Richard Hyatt: Keeping a guilty man behind bars

Jeannine Galloway has been dead 38 years and the man who killed her sits in a jail cell in Trion, Ga., hoping to be set free.

William Anthony Brooks is serving a life sentence for Galloway's murder and he will be reconsidered for parole in June. His plea for a parole in 2011 was rejected and officials said they would reconsider that decision in four years.

Letters asking the state to keep this pudgy killer locked up are being mailed and those who remember the brutality of this young woman's death can write their own.

What happened around breakfast time on the 15th of July 1977 will never be forgotten. Galloway was a gifted pianist who played church music and jazz standards. She was 22 years old and lived with her parents on St. Marys Road.

Hettie Galloway saw her daughter back her car out of the driveway with a man sitting beside her. Twenty-four hours later, her body was discovered in a field near Dawson Elementary School. She had been raped and killed.

Brooks was arrested in Atlanta. In two statements to police, he said after he raped her she started screaming.

He pointed a pistol at her and ordered her to stop screaming. He said the gun went off and he ran away.

Her death was another bloody event at a time that the city was rapidly losing its innocence.

The Brooks trial was the first televised murder trial in Georgia history. Jurors did not take long to first convict and then to call for the death sentence.

His case became a cause for the anti-death penalty movement and in 1986 a new jury from Morgan County sentenced him to life in prison.

Life without parole was not an option, so Brooks, now 60 years old, is eligible for parole.

Her parents never recovered. Until they moved, her bedroom was the same as it was that morning and a book she was reading was open to the same page.

But time changed many things.

Hettie Galloway, the first prosecution witness called at the original trial, died in 2007. Dementia wiped away the memory of her daughter's killing. Her father, Earl, died in 2013, a nice man with a bitter memory.

Bill Smith prosecuted scores of cases and retired as a Superior Court judge. He says it is one of the worst cases that occurred during his time in the district attorney's office.

He has written a letter to the state along with former colleagues Mullins Whisnant and Doug Pullen.

"I promised Mrs. Galloway that as long as I lived, I would work to keep him behind bars," Smith says.

If you want to help him, write the State Board of Pardons and Parole, 2 MLK Jr. Drive, Atlanta, GA 30334. Reference Prisoner No. EF-137251.

This story was originally published May 26, 2015 at 9:59 PM with the headline "Richard Hyatt: Keeping a guilty man behind bars."