Solved cold cases in Georgia
4 documented cases.
Kendra Roberts
Kendra Roberts, a 27-year-old woman, was found shot to death on the morning of August 7, 2016, in a grassy area off Riverside Drive near the River Walk Apartments in Macon, Georgia, after a passing motorist saw what looked like a body and called 911; she had been shot multiple times at close range, including twice to the face and once to the back of the head. Within a day, investigators arrested her boyfriend, Daniel Cornel Hall, then 22, who was indicted for murder and spent roughly two years in jail despite a lack of physical evidence tying him to the killing. The case effectively stalled until a chance break in another jurisdiction. On August 17, 2016, ten days after the murder, police in Clarkston, Georgia had arrested Sterling Breynard Bell at a park after hours for an unrelated matter and confiscated a loaded Glock 9mm pistol from his vehicle; Bell never reclaimed the gun, and it sat in the Clarkston Police Department evidence room. In early 2018, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent, Brian Moore, took roughly fifty stored Clarkston guns to be test-fired and their casings compared against casings recovered from crime scenes. The casings from Bell's Glock matched those found at the Roberts murder scene. On that ballistics finding, the murder charges against Hall were dismissed in October 2018 and Bell was indicted in Bibb County on December 3, 2018. Bell, who had bought the Glock weeks before the killing by lying about his drug use, later pleaded guilty to Roberts' murder and was sentenced to 20 years in state prison, and in 2025 he received a separate 25-year federal sentence on related firearms charges.
Lita LaVaughn McClinton Sullivan
Lita McClinton Sullivan, 35, was shot to death at the door of her Buckhead townhouse in Atlanta, Georgia on January 16, 1987 by a man posing as a flower deliveryman, on the morning a hearing in her contentious divorce from millionaire James Vincent Sullivan was set to begin. Investigators long suspected Sullivan had hired the killing, but a 1992 federal murder-for-hire trial ended in a directed acquittal. The case broke only in 1997-1998 when the criminal accomplice was identified and flipped: truck driver Phillip Anthony Harwood, the man who had taken Sullivan's money, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter for a 20-year sentence in exchange for testifying against Sullivan. Sullivan fled the country in 1998, was captured in Thailand in 2002, extradited in 2004, and convicted of malice murder in March 2006 and sentenced to life without parole.
Stacey Lyn Chahorski
In December 1988 the body of a young woman was found along Interstate 59 in Dade County, Georgia, near the Alabama line, and for more than three decades she was known only as 'Rising Fawn Jane Doe.' In March 2022 forensic genetic genealogy identified her as Stacey Lyn Chahorski, a 19-year-old from Norton Shores, Michigan. Months later the same technology identified her killer as Henry Fredrick 'Hoss' Wise, a long-haul truck driver who had died in 1999 — making it the first known case in which both victim and killer were identified through investigative genetic genealogy.
Timothy Coggins
Timothy Coggins was a 23-year-old Black man who was abducted and brutally murdered in October 1983 near Sunny Side in Spalding County, Georgia, in a racially motivated killing. Prosecutors said Coggins was targeted by two white men, Franklin George 'Frankie' Gebhardt and his brother-in-law William 'Bill' Moore Sr., because he had been socializing with a white woman, a transgression the men viewed as a violation of the rigid racial order they wanted to enforce. Coggins was stabbed more than thirty times, his lungs were punctured, he was mutilated, and his body was tied with a logging chain to the back of a truck and dragged across a field off a rural road. His body was found on October 9, 1983, near a power line in Sunny Side, a small community south of Atlanta. The original investigation stalled within weeks, in part because those involved intimidated potential witnesses and because, as later evidence showed, the local sheriff's office of that era had ties to the Ku Klux Klan. The case stayed cold for more than three decades. It was solved not by DNA or forensic science but by criminal informants: while serving prison time on other charges, Gebhardt repeatedly bragged to fellow inmates and associates that he had killed a Black man, and roughly half a dozen of those men, including a former cellmate and one informant who wore a recording device while in a cell with Gebhardt, eventually came forward and testified. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Spalding County Sheriff's Office reopened the case in December 2016, made arrests in October 2017, and on June 26, 2018, a jury convicted Gebhardt of malice murder and other counts. He was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years. Moore pleaded guilty in August 2018 to voluntary manslaughter and concealing a death and was sentenced to 20 years; Moore died in prison in 2021.