Original subtitles

My dad, he said, you know,

the greatest satisfaction that you can get

is when you help someone

who couldn't help themselves.

Just knowing that that tremendous wrong

had gone unchanged,

tremendously influenced

what I wanted to do with my life.

To being able to find some justice for folks

who couldn't speak for themselves.

Both cases have absolutely different motives,

different situations and everything else.

But in both cases...

they revolve around an old well.

Children learn what they live.

I got whipped with a dog chain

and a hosepipe.

He found his mother, beaten senseless

hiding under a house next door.

To use your own kids

to help you cover up what you did,

makes you a snake.

At some point in time, there's supposed to be

a better ending.

In this case, there wasn't.

There was no ending.

It does haunt me.

It changed my life.

Hogansville in 1970,

it was the picture of small town life in the South.

Was a place anybody would wanna grow up.

Everybody knew everybody's kids

and they helped in raising them, you know.

It was... It was Mayberry.

My dad was...

He was a police chief in town.

He was kind of a...

An Andy Griffith

with maybe a little bit of Sherlock Holmes.

Uh, he was a great investigator.

Because of my dad, nothing ever went unsolved

in Hogansville, Georgia.

Righting things that were wrong

meant a lot to him.

I think that being raised by him,

I feel the same way.

I'm a 15-year-old kid, it's August the 3rd, 1970,

I'm with my dad, which is the place

I always wanted to be.

He got a call from the sheriff's office.

That said that they had discovered a lady in a well

just outside the city limits of Hogansville, Georgia.

I was riding along with my dad

when I was 10 or 12 years old.

But this situation was different.

A mysterious death in Hogansville

was unheard of.

My dad said, "Hey, you know, let's go."

And we went out there on Mobley Bridge Road,

right at the corner of South Lee Street,

the Moore property.

There were, of course,

people in the community around

that were around the old well,

which was adjacent right across the street

from the Moore home.

You could hear folks murmuring around,

you know, about, you know,

what they thought had happened,

this and that.

Today, it... You know,

it just looks like a mound of dirt.

But those 50 years ago,

it was anything but a mound of dirt.

I never will forget peering down into that well

and you could see the body of a woman,

wasn't water in the bottom of it.

She was like in a fetal position,

like she was underneath like as if she were praying

and, uh, it was just...

It was just an awful sight.

Her name was Gwendolyn Moore.

And my dad, he knew her

and her husband Marshall.

My dad knew everybody.

I knew a couple of them, her children.

They hadn't been in town that long

but, uh, I knew Allen.

We lived on the same side of town,

we weren't close friends,

but we were acquaintances,

you know.

My dad had called for a wrecker.

Sitting there with that wrecker running

and the mechanics are bringing the lady up

out of the hole,

and then for just a few seconds,

while they were taking the moment in

of the spectacle of it all, it was just...

silence.

She was over that well,

and as cables do, they...

You know, they stretch and they spin.

And she was turning around on that cable.

I look at... Look back and...

I can still see that wrecker.

She had on a pair of yellow shorts

and a white blouse

and it was a...

a sight that was burned in my memory

that I'll never forget.

That's somebody's mother, you know,

what if it was my mother?

As we were leaving and after we left,

my biggest thought was,

"What in the world's gonna happen

to Allen and them, you know?

What now?"

The investigation of Ms. Moore's death

was up to the Troup County Sheriff's Department

and under the direction of Sheriff L.W. Lem Bailey.

My dad was the chief of police

in Hogansville, Georgia.

His authority ended at city limits.

Everything surrounding us

was in Troup County, Georgia

and it fell under the guise of the sheriff's office.

The sheriff of the county is the most powerful

law enforcement official in the county.

And everything is subject

to his authority.

Everybody was waiting for the...

What they felt was some type of answer

for Gwendolyn Moore

and that answer was gonna come from Sheriff Bailey,

and it just never came.

My dad and I were talking one day

and Ms. Moore came up,

and he bluntly stated the fact

that Gwendolyn Moore's case had been closed.

They had drew this death an accident.

An accidental death.

He said that it was absolutely obvious

that they did not follow the evidence in this case.

All they did was look for a reason

to throw the case out the door.

My dad was disgusted about that.

My father wanted more than anything

just to be able to right this.

And he didn't have the ability to do that.

It was a shame that it was...

a few hundred yards out of his jurisdiction.

I think that was a very large part of my taking

the direction that I took in life.

After I graduated high school,

I immediately went to work for the state patrol

and as quick as I became of age,

I was promoted to trooper

and I spent time with my dad all the time.

My dad died August 18th, 1980.

You know, and I was 25 at the time.

After he passed away, you know, life goes on.

But it went on without him.

After my dad died,

I was offered his job.

I wanted to be the Chief of Police

in Hogansville, Georgia because my daddy was.

I drive by the well, by the houses,

and I think about the situation

of what had happened.

It's out of my hands, I...

You know, nothing I can do.

It's outside the city of Hogansville, and...

it was frustrating.

After 12 years in the city of Hogansville

as a police chief,

I just wanted to go in another direction.

And I resigned.

I opened my own business.

We did commercial tires.

When I left police work, I never was happy

doing what I was doing, made...

Actually made the best money I ever made,

but it wasn't me.

The district attorney, Pete Skandalakis,

he and I were friends and he had an opening

for an investigator.

So I called Pete and I asked him

about that, uh, position

and he said, "Apply for it."

And I did and I, uh, I got...

Much to my joy, I got the position.

So I've been there nine days in the job

and I get a call from the sheriff's office,

an investigator named Larry Arrington.

And Larry asked me,

"Clay, you remember an occasion of a lady

that was found in a well in Hogansville 30 years ago?"

