• Publication: Athens Magazine
• Author: Wayne Ford
• Original Publication Date: February 2002

In a quiet moment while reading the headlines, Bernice Allen said her heart went out to the parents of University of Georgia student Tara Baker who was slain in her apartment a year ago. “I just prayed for her parents because I knew what they were going through and what they are still going through,” Mrs. Allen said from her home in Athens.

She and her husband, J.C. Allen, who died in April 2001, were left with only memories when their daughter, a UGA student, was slain 18 years ago. Time never completely healed the loss.

“You just get older,” she said.

“You think, ‘Where would she be today? What would she be doing? Would she have children?’ I see young people today and I try to find her in the crowd. I look for her face.”

Mrs. Allen said she has found strength through her faith and friends. But the smell of her daughter’s favorite perfume or a color she liked can rekindle memories of a child on the brink of womanhood.

In the Allen slaying, police made an arrest. A man was convicted.

But since that time, two other university students have been slain in Athens. The crime scene often provides the most important evidence. If what detectives find at the scene becomes the make-or-break evidence, then in all three of these cases it left police groping in the dark.

The slayings of the young women happened years apart. On Dec. 21, 1983, Donna Lynn Allen, 19, was found lying on the ground by a police officer on North Campus, where she had been stabbed to death on a cold, wintry night.

On April 23, 1992, friends found Jennifer Lynn Stone, 22, in her downtown Athens apartment, where she had been raped and strangled. On Jan. 19, 2001, Tara Baker, 23, was found dead by firefighters in her burning apartment on the east side of Athens. Police won’t say how she died, a fact that could reflect an absence of solid clues.

Murders happen every year in Athens. There are many that remain unsolved. Yet, when a student at the university is slain, the headlines speak in every newspaper in the state.

Of these three slayings, only the murder of Allen was solved. Yet there was no evidence at that crime scene to identify the killer. It occurred just days before Christmas after most university students had left Athens. The day was cold, wet and with a forecast of freezing weather.

Allen, a sophomore who worked two part-time jobs, had grown up in Athens. She left her downtown job for home sometime after 6 p.m. and had walked across Broad Street onto campus, where her car was parked. A man followed, attacked with a knife, and killed her along North Herty Drive next to the Academic Building. He disappeared into the night.

The killer left virtually no evidence. Police had no clues to identify a suspect. Yet police were forthcoming in releasing details of what they knew, apparently in the hope that further information confirming or related to those facts would surface. They readily disclosed that she had been stabbed to death.

“Had he not attacked two more people there might never have been an arrest,” said Mrs. Allen, who attended the trial of her daughter’s killer and realized what police faced in the initial phase of the investigation. The fact that the killer did accost two other women in Athens led to his arrest and subsequent confession. Warren Reid Hall 41, is still serving life in prison for murder.

In the Stone and Baker cases, police have encountered no such leads, even though they have put the microscope on numerous rape and burglary suspects.

But, the Stone case does have an ace in the hole. Using DNA from a small amount of seminal fluid obtained at the scene, police believe they can identify the killer if it ever matches to someone. In the past eight years, despite hundreds of comparisons, the killer remains invisible.

The Baker crime scene appears more like the Allen case: no viable witnesses and no physical evidence like DNA or fingerprints. A year has passed. The only public statement regarding her manner of death was in a fire department report in which a firefighter stated he observed “multiple injuries,” a description that reveals little and feeds conjecture.

Police are withholding the method of her killing; their reasoning, valid or not, is that crime scene details would be crucial in interrogating a suspect. “It’s important right now that only the person who killed her knows what happened—other than the police,” said Mark Wallace, Athens-Clarke assistant police chief.

After almost 10 years, the Stone case appears cold, but not completely as new leads occasionally come in.

Lt. W.J. Smith never comes to work at the police department that he isn’t reminded of the case. Three photographs of the senior journalism major are thumbtacked on his bulletin board. Stone died by strangulation.

“I think she died trying to defend herself,” said Smith, the lead detective for the case. Police know she was alive about 1 a.m., as she had called her boyfriend about this time. But how did the killer enter her ground-level downtown apartment, located at Broad and Hull streets?

Possibly, she left the door open after entering, and he slipped through the unlocked entrance. Possibly, she went outside and he came up and forced his way in. No one knows.

What appeared to be a major break in the case came when one of Stone’s 35mm cameras turned up about two months later during a drug raid in Athens that was unrelated to the murder investigation. A man and woman claimed to have bought the camera, and police determined the sale occurred only hours after Stone was killed. The other camera, as a result, was traced to a location in Oglethorpe County.

“But the investigation shows they swapped it for a rock of cocaine,” Smith said. The man with the cameras was led to the couple by Donald “Heavy” Wilson.

“Donald’s story to me was he was headed up to the door [of a boarding house on Hancock Avenue]. A guy said, ‘Hey man.’ Donald turned around and the guy said, ‘I need to sell this thing.’ Donald said he pulled a camera out of a brown bag. Then Donald’s story changed and he said it was in a pillowcase,” Smith said.

“Donald said it was a nice camera and the man said, ‘Where can I get rid of this?’ Donald said he didn’t know the guy.”

Smith said Wilson told the man about an area where he could probably sell the cameras. In the meantime, Earnest Brown Jr. came up and they talked. The camera was sold or traded. The man later pulled out another camera and this one, the investigation showed, was taken to Parkview Homes and sold.

This indicates that the man who had the cameras was most likely the Stone killer. And it indicates he didn’t know where to sell the items, leading to speculation that he was unfamiliar with the drug-dealing area bordering the downtown.

Brown, Wilson and another man, Larry D. Brown, were all charged in connection with possessing the stolen cameras, but the charges were later dropped.

