After nearly a decade, investigators in Georgia, USA, hope to soon bring a man to trial for a double robbery-murder. They were helped by a witness who found a rifle and personal belongings of the couple murdered in 2015 in the stream.
Murdered Elrey “Bud” Runion with wife June.
| Photo: ČTK, Cobb County Police Department via AP,
Sixty-nine-year-old Elrey “Bud” Runion wanted to refresh the experiences of his youth on his old knees. He therefore submitted a request to the well-known classifieds website Craigslist Ford Mustang model 1966. It was January 2015 and soon a man called him saying that he had the car for sale if he wanted to come and see them, CNN recalled the beginning of the case.
Without hesitation, Runion got into his car with his wife, June, who was three years his junior, and drove from the suburbs of Atlanta nearly two hundred miles southwest to rural Georgia. When the couple did not come to watch the grandchildren the next day, concerned relatives contacted the police.
After the girls and their car, the earth collapsed in the seventies. The mystery was recently helped by a drought:
In 1971, two girls disappeared with their car. The case was solved only after 36 years of drought
The search lasted for several weeks, and the police found the husband dead, shot to the head. “They were lying on one side of the logging road under the trees,” then-County Sheriff Chris Steverson reported, according to the Augusta Chronicle. The paper specified that their car was submerged in a pond about 400 meters away. From there it was about a kilometer through the forest to the place where Ronnie Towns, then twenty-eight years old, lived.
Source: Youtube
According to CNN, the police discovered that he was the one who was supposed to be offering the car to Runion, although he did not have one for sale. Since then, the man has been charged with robbery and murder for the second time, but due to procedural complications, he has not yet appeared in court. He denies the guilt, he faces the death penalty.
Before his first arrest, Towns was hiding in the woods, when his father convinced him to turn himself in to the police. “He said: hey dad, I have nothing to do with this. And I think the same thing, our guy didn’t do it,” Ronnie Towns Sr. said at the time, according to CNN.
Driving a 1966 Ford Mustang:
Source: Youtube
Now, investigators in Georgia have announced a potential breakthrough. The witness, who was searching with a metal detector in the stream near the suspect’s residence, first found a 5.6 millimeter rifle and two days later a bag containing the mobile phone, credit cards and mobile phone of the murdered. Judicial District Attorney Tim Vaughn told the AP that the newly seized evidence could be useful.
“We already have a well-built indictment, but this will make it even better and stronger,” he told the agency.
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He added that the rifle from the stream has the same caliber as the murder weapon, but only further analyzes will show whether the perpetrator used it. Investigators also said they searched a home after the creek finds, apparently at the defendant’s residence, and seized additional evidence, according to CNN.
Towns’ first trial collapsed after problems in selecting a grand jury, with the courts finally accepting defense objections in 2019, the AP reported. A year later, the man was charged again, but the proceedings were slowed down by the covid pandemic. Towns remains in custody. Now the prosecutor hopes the trial could begin in August.
Source: Youtube
The Journal regularly informs about cases clarified years later thanks to new clues or the progress of laboratory methods. For example, the police found out some time ago schoolgirl killerwho killed 47 years ago, or she gave a name to a girl murdered thirty-five years ago. Tireless detective work as well she found the killer, who lived an orderly life in Australia after escaping from an American prison. But some searches also have a relatively happy ending, like the story of a woman from Pittsburgh whose family she found out after thirty yearsthat he lives in a nursing home in Puerto Rico.
