33 years later, Ga. body ID’d as Lauderdale man
Drug deal likely went bad
MACON Ga. One mystery was solved when the body of a murder victim found in Georgia was recently identified as a Fort Lauderdale man who vanished 33 years ago.
But questions remained Friday in the story of 28-year-old William Maholland, whose body was found with a shot to the head. He is thought to have been slain in May 1984.
His body was dumped in Jones County, Ga., nearly 600 miles north of South Florida.
A Macon newspaper, The Telegraph, reported that a DNA analysis of the man’s remains, completed earlier this year, matched that of Maholland.
His childhood friend, Philip Schultz, of Pompano Beach, said he now can stop having nightmares about where Maholland ended up.
“I used to dream about him all time, him saying, ‘God, I need help,’” said Schultz, who runs an electrical wiring business. “I don’t have to worry about that anymore.”
A fisherman found the body in the Oconee National Forest after he noticed buzzards circling a particular area, the newspaper reported. Those details mostly line up with what private investigators told Schultz
and Maholland’s mother over the years, Schultz said.
He said Diana Maholland, a Venezuelan national, spent her life savings hiring more than a dozen private detectives to search for her son.
The last time she spoke to him was May 13, 1984, when he called her in London to wish her happy Mother’s Day.
The investigators suspected William Maholland — an American Heritage School grad — was killed in South Florida in a drug deal gone bad, and his body was dumped in the Everglades, Schultz recalled.
Diana Maholland moved back to Florida to look for answers and come to terms with what police were saying about her son’s involvement with drugs.
Georgia investigators’ effort to identify his remains went cold in 1987.
Jones County sheriff’s investigator Earl Humphries had thought the chances of identifying the slain man were slim.
“You don’t ever give up hope,” Humphries said.
In 2006, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation exhumed the man’s body and collected DNA.
Diana Maholland, motivated by advancements in DNA technology, in recent years provided Fort Lauderdale police with a sample of her DNA.
Police entered it into a national DNA index system. Forensic scientists at the University of North Texas matched the deceased man’s DNA with a sample from his mother.
In March, a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent called Humphries and gave him the news of the DNA match.
“It’s still a cold case,” Humphries said. “We’ve just gotten one step further now that we know who the victim is.”
They long had suspected the body belonged to a man who was from out of town because of his Bermuda shorts and a belt with swordfish on it.
Schultz said if he had heard about the belt on the body in Georgia, he would have known it was his friend, instantly.
It was one of a number of one-of-a-kind items his friend wore, including a pinkie ring with black coral carved into the shape of a fish.
The two frequented the New Wave Bar on Fort Lauderdale’s oceanfront strip, Schultz said.
“Billy,” as he was known, played guitar and hobnobbed with rock stars, his friend said.
“I remember all the good times we had,” Schultz said. “Lots of adventures.”
One of those adventures stranded them 135 miles off the coast of Cocoa Beach during a swordfishing trip.
After 12 days at sea, the U.S. Coast Guard rescued them.
Maholland had been dealing cocaine at a time when massive amounts of the drug were being smuggled into Florida from South America.
Schultz said his friend was involved in selling small amounts of drugs to high-end clients to supplement his income as an aspiring boat captain and a line fisherman.
“He didn’t need the money,” Schultz said.
After his friend’s disappearance, Schultz went to Maholland’s apartment in Port Royale, Fort Lauderdale, to investigate.
He immediately knew something terrible must have happened to his friend. His pet bird — a yellow-naped Amazon parrot named Damien, after the evil character in the Omen movies — was dead.
“That poor bird starved to death,” Schultz said. “He opened every kitchen cabinet, went through the garbage. He ate every chicken bone scrap he could find, drank all the water out of the toilet.”
“[Maholland] loved that bird. He took it everywhere. He had a 1,000-word vocabulary.”
A safe in Maholland’s bedroom had been pried open, then thrown in a trash bin.
Long before receiving the latest news, Schultz had accepted that his friend was dead, he said.
Diana Maholland didn’t live to learn what happened to her son. Records show she died at age 86, in 2015.