- Publication: Athens Banner-Herald
- Author: Joe Johnson
- Original Publication Date: Thursday, April 23, 2009
Seventeen years ago today, Jenny Stone worked into the early morning hours on a project for a University of Georgia advertising class, then decided to take a break.
The 22-year-old UGA senior left the small carriage house she rented on North Hull Street sometime after 1 a.m. to get some fresh air, and returned home to surprise a burglar who had slipped in through an unlocked door.
They struggled in the kitchen, and the burglar forced Stone into the bedroom where he raped and strangled her to death.
He left the carriage house, exchanged two of Stone’s cameras for crack cocaine and disappeared.
That’s the best theory police have about how Jennifer Lynn Stone was killed April 23, 1992, according to W.J. Smith, a former Athens-Clarke police lieutenant who was lead investigator in the murder case until he retired seven years ago.
“We know that Jenny was last alive around 1 a.m., because that’s when her boyfriend called to check on her, and that her cameras were being sold and traded for dope at around 3 a.m.,” Smith said.
Witnesses described the person who sold the cameras as a light-skinned black man with a small mustache, someone they — and reliable police informants — never had seen before, the former investigator said.
The description seems to jibe with physical evidence investigators collected.
They found hair on Stone’s bed that bore traits of two races, Smith said, and DNA from the hair matched the killer’s semen.
“When the tech at the crime lab told me that she found characteristics of both black and white races in the hair, I asked, ‘Could that mean a mixed race?’ She said it could very well be that,” Smith said.
Dozens of people gave DNA samples that allowed investigators to rule them out as suspects. Others didn’t give samples but were discounted because they were white, according to Smith.
Tipsters even told police the killer might be the son of a local judge, but investigators found he couldn’t have committed the crime.
“With the information from the crime lab, along with the witnesses telling us that the guy with the cameras was a light-skinned black guy, we pretty much eliminated him as a suspect,” Smith said. Investigators also accounted for the judge’s son’s whereabouts.
After he killed Stone, the suspect apparently walked down West Hancock Avenue where he asked a man where he could sell a camera, Smith said.
“He pointed him toward a pool hall where dopers hung out and said, ‘Those boys down there might buy it,’ ” the retired investigator recalled.
The man traded one of Stone’s cameras there for a rock of crack cocaine, then crossed West Broad Street to trade the other camera for more crack at the Parkview Homes housing complex.
Police recovered both cameras, one during a drug raid off Jefferson Road. The film in the camera showed Stone’s nephews and nieces posing for a peanut butter advertisement she was working on, according to Smith.
Stone, an advertising major who minored in journalism, was president of a mock advertising company for a class at UGA, according to her close friend, Sandi Turner.
She was supposed to meet with fellow students twice on April 23, at noon and 6 p.m., to go over their project.
“She was the most diligent person in the ‘company’, so when she didn’t show up, they knew something was wrong,” Turner said.
Students went to Stone’s home about 7 p.m., and through a cracked door saw her body in the bedroom.
The murder was the first in years in the downtown business district, and Turner, who spent many nights at her UGA sorority sister’s home, said she and Stone both felt safe there.
“I blame one bad person for what happened to Jenny,” she said. “Something like that could happen anywhere.”
Turner and other friends actually were envious of the house where Stone lived with her two cats — a three-room brick and frame building in walking distance of downtown hot spots and across from R.E.M.’s office on West Clayton Street.
“We all loved Jenny’s apartment, because it was in such a prime location,” Turner said.
Stone could focus on art there, particularly photographing portraits.
“Jenny had this impish grin that was just so knowing and cut through everything,” said Turner, now the county government’s public information officer. “She was one of those people who just got it, who understood life in general and was really into her creative side, which is why we were such good friends.”
Stone had won an internship with a prestigious Atlanta advertising firm, and had she lived, she might be working in the big leagues, on New York’s Madison Avenue, Turner imagines.
“I think that Jenny would have gone on to wonderful things — a successful career, marriage, family — and just would have had a great life,” she said.
Although Smith and a team of detectives and Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents questioned dozens of potential suspects and tracked down hundreds of leads, no one has been charged with Stone’s murder.
Athens-Clarke Assistant Police Chief Alan Brown, who investigated Stone’s murder with Smith, also thinks Stone may have been murdered by a transient criminal, someone who left town from the bus station on West Broad Street, adjacent to Stone’s home.
But Brown’s not convinced.
“I never did lock into any one theory, and I’m still open to the possibility that it was someone she may have known, or that it was someone who was from out of town and came through on a bus,” Brown said.
Solving such a cold case may hinge on the DNA evidence.
Officials in all states collect DNA samples from convicted felons as they enter prison, and put their genetic profiles into the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), which contains information about both named and unidentified criminals.
But CODIS didn’t go online until 1998, and at the time, Georgia prisons were collecting DNA samples only from sex offenders, according to Ted Staples, the GBI’s manager of forensic biology.
Eight years after Stone was killed, in 2000, Georgia prisons began to take DNA samples from all convicted felons, Staples said. Some other states took even longer.
GBI crime lab officials check at least once a month to see if a criminal entered into the CODIS system has the same DNA as the man who left semen and hair when he murdered Stone.
Staples feels as though he has a personal stake in helping to find her killer — he was the GBI serologist who helped process the North Hull Street crime scene.
“I told the newer people in the lab that if we ever get a hit in this case, they’ll see me running up and down the hall,” Staples said.
The Georgia Supreme Court ruled last fall that investigators’ checking for DNA matches keeps the Stone investigation active. The Banner-Herald had sued to try to force police to release the file under the Open Records Act, arguing the case had grown cold and no longer could be withheld from the public.
Smith volunteered to help with the case even in retirement if authorities identify a suspect.
“I assure you that the Stone case was worked into the ground,” Smith said. “If a viable suspect is developed, I promised to come back and work on the case, and that promise still holds.”
Turner cried as she spoke about her friend.
“I can’t in a million years imagine why anyone would want to hurt Jenny, who just had this tremendous kindness toward other people and animals,” Turner said. “My personal feeling is if we find out who did this, she’s still gone, but it would be nice to have some answers.
“One positive side to this is it made me appreciate life more, and to be more diligent in caring for people and giving back to the community,” Turner said. “I think that would make Jenny happy.”
Anyone with any information about Stone’s murder should call the GBI at 1-800-597-TIPS.
[Photo caption] W.J. Smith, a former Athens-Clarke police lieutenant who was lead investigator in the Jennifer Stone murder, recalls how the house Stone rented looked 17 years ago. Stone, a 22-year-old advertising major at the University of Georgia, was murdered April 23, 1992. Below, investigators search Stone’s Hull Street home in 1992. (Tricia Spaulding / Staff; File / Staff)