And I said, "Not only do I remember it,

I was standing there when they got her

out of the well."

He went on to explain to me

that, uh, a young lady had found a death certificate.

Larry sends me a fax over with the death certificate.

When you get a fax, you don't look

at the top of the fax

to look at the date and the time.

But as for whatever reason,

it's the first thing I looked at.

And it says, "October the 24th, 2002."

And it hit me

like the old proverbial ton of brick.

God, this is my daddy's birthday.

And it was just like, "Oh, my God.

There I was with my dad at the scene

when this thing happened.

And now on his birthday, a case that I know

that he absolutely felt

was never set right on his birthday,

here this falls in front of me."

It was an epiphany.

I learned about Gwendolyn

when my grandmother died which was in

February of 2002.

My mom's related to Gwendolyn,

um, that is her aunt.

The first thing that I heard about Gwendolyn

was that she was found in a well.

I was taken aback, I didn't understand

what that meant, so I wanted,

uh, more answers to that question.

It was after that, that I started looking

into finding her death certificate.

I was shocked because I expected it

to say that it was an accident,

but it was actually marked as a homicide.

So then I took that death certificate

and I contacted the police department.

At that point, I said,

"This needs to be made right."

Here I am, I'm in a position maybe to do that.

My dad couldn't.

So, with that, we began.

Clay, you know, began starting at square one.

He really had nothing. He had...

All he had was the death certificate.

A death certificate is generally

a very mundane document,

but this one enumerated injuries.

The death certificate was done

by Dr. Krafka in 1970.

A pathologist looks at a body

that can tell him a story.

Dr. Krafka was looking at this woman

and in her, he saw evidence

of repeated abuse.

She had been hit in the head with a liquor bottle.

And when the sheriff's office got there,

they made her go to the hospital.

And they actually put stitches in her head.

I'm reading that six days after she's hit with a bottle,

that she's beaten in the left eye and mouth

with a fist.

And that was the day

before she was found in the well.

It specifically says this was a homicide.

My God.

How in the world could this not have been prosecuted?

And Sheriff Bailey just elected to ignore it.

It's unfathomable.

I told him from what my mother said,

they tried to have,

um, her death investigated back then

but they didn't get anywhere with it.

At the end of our conversation,

I expressed to Leslie that I'm gonna do all,

everything in my power

to find justice for her great-aunt.

Marshall Moore continued to live in the same house.

We're gonna have to interview him.

But I want to wait till I have acquired

enough knowledge about the case

that I know more than he thinks I know.

At this point, no one since 1970

has talked to Allen Moore.

I've got to talk to Allen Moore.

Allen's aunt, Miss Pat, told me

that Allen had gotten out of the Navy

and that she thought he lived in Folkston, Georgia.

He was a technical guy

at a big state prison down there,

and answered the phone.

When he said Clay Bryant, I mean,

I knew who it was. I mean,

I said, "Yeah, Clay, I remember you."

And, uh, he said,

"Well, I've been assigned a case."

And we, uh, we talked a bit,

talked about old times and old folks, you know.

And I got... We got to the subject

of his mother's death.

And he became,

as we talked about it, a bit emotional.

And I said, "Look, I would like

to talk to you about this.

And this is something we don't need to talk about

over the phone."

So, uh, we agreed to meet each other.

August the 3rd, 1970.

That was probably the, uh...

worst time of my life.

Uh, that's when I found out Mama was dead. Um...

Um...

It was pretty tough.

My neighbors come to the house that morning,

when we see daddy and I heard him

when he said, uh, "Gwen's in the well."

That's a pretty tough pill to swallow, uh,

but I did go over there and I did see her down there.

So I knew it was her.

She was, uh, a loving mother.

Um, she had a heart as big as, good Lord,

the whole city here.

Um, and she was always caring.

He said that daddy came home

and supper wasn't what he wanted.

That was the reason to beat up on mom.

Every day it was always a reason.

His mama got slapped around every day of her life.

Mama got beat pretty good, uh, that night.

She couldn't even get out of bed the next day.

But I remember going in there and telling her

how much we loved her.

We cried all night long.

And then you start doubting yourself

as a kid or maybe this is normal.

It's unimaginable,

it's unimaginable

the sheer brutality

of what that poor woman lived under.

And, you know, Allen too, for that matter.

I mean,

one time I got whipped with a dog chain

and a hosepipe.

Dad went over and took a piece of swing chain

off the porch

and beat him with the swing chain

till he was bloody.

I remember when I'd come to,

mama was sitting there with a,

uh, bowl of water.

She was soaking my back,

getting the sheet because it was stuck to me.

Um... From, you know,

from the time of being a small child,

Allen's life was a living hell.

Well, my brothers,

I think they dealt with it,

you know, the getting beat,

I mean, by trying to shut it out of their lives.

Myself, I always expected it in a way.

Um, the neighbors, they knew about it.

The others, you know, whenever, um,

mama was getting beat, I mean,

Danny, um, and Mr. Turner or Ms. Turner, his mother,

um, they lived over there.

But they was aware of when Mama

was getting beat one time,

um, and Danny, he wanted to call the police.

Well, unfortunately,

where we lived at in Hogansville,

we were right outside the city limits.

My dad's actually part

of the Troup County Sheriff's Department,

and Danny was told

by one of the people there,

uh, "No, that's none of our business.

We just don't need to pay attention to it."

That's always stuck with me.

And anybody who lived around us, they knew.

You know that there's a life and death situation

going on or a body... Serious bodily injury...

And you choose

not to even call the law enforcement,

uh, that... That's not right.

She'd be alive today.

The night before she was found in the well,

I remember seeing my mother.

Uh, she was up underneath, uh,

my next door neighbor's house, Miss Lewis,

uh, under the porch.

