MIAMI (Court TV) — Months before a 16-year-old allegedly killed his stepsister on a cruise ship, investigators say he had tried to climb into bed with the victim while she was asleep.
Timothy Hudson leaves following a hearing at the James Lawrence King Federal Justice Building on Wednesday, May 27, 2026, in Miami. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
Timothy Hudson, 16, has pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder and aggravated sexual abuse in the death of 18-year-old Anna Kepner. Kepner’s father is married to Hudson’s mother; the blended family had been on a vacation on board a weeklong Carnival cruise when Kepner disappeared.
Investigators say Kepner’s body was found wrapped in a blanket and stuffed beneath her bed; a box of life vests had been placed in front of her body, apparently to disguise her.
Court TV reviewed a recently released transcript of Hudson’s pretrial detention hearing, at which FBI special agent Andrew Delvalle testified that investigators were made aware of a previous incident involving the stepsiblings.
During an interview with Kepner’s ex-boyfriend, he told investigators that the couple would frequently FaceTime each other at night, sometimes falling asleep while the call was still going. During one such conversation, Kepner had apparently fallen asleep and her then-boyfriend was up doing work in his garage. “He noticed, or he heard, a noise coming from [Kepner’s] phone,” Delvalle testified. “He looked, and he states that he had seen [Hudson] trying to get into bed with [Kepner]. He was kind of surprised and shocked by it and yelled at [Hudson], and then [Hudson] apparently ran out of the room.”
The ex-boyfriend told the FBI that he had made Kepner aware of what had happened, but she was hesitant to report the incident to her father. Kepner “felt that [Hudson] … was a little weird and that he had quite a few knives, so she was a little bit afraid of him.” Kepner’s father said that his home had surveillance cameras, but the alleged incident happened months earlier and the video auto-deletes after 30 days.
Hudson is accused of sexually assaulting Kepner; a rape kit performed on the victim yielded two samples that matched Hudson’s DNA. At a pretrial detention hearing in February, Hudson’s attorneys tried to cast doubt on the evidence by suggesting that any sexual contact between the two had been consensual. His defense attorneys also tried to cast doubt on Kepner’s younger half-brother, who had been sharing a room on the cruise with both the victim and the defendant. “I think it is clear that there are a lot of gaps and question marks about this investigation, gaps and question marks that the government is filling with guesses and assumptions,” Hudson’s attorney, Eric Cohen, said. “There is a large window of opportunity where this could have happened and there is more than one person in the room.”
Prosecutors say Kepner was killed during a 16-hour window on the ship, but have been unable to more definitively pinpoint her time of death. Describing the killing as a “barbaric, intentional, thoughtful act,” prosecutor Alejandra Lopez detailed the evidence against the defendant, which includes surveillance video showing him alone with the victim in their room for more than three hours.
Despite the prosecution’s push to have Hudson taken into custody, the judge ruled that he will be allowed to remain free and in the custody of his maternal uncle.