These men, in turn, tried to help police identify a suspect. From their information, the suspect was described as a light-skinned black man, possibly in his 30s, maybe 5 feet, 10 inches tall, maybe a little taller, with slim-to-average build and a moustache.

“An average-looking guy,” Smith remarked. Were the men being truthful? “Did I have a reason to doubt it? No, but I didn’t have that much reason to believe them either,” Smith said.

Stone resided in a house next to the Greyhound Bus Station, a fact that has enhanced speculation on the crime. Could the killer have simply ridden in on a bus or left on a bus? No one knows.

“Right now, it wouldn’t surprise me if it was someone passing through. I’m open to anything,” said Smith. “But the odds are the guy who had the cameras is the guy who did the crime.”

Smith has traveled to Nevada, Texas, Louisiana and Florida tracking down possible suspects. Dozens of suspects have been tested through DNA. In fact, the DNA from the Stone case is now a standard check used by the State Crime Lab when it runs DNA on prison inmates.

Athens attorney Gerald Brown became knowledgeable about the Stone case while serving as chief assistant prosecutor for former district attorney Harry Gordon.

“It can be solved,” Brown said. “But this case reminds me a lot of the Clinton Bankston case, where we had all kinds of fingerprints.” Bankston was convicted of killing a couple in their home in 1987 and three more women later that year, all in Athens.

“We knew if we ever found the person who matched the fingerprints, we’d have the murderer. But it turned out the murderer was a young fellow about 16 at the time and his prints were not on record.”

About the Stone case, Brown said: “The police have done everything they could have done, but the person they’re looking for is somebody who does not fit into a local pattern. He doesn’t fit in the data banks on DNA.”

For police the case is the proverbial needle in a haystack. “That haystack is being torn apart one straw at a time,” Smith said. “If he’s in the system, then I suspect that one of these days it’s going to come up. I hope it’s in the next five years. I want to retire before I get to be an old man.”

Sharing Smith’s office is detective Mike Tyndall, a former street cop who is now a lead investigator in the Baker case. Tyndall won’t talk about the case. Ranking officers above him closed that option by their stance on the crime.

Baker, a first-year law school student, lived in a duplex on Fawn Drive in a relatively new development of townhouses and duplexes off Lexington Road. It is bordered on one side by an older subdivision of single-family homes containing a mixture of short-term renters and longtime homeowners. Baker’s two roommates were out of town when the intruder entered the residence.

What time did the killer enter? Police won’t say. Did the person enter during the night, kill Baker, then stay for several hours with her body before setting the bedroom on fire? Police will only say she didn’t show for a 9:30 a.m. class. The fire was reported at 11:25 a.m.

Is there a firebug in that area of town who evolved into a killer? Just weeks before on Dec. 25, 2000, someone entered an apartment in the same complex at 180 Deer Parkway while the male resident was away.

Firefighters, just as they did at the Baker residence, had to force their way into the building. A fire was found in the bedroom closet and there were “indications of multiple points of origin.” A window screen was found in nearby woods. The fire department was notified at 2:21 a.m. This indicates it was a person who prowled the area at night when few people would have been outside.

If the perpetrator set both fires, were the fires set to cover the crimes? Or were they a preconceived action of a pyromaniac? Another unknown.

Brown, who is not privy to evidence in the Baker case, surmised, “It is possible you’ve got somebody clever enough to try and destroy evidence.”

While the reluctance of police to talk about the Baker crime scene has led to public speculation on the manner of death, police are maintaining their posture on this strategy.

Will the Baker killer strike again? “There is always that possibility,” Wallace said. “However, we have not been able to ascertain that the killer has killed before. The FBI and GBI did a profile on our crime scene, and of course we’ve compared the case with other solved and unsolved cases throughout the country that are in any way consistent with our situation.”

Detectives have had a few possible suspects. “I would hesitate to use the word strong, but we have had several good leads, some of which we are still pursuing,” he said in November.

But no matter what the police do, no matter how the public perceives the investigations or the crimes, the human tragedy has its most enduring and hurtful moments with the parents of the young victims.

Mrs. Allen will never forget talking to her daughter about 30 minutes before the crime occurred. “She called to tell me she was on the way home because it had started to rain and was getting icy. I told her to be careful coming down North Avenue because it’s a steep hill.”

Mrs. Allen said her daughter’s boyfriend called the house wanting to know if she had arrived because he was coming over when she did.

“We just kept waiting and waiting and waiting,” she said, as her voice tightened. “When we got a call to come to the hospital, it was totally devastating. There had been an accident. We didn’t know what kind. We were just hoping it wasn’t her.”

The realization of the murder put Mrs. Allen and her husband in a state of shock. “Our pastor came out. He had lost a 6-year-old son a few months before this happened. He could relate to what we were going through. You’ve got to think on the good times. You can’t dwell on the bad. You can’t think about the person who did this to her,” she said.

“She loved school from the time she started until she graduated,” Mrs. Allen said. Like her father, who was a mechanic of excellent reputation and restored old cars, Donna Lynn Allen had an inquisitive mind and might have become a lawyer, a career in which she expressed some interest. She was active in church and loved children.

Coping with the loss of a daughter with this bright future has been a giant effort. “If you have support from your church family, your immediate family and friends, you can make it,” Mrs. Allen said. She has one other child, a son, but her husband is now gone. They never discussed the death of their daughter a lot. They didn’t have to. “He felt what I felt,” she said.

“Merle Haggard has a song—‘If We Make It Through December,’ which speaks of tough times with hope for the future. And whenever it came on,” Mrs. Allen said, “it was just our song.”

Wayne Ford, a former police reporter, is Oconee editor for the Athens Banner-Herald.