A Key Event

The Murder of Charlotte Emily was the key event in the first Volume, and the first murder in the Missing Children’s Incident. It took place outside of Fredbear’s Family Diner, on May 7th, 1982—Charlie’s birthday. The investigation after span from the 8th to the 10th. It is the only Missing Children’s incident confirmed to be a murder. As well as being what started the entire lore, it is also the kickstart event for several other events—such as Michael’s reason for bullying Evan, and the start of William’s serial killer career.

## Timeline

Around 9:37, an hour or so after her birthday party started, Charlotte “Charlie” Emily starts to look for her little brother, Sammy. Sammy, who was eventually revealed to have been messing around with The Puppet, couldn’t be found by Charlie which caused her to worry about him. Charlie goes outside to look for him and to call out his name, but in the process she gets locked outside. Now not only worried about her brother, Charlie is cold and wet since it is raining and grows upset, beginning to think that her birthday party is going horribly wrong. In an attempt to try and get the attention of someone inside, she bangs on the locked door but to no avail. After this, Charlie starts to weep, sitting with her knees to her chest on the ground as she gets a strange feeling of dread.

Meanwhile, William Afton returns to the diner after leaving it due to a fight between him and Henry. His driving is unstable, which is partly because he is slightly tipsy and also because he is incredibly furious. As his headlights dawned on the driveway of Fredbear’s, he noticed Charlie on the ground. Alcohol, mixed with boiling rage, prompted William to get out of his car and approach Charlie. At first, the teenager is overjoyed at someone coming to save her, especially someone she is close to and trusts. But after she sees William makes no move to help her inside, and notices the look of pure anger and hatred William gave her, Charlotte grows nervous and a bit fearful. Instead of letting her back in, William focuses all of the anger he had at Henry onto Charlie, by grabbing her throat and beginning to choke her. Whilst struggling against his grip, Charlie begs for William to let her go, but after a few minutes, she accepts her fate. The exact moment she dies is not shown in the comic, but it is implied that after she stops resisting is when she dies. William, feeling no remorse whatsoever after Charlie dies, instead marvels at the feeling of how it felt to take a life, and the satisfaction he now felt instead of anger. This is also a key moment in the comic because it is when William starts to kill. Still slightly drunk and not fully processing the weight of his actions, William decides to simply drag Charlie out to the back of the diner, rather than put the work into hiding her body. While in the process of doing this, however, William’s son, Evan Afton, sees his silhouette hiding Charlie’s corpse in the alley. Evan is only able to the see the shadow of his father, and therefore was unable to identify Charlie’s murderer.

After William had abandoned his victim in the back-alleys, he went inside and found a concerned Henry Emily, who could not find his daughter. Henry searches around for Charlie tirelessly, while William pretends to check around, but when neither of them find anything on her, Henry becomes panicked and insanely worried. William tries to brush it off, stating that Charlie might just be hiding or something, but Henry disagrees, saying that that didn’t sound like Charlie at all, and calls the police. With the consequences of his actions now hitting him, William hides in the bathroom and momentarily has a mental breakdown before working out a plan. Both nervous and feeling adrenaline, William returns to the main area, where Henry was anxiously pacing while waiting for the police. William tries to calm him down, falsely assuring Henry that they would find her and that everything would turn out fine, to which Henry only weakly nods. Eventually, the police arrive, and after some time they find Charlie—but of course, it’s too late. The Puppet, previously having escaped from the box she had been locked in, was draped over Charlie’s body. She was devoid of any blood, since her death was by asphyxiation, and the only evidence to identify a suspect were the large, purple bruises around her neck.