Justice at last in Georgia murder?
A story unfolding no more than about 70 miles from here is the stuff of the grimmest kind of crime movie. Except this one is about real life — and death. It’s about justice too long delayed and thus far denied, but justice that just might be on the horizon at last. It’s about what had been one of the coldest murder cases in Georgia, an apparent racial killing committed when Joe Frank Harris was governor and Ronald Reagan was president.
The case is old, but it is cold no longer.
Spalding County Sheriff Darrell Dix announced Friday that five people have been arrested in connection with the murder of Timothy Coggins, a 23-year-old black man whose body was found near a tiny Spalding County community named Sunny Side (a grim detail that might or might not make it into a screenplay) on Oct. 9, 1983.
At a news conference in Griffin, Dix said an investigation by his office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, based on new information authorities obtained about seven months ago, had led to the arrests of the suspects — two of them law enforcement officials. Dix did not go into detail about the suspected motive, but said that if the killing happened today, “it would be prosecuted as a hate crime.”
Just as mystery has shrouded the murder of Coggins for 34 years, mystery — or at least official secrecy — now shrouds the circumstances that led to the reopening of the case and the arrests of the four men and one woman, all white, now in facing charges in connection with the slaying.
Frankie Gebhardt, 59, and Bill Moore Sr., 58, face multiple charges including murder, aggravated assault and concealing a death, and both have “extensive criminal records.” Gregory Huffman, 47, a Spalding County detention officer who has since been fired, is charged with violation of oath and obstruction, as are Lamar Bunn, 32, a Milner police officer, and Sandra Bunn, 58 (relationship, if any, unknown). As the Ledger-Enquirer’s Lauren Gorla reported Monday, Huffman’s, Lamar Bunn’s and Sandra Bunn’s charges are all in connection with the recent investigation. (Note Huffman’s and Lamar Bunn’s ages.)
In a weekend telephone interview with the New York Times, Heather Coggins, now 40, a niece of the victim and one of several family members at the news conference, expressed gratitude to law enforcement authorities for their persistence in pursuing the case. She said police had been “extremely tight-lipped” even to the family: “We’re waiting just like the world is to see what happened and what the details are.”
Those details will be fascinating and, it is to be hoped, illuminating in terms of bringing this long, ugly, tragic saga to an end and those responsible for it to overdue justice. As of now, nobody has been tried, much less convicted. What authorities have learned in the last seven months, and how they came to learn it, should be a compelling part of the story.
This story was originally published October 17, 2017 at 5:13 PM with the headline "Justice at last in Georgia murder?."