Solved cold cases in Georgia
7 documented cases.
James Greene
Atlanta police officer James Greene, 27, an Army veteran with four years on the force, was shot and killed in his parked police van shortly after midnight on November 3, 1971, while working a one-man unit. His badge and revolver were taken, a mark of the Black Liberation Army, a revolutionary group that advocated killing police officers. Prosecutors said they did not have enough evidence to take either man to trial, and one of the two men later blamed, Twymon Myers, was shot dead by New York police and the FBI in 1973. The case went cold for about 30 years. It reopened after the other man, Freddie Hilton, who by then called himself Kamau Sadiki, was arrested in New York City in 2001. Atlanta cold-case detective Jim Rose and Fulton County investigator M.C. Cox then crisscrossed the country finding former Black Liberation Army members who had seen the shooting or heard the gunmen brag about it. Hilton was indicted on July 12, 2002. At his trial in 2003, three former cell members testified that he told them he and Myers had killed an officer and that he had the officer's badge and gun; the defense said no physical evidence linked him to it. A jury convicted him, and he was sentenced to life plus ten years. The Georgia Supreme Court affirmed in 2010.
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 at the door of her Buckhead townhouse in Atlanta on the morning of January 16, 1987, by a man carrying a box of roses. It was the day of a hearing in her divorce from James Vincent Sullivan, a Palm Beach millionaire who was 600 miles away at the time. Phone records tied his home to a motel where three men had stayed under false names and to a rest-stop pay phone used 40 minutes after the shooting, but nobody could prove who was on the calls. A federal murder-for-hire case ended in a directed acquittal in 1992. In 1998 a woman in Texas told police her former boyfriend, truck driver Phillip Anthony Harwood, had described the contract and she had seen Sullivan pay him. Harwood confessed, Sullivan was indicted and fled, and he was caught in Thailand in 2002 after a television appeal. Extradited in 2004, he was convicted of malice murder in March 2006 and sentenced to life without parole. Harwood pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and served 20 years.
Rodney Castlin
Rodney Castlin, 36, a married father working nights as manager of the Wingate Inn in Kennesaw, Georgia, was shot once in the chest on December 7, 2000, when two men robbed the new hotel of $304. His wife was eight months pregnant. Investigators lifted a fingerprint from the front counter, but it was run through Georgia's database in 2000, 2005 and 2009 without a match, and the case went cold. In 2012 a search of the FBI's national fingerprint database returned the name James Lorenzo Randolph, a South Carolina man who had been arrested there for a similar robbery within weeks of the Georgia killing. That same year a Cobb County detective, John Dawes, learned through a Florida detective that a federal prisoner claimed to know about a hotel shooting north of Atlanta. In September 2014, after Georgia granted him immunity, that man, who said he had driven the getaway car, gave a statement naming Randolph as the shooter. U.S. Marshals arrested Randolph in Columbia, South Carolina, on October 6, 2014. A Cobb County jury convicted him on all counts on March 21, 2016, and on April 26, 2016 he was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences plus 35 years. The Supreme Court of Georgia upheld the convictions in August 2023.
Shannon Melendi
Shannon Melendi, a 19-year-old Emory University sophomore from Miami, disappeared on March 26, 1994, during a lunch break from her part-time job keeping score at the Softball Country Club on North Decatur Road in DeKalb County, Georgia. Her car was found at the gas station across the street, unlocked, with the keys in the ignition. A caller claiming to hold her led police to a pay phone where her ring was found, wrapped in a bag and tape. Suspicion fell at once on Colvin Hinton, known as Butch, the umpire of her last game, a Delta Air Lines maintenance worker with earlier convictions for attacks on women, who had left the club within minutes of her. Police searched his Clayton County home and found pits in the yard but no trace of her; six months later his house burned, and he went to federal prison for arson. There he talked to fellow inmates, one of whom said Hinton woke screaming and told him a demon inside him had killed her. After the DeKalb County district attorney's office took over the file, a grand jury indicted him and he was arrested on August 30, 2004. With no body and no crime scene, a jury convicted him of malice murder on September 19, 2005, and he was sentenced to life. The Georgia Supreme Court affirmed on June 12, 2006, and on July 17, 2006, Hinton confessed to kidnapping Shannon at knifepoint, raping and strangling her, and burning her body in his back yard. Her remains have never been found.
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.