Both of her eyes pretty much swollen shut.

Her face was black and blue.

Hair was a mess.

She was hurting. She was in a lot of pain.

Um, and I remember seeing blood

looked like coming from her head.

I tried to get her to go with me.

Come out from underneath the porch.

And I told her, I said, "We'll walk...

We'll walk down Lee Street

and, uh, we'd get away."

And she said "No, that wouldn't do." Um...

She said I needed to go home

and watch out for my brothers,

and, uh, that she loved us very much

and she'd be back to get us.

It was bad enough that when I hugged her

that, uh, it hurt her.

And I told her, I said, well, I need to go.

Um...

Talking with Allen,

he bore guilt, you know.

I... And we were sitting on the side of the road,

he's sitting there with tears running down his eyes

and he's telling me this, at this point, you know,

we're in our 40s.

And he's sitting there crying

and, you know,

and he says if I had just taken her by the hand

and took her toward town,

toward the police department, you know.

And he lived with that.

And...

I... You know, my heart bled for him.

When the neighbors know that you hide

under a damn house...

beaten...

on more than several occasions,

it's unconscionable

that not only that that could happen to her,

but nobody did anything.

It's heartbreaking.

Now, I wanted so much

to be able to make something right about it.

I asked Allen about,

"In the initial investigation,

what did they do or say?" And he said,

they came, they talked to him for about 10 minutes

and never was asked another question.

And I remember telling the GBI,

"That's my daddy.

I know what he's capable of."

But Allen said that the first thing he told

the GBI agent was he said,

"Look, my dad killed my mom."

And Allen told me that he knew

that the violence against him was never gonna end.

He had to go. And he left.

I wound up, uh, leaving

and staying with my aunt,

staying in LaGrange.

Then the next thing I know,

I was fixing to join the Navy.

And that was probably the best thing

that ever happened to me in my entire life.

Allen told me that, you know, his brothers,

because they were younger than him

and, uh, they had little choice

but they stayed with Marshall.

I haven't talked...

to my blood brothers

in God knows how long.

I don't even remember how long.

I can feel the pain and the thing

that he was reliving.

And I promised him. And I said, "I will do all,

everything within my power

to find justice for your mom."

We needed to know everything

that was done back in the day.

But Sheriff Bailey died in the early 1980s.

Uh, he wasn't available for us to talk to.

We couldn't interview him.

I asked the Troup County Sheriff's Office

for a case file and it's nonexistent.

Since the GBI was involved,

the Georgia Bureau of Investigation,

I started to research with them

through their archive.

That time, the GBI worked at what was known

as the pleasure of the sheriff.

So basically, the sheriff had control of the outcome.

Well, actually, I expected a whole lot more

than what was there.

There was, uh, maybe

half a dozen interviews

and they were just extremely short in nature.

The first thing I looked at the top, it says...

You know, it described the crime and the line

where it says the suspect or the person arrested,

and it's blank.

As I read the report, I find that Troy Owen,

a GBI investigator,

in the statements themselves that Owen took,

Marshall Moore said he slapped her

several times that night,

not counting the time four nights before

when he hit her in the head with the bottle.

In the GBI's case file was a polygraph report

where Marshall had taken a polygraph.

On the polygraph report, it was indicated

there was no evidence of deception.

Based solely on that, GBI closed the case

into the death of Gwendolyn Moore.

Not to say, at that point,

that there's more than enough evidence

to convict the man.

But my God, how could you just discard

all those things?

And they did.

The report itself reflected the fact

that Allen Moore, in fact, had found his mother

beaten senseless hiding under a house next door.

Allen told the GBI agent,

you know, "My father killed my mother.

And if he finds out I'm talking to you,

he's... He will kill me too."

As I researched Marshall Moore's history,

I came to realize that prior to Gwendolyn's death,

Marshall had an interest in an attractive divorcee

by the name of Priscilla Shepherd.

And three months after Gwendolyn's death,

Marshall was married to Priscilla.

After an event like this, a man loses his wife

and all of a sudden three months later,

he's remarried?

Priscilla Shepherd was the daughter of Robert Shepherd.

The Shepherd family,

their family ties went all the way back

to the old Dixie Mafia in Phenix City, Alabama.

Dixie Mafia is a band of criminals

that call upon each other

to do certain crimes for them.

So they were in control of a lot of things.

If they were in a particular county,

especially rural Georgia,

and they could get a hold of the sheriff,

they ran that county.

If you look at a sheriff's badge

in the state of Georgia, it has the Georgia seal

in the center, not the county.

The sheriff has a ton of power.

And in the '70s, especially,

he's elected and once he's in there, he's in.

He works and does as he pleases

with virtually no oversight at all.

Priscilla Shepherd is married to Mr. Moore.

So if you look at the game,

six degrees of separation,

she's one.

So as an investigator,

you would have to start with him,

and then his connection to her.

And then look at the people connected to her

that would want to keep him out of prison,

so that she could have her husband at home.

By proxy, she's gonna be protected,

she's gonna have power.

So she doesn't even have to say,

"Hey, I don't want my husband going down for this."

Somebody is gonna make sure

that doesn't happen on her behalf.

That is absolutely a cover-up.

It kind of explains why this case never went anywhere.

To me, it's obvious that Robert Shepherd

used his influence with Sheriff Bailey

to influence the outcome of the investigation.

To the powers that be in Troup County in that time,

Gwendolyn Moore was insignificant.

She didn't mean anything.

She was just something that needed to be...

ignored.

At this point, I know that Marshall Moore

killed Gwendolyn.

But we're talking about a crime

that's 33 years old,

that you have a medical report

with nobody that can testify to it.

