Monty's killer will be caught
Maybe there's hope yet that there will be justice for Monty McAvoy.
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It was 26 years ago, in June of 1983, that the body of Holice "Monty" McAvoy was found in his trailer near Clarks Hill Dam in Appling. He'd been shot in the back of the head several days earlier.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation took on the case. A few years later the Thomson office's agent in charge - who since has retired - told me they knew who had killed Monty, but didn't have enough evidence for an arrest.
The trail seems to have gone ice-cold since then. But an entirely unrelated arrest last week gives hope.
Police in Lawrenceville, Ga., arrested a 65-year-old man as a suspect in a 1976 murder in Missouri. The man, Johnny Wright, was filling out paperwork for a routine background check for a job application when the decades-old warrant for his arrest showed up in the system.
"He paid $15 to get arrested," said Lawrenceville Police Capt. Greg Vaughn.
If only Monty's case were so easily resolved. Pat Morgan, the current assistant special agent at the Thomson office of the GBI, says the murder was before his time. He wasn't familiar with the case until he looked it up. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation Web site has a list of unsolved homicides; Monty's isn't even on it.
The most recent agent to whom the case was assigned has since left the GBI. In an odd coincidence, he happened to be visiting his former coworkers the day Morgan and I talked last week, and hinted that there might be new information coming.
I sure hope so. Monty wasn't exactly a high flyer in society, but he deserves justice just the same.
Monty was an interesting character. A little rough around the edges, but a nice guy. He was a fishing buddy of my oldest brother, and worked as a carpenter.
Back when I did such things, I ran a backhoe to dig the drainlines for the septic tank for Monty's trailer. I also dug up a nest of yellow jackets and got nailed by several of them before I could scramble off the machine and run like hell.
I remember going out on Clarks Hill Lake in a boat Monty built. It looked just like a boat built by a carpenter, but it floated. More suited to his talents was the cedar chest he built for my sister.
He'd be 55 now. And his killer - who very likely is reading this, hopefully sweating and guilt-ridden - has enjoyed 26 more years of freedom than he should.
While Wright's arrest in a 33-year-old case gives hope that the cops eventually will solve Monty's murder, the recent identification of a Columbia County man dead for 12 years also is a sign that they won't stop trying.
Certainly, Columbia County investigators never stopped working to find the identity of Lawrence Hopson.
Workers found Hopson's remains in 1997 while clearing land for the golf center property on Columbia Road (now the location of St. Teresa's Catholic Church).
Investigators first managed to trace the rusted handgun found at the scene to Hopson. Then investigators tracked down Hopson's only living relative, a brother in Virginia, and got a DNA sample.
Sadly, the brother died before the investigators confirmed that the bones did, indeed, belong to Hopson. But after all these years there's finally closure in the case.
e could use some closure for Monty McAvoy's case, too. But even after all this time, I'm confident the cops haven't given up.
Columbia County Sheriff's Capt. Steve Morris points to the case of Faxton Lamar Powell, whose murderer was arrested 12 years after Powell's body was found near Harlem, and the arrest of Patricia Ann Moore's killer eight years after her death. It's no fluke there are only three unsolved murders in Columbia County.
"We never forget," Morris says, "and we never say never."
For Monty's sake, I sure hope so.
(Barry L. Paschal is publisher of The Columbia County News-Times. E-mail barry.paschal@newstimesonline.com.)