A Florida Family’s Cruise Turns Tragic: Who Killed Anna Kepner? By Chris Spargo and Samira Asma-Sadeque 52

The autumn sun was bright at the Port of Miami when Anna Kepner, 18, and eight of her relatives from Titusville, Fla., boarded a Carnival cruise ship bound for the Caribbean on Nov. 2.

Since 2024, when Anna’s father Christopher, 41, married third wife Shauntel Hudson, 36, and brought together her children — Andrew, 18, Timothy, 16, and Brooke, 9 — with his kids Anna, Connor, 14, and Kylie, 9, members of the large blended family had taken as many as four vacations together.

Christopher’s cruise-loving parents, Jeff, 59, and Barbara, 63, had paid for the tickets and also came along.

Nobody was more excited than Anna, a high school senior and cheerleader who loved the sun and the ocean. She had joyously chronicled a previous cruise in May to celebrate her birthday on TikTok, writing, “I wanna go back.”

The family’s six-night voyage, however, ended in a shocking tragedy.

On Nov. 6, as their ship, the Horizon, was headed back to Miami, they gathered for dinner.

Anna, who had complained that her braces were painful, returned to the stateroom she shared with brother Connor and stepbrother Timothy because she wasn’t feeling well. She later went to the ship’s casino, where she said goodnight to her grandparents around 7 p.m.

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At around 11 a.m. the next day, a public address announcement called for medical assistance in one of the cabins.

“I recognized the number immediately,” Jeff told ABC News.

Back at Anna’s cabin, her grandfather and father were told the horrifying truth: A housekeeper had found the teenager dead under a bed, her body wrapped in a blanket and covered with life preservers.

Anna’s family has said a medical examiner determined that her death was caused by asphyxiation, possibly from a “bar hold,” an arm across the neck.

FBI investigators who boarded the ship on Nov. 8 and interviewed crew and family members have not named a suspect or person of interest in Anna’s death.

However, suspicion soon fell on her stepbrother Timothy, who was seen on surveillance footage and through key card data entering the cabin that night.

At a Dec. 5 ­emergency custody hearing in which Shaun­tel’s ex-husband Thomas Hudson sought full custody of the youngest of their three children, a judge referred to Timothy as a suspect in Anna’s death.

“He was the only one that was in the room,” Christopher Kepner previously told PEOPLE on Nov. 26. “I can’t say he is ­responsible­ — but I can’t decline. I want him to face the consequences.”  

The oldest child of Christopher, a crane operator, and his then-wife, Heather Wright, Anna was quick to adapt when her father twice remarried and welcomed a combination of five more children and stepchildren to the family at their home in Titusville.

“Anna was pure energy: bubbly, funny, outgoing, and completely herself,” her family wrote in her obituary. 

A classic overachiever, Anna was a gymnast and cheerleader, a certified scuba diver and a licensed boater.

According to her father, she had big plans  for the future:

After graduating from her Christian high school, she planned to join the U.S. Navy and one day become a K9 handler and law enforcement officer.

Yet amid her joys and dreams, there were also glimpses of a teenager coming to terms with estrangement from her biological mother, with whom Anna rarely had contact. (Christopher and Wright divorced in 2009, and Christopher had full custody.)

In a TikTok Anna shared last summer, she thanked her dad, stepmother Shauntel and her grandparents “for stepping up and being a mom to me I thought I would never have,” including by taking her shopping for a homecoming dress — and taking her on the cruises she enjoyed so much.

Aboard the Carnival Horizon on Nov. 2, the nine members of the family on this cruise split up into three cabins, with the three teenagers — Anna, Timothy and Connor, who family members have said got along well — deciding on their own to stay in a balcony stateroom with three beds on Deck 8.

“They were like the three amigos,” Shauntel said at her Dec. 5 custody hearing.  

As the ship sailed toward Miami, Shauntel returned after dinner to the cabin she shared with Christopher across the hall from the teenagers’ room at 7:30 p.m. and fell asleep. She said she had no reason to check on the kids across the hall.

But speaking to reporters after Anna’s Nov. 20 memorial service at a church in Titusville, the teen’s ex-boyfriend Josh Tew, 17, said that Anna’s brother Connor reported hearing raised voices and the sound of furniture “banging” when he tried to enter the locked cabin that night. Tew added that Anna had previously told him that on more than one occasion she’d spent the night at a friend’s home to avoid Timothy.

“She complained of her being uncomfortable around him,” Tew said. 

Timothy’s reaction after Anna’s body was found raised more questions about what happened in their cabin. He was emotional and couldn’t speak when investigators asked him about Anna’s death, says grandmother Barbara, who sat in on part of his interview with the FBI.

Timothy allegedly claimed he had no recollection of events that night.

After the ship docked in Miami, he was taken to a hospital for psychiatric observation and released into the custody of an unnamed family member.

As the FBI investigation of Anna’s death enters its second month, her grieving father expects an arrest is coming.

“Right now my best course of action is to let the FBI do what they’re doing,” says Christopher. “In the meantime, he says, the family will celebrate the holidays as if Anna were still here. All I can tell you is that we have a lot of memories, and there’s stuff that we’ll never tell people. That’s for us. That’s ours.”