Dr. Krafka had died.

But he knew that there needed to be documentation

to lead down the road of what truly caused her death.

And he intentionally did that.

I get chills thinking about it.

When he did that, he gave us an outside chance

on us being able to solve the crime.

We don't have a prosecutable case

unless we can get a medical examiner to come in here

and they can make an independent determination

that she died as a result of a homicide.

I had gone up and spoke with Dr. Sperry.

He's heralded as, you know, one of the best

forensic pathologists in the country.

In 2003, I was the chief medical examiner

for the state of Georgia.

Once I read the death certificate

and, you know, it was the kind of thing

that made the hair on my neck stand up a little bit.

There's something wrong here.

Something bad wrong.

I mean the question is,

did the beating have something to do

with her death?

We need to conclusively say

that there's an injury

that a pathologist can testify to

that caused Gwendolyn Moore's death.

There's not but one thing we can do,

and that's we're gonna have to see

if we can get this body exhumed.

What I cautioned him about

really regarding the exhumation

was there is a huge chance

that, um, I wouldn't be able to find anything at all.

And at that point, you know,

we're talking about 33 years in the grave,

and it's a...

It's a long shot.

Nevertheless, you know, Clay and I,

you know, we wanted to make sure that we exhausted

every single avenue.

The family, over the years,

had gone through so much trauma,

we just wanted to make sure

that they were on board with what was fixing to happen,

we were fixing to open some old wounds.

And we wanted their blessing to do so.

So we had to get Allen and Leslie

and Ms. Pat Terry,

the family members to be on board

with what we wanted to do.

Marshall being a suspect in the case,

I don't wanna involve him,

his opinion or even knowledge

and knowing the fact we're exhuming the body.

I said, "Clay, if you think

that this will get to the bottom of it,

then we got to do what we got to do."

To the person, every one of them said,

"We wanna know the truth about what happened."

Justice needs to be done in this case.

Everything about this case hinged on the result

of this exhumation.

If the autopsy was unsuccessful

as far as finding evidence of her death,

you know, all... Everything that we've done

was for naught and it... We were fixing to know

within just a few hours where we stood,

if we stood at all.

As they start taking her body out,

the vault actually generally fills with water,

and because of the grass clippings and the tannic acid,

the skeletal remains

turn just as dark and black as ebony.

Fortunately, because her body

would have been laid in the casket, the...

All of the skeleton was in the same position.

Like one would see in the, you know,

bodies at Pompeii for instance,

I was hoping in a sense and so was Clay

that there would be skull fractures.

He places the head down,

when all of a sudden, he says

her nose has been broke more times than I can count.

And all it does is make you say,

"Thank God we're doing this.

We're, you know, we're on top of the mountain."

And then the next sentence,

"We're in the valley."

I could not find any skull fractures,

especially any large injuries that would,

in and of themselves, be lethal.

Lynda and I both sunk down on the floor.

We're sitting in the autopsy room

at the crime lab and, I mean,

we're just devastated about it.

Here we are, we disturbed this woman from her rest.

The family, God knows,

we dragged these people through this for nothing.

We've hit a dead end.

Oh, I was emotional about it.

Lynda had tears running out her eyes too.

And she's, you know, we...

Well, we did the best we could.

It was just a situation where no fracture,

this is going nowhere. It was a total devastation.

As we're sitting there,

feeling sorry for ourselves

and for failing this family,

putting them through this,

Dr. Sperry is continuing

to rebuild her body

starting from the neck down.

Although the larynx was gone,

there still was a bone that I had not looked at yet.

All of a sudden, Dr. Sperry said,

"This woman was violently strangled."

And I couldn't believe it.

Clay and I, we looked at each other,

our eyes got so big.

We actually thought we hadn't heard

what Dr. Sperry had said and he repeated it and he said,

"This woman was violently strangled."

And Clay and I because we had sunk

to the floor, we jumped up.

I had found the elements

of the hyoid bone.

The hyoid bone is, uh,

deep in the tissues of the tongue.

Lo and behold, they were fractured.

And, uh, what it told me

as soon as I saw those

is that she had been strangled.

Well, the medical examiner, Dr. Joseph Krafka,

he put the cause of death down

as respiratory arrest

and pulmonary edema.

I'd say you've just went through...

Other than the birth of my children,

the biggest rollercoaster ride

you've ever been on of emotion in your life

and that includes the death of your parents, you know.

Oh, God. I mean, I have chills thinking about it now.

It's just elation, you know,

by God, we were right.

When her hyoid bone was crushed,

she died

within a matter of just a few minutes.

At that point, she...

was placed in that well by someone,

and that same someone that strangled her to death,

I am 100% confident

that it was Marshall Moore.

Dr. Sperry's autopsy made our case, quite frankly,

because without that finding of the fracture in her neck,

we would not have been able to pursue that case.

It's now a homicide at the hands of another.

Had we just drawn a blank from the exhumation

and the autopsy,

we would have stopped

the investigation at that point.

We would have been at a dead end

and he would've gotten away with murder.

We knew what the preliminary result of the autopsy was,

so while we were waiting

to get the official result in writing,

we called Marshall in.

This situation is something that, you know,

I was connected with from my childhood

that it had come full circle

and here I was, heaven, you know,

God giving me the opportunity to make this right,

to make it right for myself and for my dad.

My dad, God, he would've given

anything in the world

to have been able to have the opportunity

to do what I was doing at this point.

He would've been elated

to have been able to ask Marshall Moore the questions

that I was about to ask, you know,

to try to right the wrong he knew so long ago

that had been swept under the rug, you know.

I knew what he had done.

And he knew that I knew what he had done.

It was... It was tremendous,

tremendous amount of self-satisfaction for me.

