A nightmare that lasted 118 minutes.

That’s how long the passenger in Cabin 9125 says he heard “weird, muffled struggling sounds” coming from 18-year-old Anna Kepner’s cabin next door aboard the Carnival Horizon on the night of November 6–7, 2025. Thumps against the thin wall. Gagging coughs. A girl’s voice whimpering “stop… please… I can’t breathe.” Bed springs creaking violently. Then long stretches of eerie silence broken by sudden bursts of frantic movement again. The terrified neighbor, a 42-year-old accountant from Orlando traveling with his wife, pressed his ear to the wall in horror — but the hallway camera shows something even more disturbing: for those entire two hours, NO ONE opened Anna’s cabin door. Not once.

The only person who had entered the room earlier that evening was her 16-year-old stepbrother, Dylan Hudson.

The bombshell testimony, obtained from FBI affidavits unsealed this week, has turned an already stomach-churning case into one of the most talked-about maritime murders in years. Combined with the leaked hallway surveillance clip that shows Dylan slipping into Anna’s cabin at 10:51 p.m. — and never coming out until dawn — investigators now believe the Florida cheerleader was trapped inside with her obsessed stepbrother for nearly two full hours while he slowly choked the life out of her using a brutal “bar hold” choke.

“It wasn’t quick,” the next-door witness told agents, voice shaking. “At first I thought they were just roughhousing — teenagers, you know? But it kept going. And going. The girl kept making these wet, choking sounds… like someone squeezing her throat and letting go, then doing it again. My wife wanted to call security, but I stupidly said ‘mind your own business, it’s family.’ I’ll never forgive myself.”

Hallway CCTV confirms his worst fear: From 10:51 p.m., when Dylan followed Anna inside, until 6:27 a.m. the next morning, when he finally stepped out alone — shirtless, hair wild, scratches across his neck — the door never opened again. Not for crew. Not for room service. Not even a crack. For seven hours straight, Anna Kepner was sealed inside that 182-square-foot cabin with the boy the family now admits was “dangerously obsessed” with her.

Autopsy photos are heartbreaking: petechial hemorrhaging in her eyes, deep crescent bruises on her throat matching the exact width of a teenage forearm, and ligature marks showing the choke was applied, released, and reapplied multiple times — exactly matching the neighbor’s timeline of “start-stop” struggling sounds that dragged on for almost 120 minutes.

“She was conscious for most of it,” the medical examiner reportedly told the family. “She fought hard. There were layers of bruising — some fresh, some minutes older. He kept letting her think it was over… then starting again.”

Anna’s phone, recovered from under the bed, shows a half-typed text at 11:03 p.m.: “dylan wont leave my room he’s acting scary plz send hel” The message was never sent.

Friends back in Titusville say the obsession was an open secret. Dylan had been caught taking hundreds of secret photos of Anna on his phone, writing her name inside hearts carved into his bedroom door, and once threatened to “kill himself if she ever got a boyfriend.” The family allegedly downplayed it as “puppy love.” They even let the two share an interior cabin on the cruise to “save money.”

Now that decision haunts them.

When Carnival Horizon docked in Miami on November 8, Dylan walked off the ship calmly holding his mother’s hand. He wasn’t until the steward found Anna’s body — stuffed under the bed, wrapped in bedsheets and hidden beneath orange life vests — that the truth exploded. FBI agents boarded immediately. Dylan has been in federal custody ever since, though because of his age, charging details remain sealed.

Online, the leaked hallway video has been viewed more than 80 million times. Slowed down, you can see the exact moment Anna realizes something is wrong: she pauses outside her door, forces a nervous smile at Dylan, then reluctantly lets him follow her in. Thirty seconds later, the light under the door goes out. And for the next two hours, while thousands of passengers slept, danced, and gambled just feet away, a beautiful 18-year-old cheerleader endured an agonizing, drawn-out death at the hands of the stepbrother who wouldn’t let her go.

The neighbor who heard everything ended his statement to the FBI with eight words that now haunt the internet forums:

“I keep hearing her trying to breathe… every night when I close my eyes.”

#JusticeForAnna is trending worldwide. Vigils with glowing pom-poms light up Florida beaches. And every time someone books a cruise, they think twice about those thin walls and locked doors hiding unimaginable evil.

Because somewhere out on the ocean, in the middle of all that fun and laughter, Anna Kepner spent her final two hours on Earth begging for help that never came.