The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgia county turns page on decades-old murder
Guilty verdict in brutal 1983 killing of Coggins finally brings justice.
For one family,
GRIFFIN, GA. — the guilty verdict against Franklin Gebhardt was justice long overdue. For Spalding County, the decision provided a measure of atonement that once seemed unattainable.
It wasn’t just the brutal nature of Timothy Coggins’ death — stabbed some 30 times, then dragged behind a pick-up truck, linked by a thick metal chain — that begged a community’s forgiveness. The indifference that followed was just as indicative of the attitudes of the time. Spalding deputies closed the investigation into Coggins’ October 1983 death, neither prioritized or publicized, after just two months.
“At one point they were pulled off to investigate a mailbox that had been destroyed,” Griffin
Judicial Circuit District Attorney Benjamin Coker said in his closing argument. “Timothy Coggins was just another dead black man.”
Thirty-four years later, Coggins’ family watched as Gebhardt — a hulking man with a long criminal record — was sentenced to life behind bars. As he faced the judge Tuesday, Gebhardt, now 60, hardly seemed the man who had once loomed so large in this rural county south of Atlanta, intimidating anyone who crossed him. After breaking down in tears on multiple occasions throughout the four-day trial, he expressed no emotion as Judge Fletcher Sams read the jury’s verdict, reached after seven hours of deliberations: Guilty on all counts.
“This has been taxing, not only to the Coggins family but the Gebhardt family as well,” said Heather Coggins, a niece of the victim who has acted as the family’s spokesperson. “It has been 34 years for us to be here and now we can go back to Tim’s grave and say, ‘hey, you can now rest in peace.’ ”
Prosecutor Marie Broder said she felt considerable pressure to get a conviction. And the odds were against it. According to a 2011 U.S. Department of Justice study, only 5 percent of crimes considered “cold” ever produce an arrest. Of those, only 1 percent end in a conviction.
“We prepared (the family) for the worst,” Broder said. “But I couldn’t bear the thought of having to turn to them and say, ‘I’m sorry.’ ”
Instead, she cheerfully posed for selfies with jubilant family members. On the other side of the courtroom, defense co-counsel Larkin Lee sat slumped in his chair, struggling to assess how the state got a conviction based on the testimony of seven witnesses, six currently incarcerated, and no direct physical evidence.
“I think it was the volume of ‘bad’ witnesses,” said Lee, who, in his closing argument, asked jurors to focus on the evidence, not a sense of atonement for the sins of the past.
Lee, speaking exclusively to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, said that’s exactly what happened.
“There was that need,” he said, adding the same fate likely awaited anyone charged with Coggins’ murder. Gebhardt’s brother-inlaw and alleged accomplice, William Moore Sr., is scheduled to go to trial in August.
Gebhardt maintains his innocence but “he’s always known there’s a chance this would happen,” said Lee, who acknowledged, in his closing argument, that his client is “racist” and “mean.”
“He felt untouchable,” said Chris DeMarco, assistant special agent in charge of the GBI’s Columbus field office. “That’s why they brought Coggins to Sunny Side, because they felt they were protected there. That was their turf.”
But his reign as a bully not to be trifled with was coming to an end. Beset with health woes, a byproduct of years of heavy drinking, and bedeviled by age, those who once protected Gebhardt out of fear were now willing to expose him.
“They were no longer scared of Frankie Gebhardt,” DeMarco said. “They were hiding this information for years. And they had stopped being afraid.”
The defense hammered away at the state’s reliance on witnesses with unsavory pasts and questionable motives. Christopher Vaughn, the state’s key witness, was a convicted child molester and an opportunist trying to make a deal, the defense argued, pointing out that he waited until 2015 — 8 years after his first interview with the GBI — to tell investigators Gebhardt had confessed to Coggins’ murder, along with another critical detail.
“Now he saw them,” Lee said in his closing argument. “And they were arguing. And they were leaving in a car. It doesn’t make sense. It’s reasonable doubt.”
But jurors apparently believed Vaughn. Coker said he was vindicated after investigators dug up a well on Gebhardt’s property. There, they found items — a shoe, a white undershirt, a knife handle missing the blade — matching what Vaughn said Gebhardt had told him.
Coker said he’s never tried a more important case.
“It’s a great win for Spalding County, a very important win,” he said. “I think it lifts a dark cloud that’s been hanging over this county for nearly 35 years. It sends a message. Times can change, and they are changing.”
For Spalding County Sheriff Darrell Dix, Gebhardt’s conviction closes a lamentable chapter in his department’s history. “I do feel like things have been set right for the Coggins family, for the Spalding County Sheriff’s Department,” Dix said. “I don’t care who you are, or where you come from, you deserve justice.”
“Is everything perfect? No. But we are a long way away from where we were in 1983,” Dix said.