When Marshall came into the jail,

he was rather stoic.

You know, he didn't have a lot to say.

He knew that the train was coming.

Marshall and Priscilla were still living

in the same house that, uh,

he and Gwendolyn lived in, everything,

all of the sons are there, except Allen

with his obvious absence.

I don't understand how a person can do that.

In Marshall's interview,

he went back over

what he said were the events of the night

in which he admitted,

um, slapping her to the ground

because he was upset,

because the kids were at the swimming pool.

And then, uh,

he said that he went to get the kids,

and when he got back, she was gone.

As the interview progressed,

he seemed like he gave the air

of he was justifying what he did.

He said, "I don't see what everybody's

so upset about it. She was just a drunk."

How damn callous can you be?

You got children with this damn woman.

You beat her like a dog every day of her life.

And you got... That's what you got to say about her?

After all these years

and after everything he had done,

uh, I could not believe that this man

still had no remorse, whatsoever.

During the interview, Marshall stated,

Sheriff Bailey asked him,

"Would you submit to a polygraph test?"

And on the 18th, that test was administered.

Marshall Moore said that Sheriff Bailey told him,

you know, "If anybody asked, you passed the polygraph."

The fact that Marshall Moore said

that the sheriff told him,

"Just tell everybody you passed the polygraph",

that absolutely supports the theory

that there was some cover-up.

When dad got arrested,

I was sad because he is my dad.

I was mad...

because I was thinking,

"How in the heck could you do this?

When we're your... You're...

You are the one that's supposed to protect us."

To see him have to walk in that jail,

it was gratifying to me.

You know, I felt like we were able to accomplish

righting a tremendous wrong.

And all of a sudden, we learned, you know,

Marshall had... Did have throat cancer

and he was currently being treated for it.

So he was released on bond

and, you know, you think,

you know, surely to God,

we're not gonna lose the ability

to find justice for her because of this.

But it was obvious that our trial

was gonna be delayed.

It was a disappointment. I wanted the world to know

the truth about what had happened.

And at this point, all there is to do is wait.

Several days after we had arrested Marshall Moore,

we had a large storm in town.

And, um, it was a pretty violent storm,

a lot of wind damage and so forth.

Uh, I know it sounds crazy and I've never believed

in the supernatural, but...

some things I can't explain.

Next morning, I get up and I look outside.

And there's my, um,

pickup truck that I just bought,

and a pine tree has literally broken off,

and lands on top of my pickup truck,

and crushes the cab, and crushes part of the roof.

I got in my truck even though it was crushed

and I had to drive with the roof on my head.

And he had asked me if I'd help him

get it over to West Georgia Paint & Body,

which was in LaGrange.

I met a young man named Tim Wilkerson.

And I asked for an estimate on getting my truck fixed.

While we were there, we were talking to Tim.

And it was, you know, a small community.

Everybody knew what was going on

because of what he had seen

the work that we had done in the Moore case.

He said, "You know, my father had disappeared

in 1987 around Thanksgiving."

It was filed as a missing person case

and it had gone cold.

He said, we think something happened to him,

and do you think you can look at that case?

He was a good daddy. He, uh,

he didn't raise his voice very much, you know.

He put us in right direction, you know.

He was, uh, I guess you'd say,

in my eyes, a perfect father.

Our whole family was real close.

Um, but he was always involved

in Little League Baseball

and the chief of the volunteer fire station

that's right down the road from us.

When my father went missing,

of course, we'd been to the sheriff's department

and talked to them and,

you know, told them everything we knew and, um,

they were doing their investigation, you know.

Um, but it just seemed like

everybody was coming up with nothing, you know.

It had been 16 years

since Fred Wilkerson disappeared.

And Tim, of course, he was searching for an answer

and, um, thought that there was an outside chance

we might give it to him.

I just feel like my dad sitting up there,

putting his hand on my shoulder,

and pointing me in the right direction.

With the information that Tim had given us,

it was time to go to work on this case.

In reviewing the case file, you know,

it just made no sense.

Fred Wilkerson's car had been found

at the Atlanta Airport and it had been wiped clean

of fingerprints.

If I'm Fred and it's my car,

there's no need to be hiding the fact

that I was driving it.

Also, there were two uncashed payroll checks to the tune

of well over $1,000 that were in the console

of his car.

The investigating agent or the GBI's theory

was that Fred had just left to go start a new life.

It didn't make any sense to me.

Hell, if he was gonna do that, he surely wouldn't have left

$2,000 worth of paychecks in the...

In the console of the car, uncashed.

It made no sense.

I think this is no longer a missing person case.

This is a murder case.

Someone murdered Fred Wilkerson.

When I found the case,

it got this kind of age on it.

Well, first place to start is with the victim.

And try to find everything that you can about anything

that would lead anyone to have a motive.

One of the first people I talked to was Tim.

Investigators over the years,

uh, you know, would tell me,

"Hey, I'm helping on your dad's case so far.

I'm working on your dad's case,"

of course you... Your hopes get up high,

and it's like nothing ever came out of it,

you know, for whatever reason.

Uh, but Clay is the first investigator that came

to our house and he started from day one,

he said, "You know, I wanna know everything,"

just so we filled him in from the start.

Fred was just, you know, happy-go-lucky,

just nice fella.

He drove a delivery truck.

He sold and delivered beer.

And he would stock stores in the area

where I was the police chief.

He had been a family man,

but Fred also had a reputation

for being a little bit of a ladies' man.

He had had a long marriage with his wife, Carolyn.

But he had got into a relationship

with a woman that he worked with.

Her name was Connie Quedens.

We actually went to her house

and did some work around her house,

uh, first time I ever met her, you know,

that was before I knew anything was going on,

you know, between the two of them.

