities eventually determined that Lilyana Wagner had killed her mother before the car crash. Warren’s office has said the teenager continued talking with online contacts even after the shooting and after she was taken to a hospital following the wreck, an element prosecutors cited in discussing her state of mind and ongoing connection to those contacts.
The prosecution’s account also included an unusually direct link between the teenager and the firearm. Rachel Wagner had legally purchased the gun at a Valdosta pawnshop about a month before the killing, Warren said. Prosecutors said she allowed her daughter to keep the firearm and ammunition in her bedroom. Public reports do not indicate that Rachel Wagner knew of the contemplated school attack or expected the gun to be used against her. The firearm’s presence instead became a factual part of the case: investigators said a teenager already immersed in violent material and communicating with people who encouraged violence had ready access to the weapon later used in the homicide.
Warren said his office and investigators did not stop at the most obvious interpretation of the disturbing digital material. They explored whether other circumstances could explain or legally alter the meaning of what happened. The district attorney said investigators considered mental health questions, possible fear, possible abuse and whether self-defense had any role. He said the investigation did not find support for a justification for the killing. That distinction is significant because an interest in violent material, standing alone, is not proof of murder. Here, the digital evidence was combined with Wagner’s confession, other writings, firearm evidence and her eventual guilty plea.
The case also illustrates the limits of what can be concluded from online behavior. Prosecutors have described Wagner’s communications as an important influence and Warren warned parents about people reaching children through screens. The official account does not establish that internet contact was the sole cause of the homicide, nor would the available evidence support a general claim that teenagers who consume violent media will become violent. The factual relevance in this prosecution was narrower: investigators said specific people encouraged Wagner’s expressed plans for violence, and her own writings connected her conduct to a preoccupation with previous mass attacks.
Rachel Wagner’s relatives supplied a different kind of context after her death. She was a New Zealand native who had lived in the United States for almost 30 years, according to reporting based on comments from her sister-in-law. The family member said Lilyana Wagner was being homeschooled and spent many hours gaming while Rachel worked. Those details described the household but did not establish a causal link between gaming and the killing. Neither the guilty plea nor the district attorney’s public explanation rests on a claim that ordinary video games caused Wagner to shoot her mother.
When Wagner entered her plea in 2026, the proceeding ended the prospect of a trial that might have publicly exposed more of the digital record. She pleaded guilty to felony murder and aggravated assault, and Warren announced a life sentence with the possibility of parole only after at least 30 years. Wagner was 14 when Rachel Wagner was killed and 16 when the case was resolved. The sentence means she will spend much of her adult life in custody before even reaching the first point at which a parole board may consider release.
Warren’s public comments after the plea centered less on the mechanics of the shooting than on what investigators had learned while examining the teenager’s digital life. He urged parents to understand who is communicating with their children online and what those contacts are encouraging. The district attorney also said the case had “no winners,” pointing to Rachel Wagner’s death and her daughter’s decades-long prison sentence. Those remarks were framed as lessons he drew from the investigation, while the legal outcome itself rested on Wagner’s guilty plea to the two charges.
Important questions about the online contacts remain unanswered publicly. Investigators have not disclosed who they were, whether they knew Wagner offline, whether they were adults or minors, or whether authorities were able to identify all of them. No later public announcement reviewed through Sept. 30, 2026, indicates that those contacts have been charged. What is settled is Wagner’s own case: she admitted felony murder and aggravated assault and is serving a life sentence, with no possibility of parole consideration until at least 30 years have passed.
Author note: Last updated September 30, 2026.