• Publication: Athens Daily News
• Author: Joan Stroer, Staff Writer
• Original Publication Date: Friday, April 23, 1993

Alex Heckman graduated from U.Ga. last June, keeps a plaque propped on her desk at GPTV in Atlanta naming her the recipient of The Jennifer L. Stone Memorial Award for Creativity, and doesn’t go back to Athens often.

“Here I can think just about Jenny; I can think about her and I don’t have to see her house,” said Heckman, 23, who identified Stone’s raped and strangled body for police the day it was found there.

Heckman said she and Stone became instant friends two years ago in a beginning copywriting class at the U.Ga. College of Journalism, and the two were going to be roommates in Atlanta. She describes Stone as “beautiful,” “cool” and “independent.”

For Stone’s diverse group of friends, time after her slaying passed in a fog of grief, confusion, even blame, she said.

“Everyone just wanted a suspect so badly that we would have believed anything, and that’s really frightening,” she said. But she has since given up on “playing Matlock,” or speculating about her friend’s killer.

“I don’t think about that person because I don’t care — to me they’re not human, and she was.”

Raymond Stone, a retired engineer, said it is still very difficult for him to talk publicly about his daughter’s slaying, or to even make sense of it. Jennifer Stone was the youngest of his five daughters: a graduating senior and advertising major at U.Ga.

“I have no explanation — I wish I did. Perhaps we will when they finally apprehend the proper person,” her father said.

Since her death, normal things like watching television have become a strain for him and his wife, Joan, he said.

“A lot of television programs, we have a lot less appreciation for them. Some of them we absolutely turn off — violence, drugs, shootings.”

But the two still follow the slaying investigation closely and hope that her killer will be brought to justice.

“The (recovered) cameras gave us great hope because we knew they were missing, I thought surely there would be a trail that will lead us somewhere.”

The family has had an outpouring of concern from friends after Stone’s death.

“Our great strengths come from our family and our religion,” he said.

Stone’s sorority sisters were planning to remember Stone, “quietly and personally” today, Kappa Delta President Jennifer Kimbrell said.

A self-portrait of her now hangs in the chapter room of the Lumpkin Street sorority house, framed and presented by her parents to the group last week with two other photos taken by her, Kimbrell said.

Two memorial awards in her honor of have also been instituted. An annual award of one’s year full tuition will be presented for the first time this year to a rising senior — the Jennifer L. Stone Memorial Scholarship Award.

The $25,000 seed donation for the new distinction was given by the Amax Foundation, a mining company whose subsidiary employed Stone’s father for 40 years.

“The merit-based scholarship will go to a student who has demonstrated creative skills in advertising,” according to a press release from the university.

“Stone, who was an avid photographer, showed a flair for the creative aspects of advertising.”

The Jennifer L. Stone Memorial Award for Creativity was presented to Heckman last June at a graduation ceremony, and will be given annually by the student Ad Club.

“It was really pretty emotional,” she said. “It still is.”

[Photo caption] Jennifer Stone