But I just felt like she was trouble

from the start, you know.

She didn't like me and I didn't like her,

you know.

Fred ended up leaving his wife.

Connie ended up leaving her husband,

Gary Quedens.

My parents were married for 22 years,

and I just couldn't understand

why he'd give Connie the time of day, you know.

But I never understood what the attraction was there,

you know.

Fred had purchased a piece of property,

and built a home that he and Connie would move into,

and then it would be their residence.

And he's got the house built.

Daddy put all of his money in it,

all of his time and labor.

It was a very nice home.

It was spacious.

Uh, it rested I think on about 23 acres of land.

It was a dream home.

Connie wanted a swimming pool behind it

and Fred doing everything he could to please her,

went and borrowed money from a friend of his.

At that point, Fred was about out of...

You know, his finances were stretched.

Everything he could muster and scrape went

into the house and the things that she wanted.

When the house was complete,

Fred moved into the house with Connie.

Connie had her two children.

Tim moved in with Fred.

Shortly after Connie convinced Fred

that he needed to deed the property

over to her to help her in her pending

child custody case and divorce,

so that way she would have custody of the children.

And he did.

On October 14th, 1986, after only a few months

of dating, Fred deeds the property to Connie.

He didn't deed half of it to Connie,

he deeded it all to Connie.

She had a pull on him.

I don't really know how to explain,

but she's very manipulative.

It was a few months before Thanksgiving 1987,

uh, when she picked a fight with me,

and then she called the sheriff's department

to have us removed from the property.

We hadn't touched her at all, but it was...

Uh, she actually reported that we were chasing her

with axes... With an axe.

So, two sheriff cars came in the driveway sideways

and, uh, they took us down to the jail.

We had to sign papers and everything to get bonded

out of jail but...

So after that, she wouldn't let me back

on the property and she gave my daddy

till midnight that night to get his personal items

out of the house.

Shortly after Fred moved out, she brings her ex-husband

back into picture.

She moves Gary Quedens back in.

And he assumes, uh, Fred's place at the house.

Tim and his dad get an apartment in LaGrange.

Two days after Thanksgiving, Fred had to make a trip

into Tennessee the next morning.

He had gotten approval from his boss to let me ride

in this big truck with him the next day,

uh, Saturday morning.

He went to bed to sleep and get up,

drive all day.

And when I got home that night,

it's probably around midnight, you know,

that's when he was... I notice he was missing, he was gone.

You know, there's no cellphones back then,

of course.

But I knew something wasn't right

because he always took the pocket knife

and all that and all that was laying on the dresser,

you know, where it's like he'd left

in a hurry or maybe just planned to go

for a few minutes somewhere but,

uh, he didn't... Didn't show back up and,

uh, next morning, of course, he didn't show up for work.

It was totally out of character

not to be at work and or to be late,

it just... That just didn't happen.

Called everybody that we knew to see

of anybody had seen him and no one had.

So then Monday, I filed a missing person report

and most of the deputies knew my father.

They said, "Oh, Fred? Fred's run off somewhere.

You know, he's off somewhere having a good time," you know.

I knew something bad had happened.

We left each other notes everywhere...

Every time we left the house, you know,

let each other know where we were at.

We were searching, we just gave everybody

stacks of flyers and everybody went

and put them out everywhere.

In 1987, before my involvement in the case,

I saw Fred Wilkerson's picture

in just about every store I'd walk into.

And there it was, you know,

Fred Wilkerson, missing person, you know,

the folks have a big interest in it, you know,

they liked Fred, and nothing.

Anytime that you have a situation

where someone disappears,

the person that has an immediate relationship

with someone else, you have to think

that they might surely have had some involvement.

Mike Newsome was the investigator

at the sheriff's office in 1987.

I interviewed Connie Quedens and of course we asked her

about her relationship with Fred Wilkerson,

which she said they had been in a relationship,

that relationship had ended.

Asked her had she seen Fred within the last two weeks,

called him or heard from him.

She said, no, she had not seen him,

heard from him, talked to him.

Connie Quedens was a suspect,

but at that point,

I did never have enough information

to arrest Connie Quedens or anyone else.

She gave him all the answers that, you know,

and she wanted to give him and they,

you know, at that point, they moved on.

A few after weeks after this,

around Christmas in 1987,

Fred's car is located at the airport.

The path followed by investigators

was that Fred up and left,

acquiring a new identity.

But it's easy to go back

in Monday morning quarter back,

but as far as I could see,

a blind man with one eye and half sense

would immediately turn the focus

of the investigation to the husband.

It appeared that Gary Quedens

had gained financially from this thing.

You have to think, "Well, maybe

if this was all a plan,

that he may have been part of that plan."

I believe that Fred Wilkerson was killed

the weekend of Thanksgiving 1987.

What needed to be established was,

"Where were you that weekend?"

Well, Gary, we talked to him and he had said,

he and the boys had gone to South Florida.

He said that they drove down there,

then the car had a transmission problem,

and that they were pretty much stuck

in Tampa the whole weekend.

Then Gary had purchased a new vehicle.

I checked the dealership in Tampa and it was true.

When Fred disappeared, he and the boys

were in Tampa, Florida.

He might be away from what I think

was the time that Fred Wilkerson was killed,

but I don't know how complicit he might have been

in the total picture of what happened to Fred.

At that point, I sat down with Tim again.

I asked Tim, I said, "Is there anything else

that would help us understand

anything else about this case?"

Tim tells me that Connie has stayed in the house

since his father had deeded the house

over to her in 1987.

And he said that in 1994

seven years after Fred disappeared,

Connie Quedens had filed a petition

in the probate court to have him declared dead.

