- Publication: Athens Daily News
- Author: Stephen Gurr, Staff Writer
- Original Publication Date: Friday, March 10, 2000
In a case that has seen literally hundreds of dead ends, Athens-Clarke police are largely discounting the latest tip in the eight-year-old case of a slain University of Georgia student.
Last month, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation received an audiotape and letter from a private investigator in California who claimed to have information about the April 1992 murder of 22-year-old Jennifer Lynn Stone.
Stone, a senior advertising student from Roswell, was found raped and strangled in her three-room apartment on Hull Street in downtown Athens.
The tipster, who gave only the name “Frank,” also contacted the Athens Daily News and sent a copy of the cassette to the newspaper.
He claimed to have recorded a telephone conversation between a man and a woman while working on an insurance fraud case in Norcross in 1993.
The 30-minute tape contains cryptic references to a body, and makes mention of “pictures of that dead girl.”
“There’s no mention of Jennifer Stone, there’s no mention of anybody we can put a name with,” said Lt. W.J. Smith, who has worked the Stone case from the beginning. “There’s no reference to Athens … there’s nothing.”
Smith said five investigators have listened to the tape but have gleaned little from its contents.
He said it appears the telephone conversation may have been recorded illegally.
Most of the conversation is banter between a young woman and her boyfriend, with references to a party and the man’s plot to rob an acquaintance. At one point he asks the woman, “You seen anything on the news about that body?”
The woman replies she isn’t going to be “party to the crime.”
“I don’t know nothing about it,” she says.
Later, the man asks, “You still got those pictures … of that dead girl?”
“There was no indication anyone took any pictures of her,” Smith said.
Two cameras were stolen from Stone’s apartment during the murder and were later discovered by investigators in Athens and Oglethorpe County.
One was empty when stolen and the other camera still contained Stone’s film when police recovered it. Three men who said they acquired the camera from a light-skinned black male were later cleared in the case.
The men were unable to provide police with the name of the suspect, who traded the cameras on the streets of Athens for crack cocaine and $20 cash.
Smith said he has not spoken with the most recent tipster, but said the man called police and refused to speak with a GBI investigator involved in the case.
“We’d just like for him to talk to us,” Smith said. “I’m not sure he wants to talk with us. We would like to find out what his motivation is.”
The Georgia governor’s office, Athens-Clarke government and University of Georgia are offering a $13,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Stone’s killer.
If the newest development proves to be another dead end, it would only be one of many. At least 80 possible suspects have been cleared through alibis or DNA samples taken from the murder scene.
Smith, who has amassed a 60-pound case file on the Stone slaying, has personally traveled to Houston, Texas and Shreveport, La., to pursue possible suspects in the case. Neither suspect’s DNA matched the killer’s.
Late last year, police were hopeful of collaring a suspect in the killing when an inmate serving time for an assault on an Ohio woman confided to a cellmate that he raped and strangled a University of Florida co-ed in 1992.
“The DNA didn’t match,” Smith said. “We’ve run down several leads that just weren’t fruitful.”
Smith said he is hopeful that a proposed law requiring all Georgia felons to submit DNA samples will allow police to get the big break they’ve been waiting for.
“It’s gonna happen one of these days, if the guy isn’t dead,” Smith said. “We’re not gonna quit. One of these days, we’re gonna hit on the guy.”