Murder charges dropped for man accused in 1985 killing
♦ The case has had issues since the beginning.
Charges have been dropped for a man who was accused of the 1985 murder of Elisha Lynette Whatley.
All charges against Danny Lee Wells, who was arrested in early 2011 and has been out on bond since later that year, were dropped on Thursday.
“We believe this was the right result and Mr. Wells is looking forward to putting this behind him and moving on,” said Wells’ lawyer Chris Twyman.
The case has had its issues since the beginning.
There were several suspects in the killing, including Wells, but there were several issues in bringing the case to court. Police arrested Wells in 1985 and charged him with the murder, but a grand jury declined to indict Wells saying there wasn’t enough evidence to move forward.
Since that time articles of evidence, including a rape kit, were destroyed or lost. GBI records show the evidence was either destroyed on Sept. 22, 1989, or sent back to the Rome Police Department on Aug. 15, 1989.
A partial kit was found in the GBI vault, which contained some of Wells’ DNA. That combined with an interview with Wells in which he denied having sexual relations with Whatley, RPD’s Terry Autry decided to make an arrest.
This time the grand jury indicted Wells but momentum in the case quickly dissolved.
“We tried to overcome the hurdles in this case but there were a lot of obstacles,” Floyd County District Attorney Leigh Patterson said. “The lack of physical evidence being the biggest thing.”
The last hearing in the case was in 2012 until recently.
Whatley’s family was key in keeping the hope alive to find her murderer and prosecute them.
“I hate for this family that we couldn’t bring the closure they need but that doesn’t change the fact that Lynette was a valuable person,” Patterson said.
Whatley’s murder was one of a series of murder cases featured in a cold cases series by the Rome News-Tribune printed on May 12, 2010.