She held a life insurance policy on Fred

for over $30,000.

Tim had no idea about this insurance policy,

until Connie filed to have Fred declared dead.

She'd been paying the premium on that policy

ever since Fred disappeared.

It's like putting money in the bank.

She kept making those monthly payments.

So, she was declaring him dead, so she could...

she could collect that policy.

Um, some of the investigators had said

that there's no motive there, but I said,

"Well, that's enough in my eyes."

In '94 when the action was taken

to have Fred declared deceased,

that became a news item.

And in the article, it read that in 1987,

Fred's car had been found at the Atlanta Airport

in the long-term parking.

Tim said in '94 that his lawyer got a call

from Lisa Hullderman

with a string of new information.

And he called the sheriff's office.

But for whatever reason,

the investigator who had the case

never contacted this young lady.

And at this point, after finding this out,

"Oh, my God, you know, this...

this could be the straw that breaks the camel's back."

I said, "You got to talk to her."

That next morning,

I'm on the way to Charleston.

I'd known Connie Quedens my entire life.

Tim and I went to school together

and Fred, uh, he was such a sweetheart.

He would do anything for anybody.

A few days after Thanksgiving,

we found out that Fred was actually missing.

I believe we read it in the paper.

He never not called his kids,

so we were all very concerned,

but Connie's reaction was nonchalant.

So Saturday November 28, 1987,

I come in from work to my parents' house

and my little sister Shelly is on the phone with Connie.

And Connie is asking a favor of her

and she told her that she couldn't,

um, but I had just walked in.

Connie asked me if I could drive her car

to the airport and pick her up.

So I was like, "Okay, fine."

She's like, "Just go ahead and head to the airport

and just pick me up in front of the terminals."

When I got there,

she was standing out in front of the terminals.

We drove back to LaGrange and normal conversation,

nothing out of the ordinary,

just an average day.

Connie never seemed nervous, um, at all.

She didn't even think anything

about picking Connie up at the airport

until seven years later, 1994,

she learned that Fred's car was left at the airport.

The newspaper article, that's what made

the alarm bells go off in my head.

At that point, she thinks, "Oh, my God.

I very well picked Connie Quedens up

when she delivered that car to the airport."

This revelation

would absolutely turn this case around.

And as we talked about the time of the things

that were going on, all of a sudden,

she does kind of gets this look about her

and she said, "Oh, my God."

There had been a well located on the 23 acres

that was Connie's home.

Connie had myself

and her sons clearing up brush,

and sticks, and rocks,

and she was closing up this well.

She had us throw all this stuff down

into the well to help fill it in.

Okay.

I realized,

"Did I help cover him up," you know.

God, all this comes together,

and it's just,

"Oh, hell, Fred is in that well."

There are times

when you are involved

in a case like this

when you know, it just comes to you in your heart,

you know, I've got the answer,

I've got this.

You know... you know,

call it fate

or divine intervention

or just dumb luck, I don't know.

But here I am still waiting for Marshall Moore's trial,

and now I might have another body in a well.

What are the chances?

All of a sudden now, we've gone

from a case that's absolutely

going nowhere to having a very strong suspicion

of the location of Fred Wilkerson's body.

I told him, her personality can change

to whatever she wants it to be.

Connie could be the nicest,

the sweetest, the most giving person,

and then in the next time,

she is conniving and mean,

and I call her a snake.

She'll just kind of slither in on you

before you even realize it.

Before I leave, she says, you know,

"You do understand that Connie is evil

and she's not above anything."

I assured her that I know that.

And, uh... But she's gonna pay for the evil that she did.

I assured her of that.

Clay calls me up and says,

"Pete, you won't believe this."

And I said, "What?"

He goes, "Lisa Hullderman picked Connie Quedens

up from the airport the night Fred Wilkerson went missing."

And I remember saying, "You are kidding me."

He goes, "No, I'm not kidding."

And I said, "Clay, get a search warrant.

That's what we need."

You know, he called me immediately because, I mean,

he was excited and he said that he thought

that'd be enough for us to get a search warrant

to search the property.

That scared me to death because I knew

if I didn't find the body there,

then that's probably the last hope ever.

Troup County Sheriff's Department,

Georgia Bureau of Investigation

and the District Attorney's Office

were out there to execute the search warrant.

Connie's not there.

Within those few minutes though,

however, she drives up.

You could tell from her demeanor,

she knew that we were there for business.

I knew that in her initial interview in 1987,

she denied having any contact seeing Fred Wilkerson

at all the week of Thanksgiving.

Had she seen Fred within the last two weeks,

called him, or heard from him,

or spoken to him anywhere.

She said, no, she had not seen him,

heard from him, talked to him.

I asked her again and she said,

the Friday night after Thanksgiving

that Fred's in her house,

that Fred came over.

We were going to discuss, uh, our situation.

Everything that she's saying now

is totally 180 degrees

from what she said when she...

Anybody's originally questioned her about anything.

Either she was lying then or she's lying now.

And all that does is strengthen our case.

I asked, after Fred's disappearance,

there seemed to be an urgency in filling up

an old well that had been used.

She... Of course, she's very evasive

about anything about that.

I said, you know, "We have a search warrant

and we're gonna search the premises in your house."

I said, "And we're gonna start at this location

on top of the hill at the old well up there."

And at that point, her demeanor changed.

We discussed the fact that if we find Fred's remains,

we're gonna arrest her right then and there.

And Connie's reply to me,

"If he's in it, I don't know anything about it."

I thought to myself,

"Yeah, you don't know all about it," you know.

As we're conducting an interview with Connie,

they start the excavation on the well.

They couldn't find the well, you know,

so I ran out there to, you know, find it for them.

Well, I just stayed back up toward the highway.

People in the community,

when everybody saw what was going on there,

everybody was stopped, lined... Cars lined up

down both sides of the highway, you know.

Uh, all the close immediate family was there.

At that point, we start talking about,

well, you never did mention the fact

that Lisa Hullderman came over here

and you had her go to the airport

and pick you up.

All of a sudden, she starts coming up

with these bizarre stories

that she's never told anybody before,

that a fella in a police uniform drives up,

he's got a nurse with him

and it's somebody that she think might...

Fred might have been involved and Fred

got in the car and left with them.

Then she had to make some provisions for Fred's car,

so she said, she didn't want it there because,

you know, Gary would be back home.

And she said, the only place she knew to take it would,

you know, she'd get rid of it at the airport.

We've been there probably two hours going over things.

And every word out of her mouth,

she's burying herself deeper and deeper.

But we got to find Fred.

That's the key to everything at this point.

We got everything that we need,

except Fred.

We're sitting there with her, it's probably

a little after lunch by now.

All of a sudden, the radio crackles a little bit.

GBI agent says, "Hey, we found human remains."

Connie, you're under arrest

for the murder of Fred Wilkerson.

The jig is up.

We put Connie in the car, drive her out.

That was a good moment to see that anyway.

We knew her life was gonna be hell from there out, you know.

One of the days you never forget.

The fact that we're dealing with cases, both of them,

it's ridiculously old and the bodies in the well,

it's just...

It was... It's unreal.

I swear...

I swear, uh, old Buddy had a hand in it.

So here we are, we're preparing

to go to trial on both cases,

Connie Quedens and Marshall Moore.

And the county, to our amazement,

would go to trial on Connie first.

We had acquired a mountain of evidence.

We asked Tim, uh, not to plan a funeral,

so we could, uh, bring the remains

of Fred Wilkerson into a courtroom,

so we could show the cause of death,

the manner of death,

and also how we identified Fred Wilkerson.

We were able to find DNA off of a,

um, femur bone.

Dr. Snow, he holds up the skull and points

to a hole in the back of the skull,

and he said, he was shot in the head execution style.

Trial was over. It only took three days.

At this point, all there is to do

is see what the jury has to say.

It's the most nerve-racking time of your life, you know.

I thought for sure there's no way

they could find her innocent, but there's always that chance that one or two jurors,

you know, wouldn't see it that way.

You never know, you know, until they actually say it.

And of course, we were all nervous about it.

You could feel there was a tension in the courtroom

while Judge Lee was reviewing the verdict.

Do we have the verdict, madam foreman?

Yes, Your Honor.

The State of Georgia

versus Connie King Quedens,

we the jury found the defendant guilty.

Guilty.

It was... it was a powerful moment.

They convicted Connie Quedens

of malice murder and possession

of a firearm during a commission of a crime.

And on the same day of trial,

she was sentenced to life in prison.

That was a big relief for us.

Uh, it all fell into place and I'm thankful for that,

you know, very much.

Um, Clay is a great guy, you know,

and we got to be good friends through all that.

We spent a lot of time together but, uh,

I think he would... he would do anything

in the world to help somebody, you know.

No. You know you're not supposed to ask me that,

because I really don't know

how to answer that and be nice. I really don't.

Of course, you know, you hate somebody who killed your father,

you know.

They say that people don't live long in prison.

We've gotten letters when she was

coming up for the... her parole.

And, uh, all we can do is just hope

that they keep denying it and keep her in jail

until she does pass away.

I think if she would get out,

she would definitely come looking for me.

If she would ever get out,

I'm going in hiding underground really far.

Changing my name, everything.

I'm just gonna be a completely different person.

Uh-huh. I'm not joking.

I think if she got out

that she would get revenge somehow.

After Connie's convicted,

we turned our focus to Marshall Moore.

We got another trial date.

And then we start being delayed and delayed,

because he's being treated for cancer.

This goes on for a year and a half.

And Marshall goes back into hospital and, you know,

his physical condition goes downhill

and he passed away before we get to trial.

Ultimately, he never stood trial,

but everyone knew what he did.

After Marshall's death, I was contacted

by a nurse that was treating Marshall during his,

uh, stay in the hospital.

She told me some things.

He asked her, he said, "You're not scared of me?"

And she said, "Why would I be, Mr. Moore?"

He said, "Well, they call me the boogieman."

And she said, "Why is that?" He said,

"Because I killed my first wife."

You know, here he was even in his dying day,

um, he pretty much believes he got away with it and,

you know, to a certain extent, he did.

He knew he's gonna be convicted

and I think

he put it off as long as he could.

But, you know, in my mind,

he had to stand to higher judgment.

When he passed, I said, "Well, okay.

No, we didn't take you to court

and you didn't get to be found guilty

in the court of law with your peers,"

but he can't... he can't dodge God.

I'll tell you this. Clay Bryant, he was, um...

He's my hero.

He wasn't afraid to rattle a tree.

You know, he's kind of like an old bulldog.

When he gets his teeth on you, you're got.

It's simple as that. You were got.

Uh, I don't want him on my bad side. Uh-uh.

I'm perfectly happy

with me and him being close friends.

I'm glad that he gave me some peace.

I know my mama's at peace.

It can't get no better.

And I don't know how I'd ever thank him.

My dad, he said, you know,

the greatest satisfaction that you can get in life

is when you help someone who couldn't help themselves.

Knowing his feelings about it

and what all transpired back in the day,

it was just a...

an absolute blessing to me

to be able to go and fix something

that my daddy always felt like was left wrong.

And I hope the things that he instilled in me,

well, I know that they led to some things

that brought justice to some folks

that wouldn't have gotten it.

And I thank him for it.