After 28 years, authorities arrested a man in the cold case murder of a 20-year-old woman whose body was found near her car along a Georgia highway.
On September 14, 1998, Christy Dawn Myers left her Coffee County home, where she lived with her husband and their young daughter in Broxton, to visit a local store, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Several witnesses told investigators they had spoken with Myers at the store, the agency has said. After she left the business, Myers was found dead after midnight on September 15, 1998.
Myers’s body was located outside of her car on the side of the Broxton Fitzgerald Highway in Coffee County, the GBI said in a Friday, October 2, news release. She had been stabbed several times.
The case remained cold for nearly three decades, until testing of forensic evidence identified a suspect, James Lawrence III, of Irwin County, according to the GBI.
Lawrence, 47, was arrested on Thursday, October 1, on charges of felony murder, malice murder and aggravated assault in relation to Myers’ death.
The GBI didn’t specify a potential motive for the murder or whether Myers knew Lawrence.
“Over the past 28 years, the GBI’s Regional Investigative Office in Douglas and the Coffee County Sheriff’s Office have remained committed to seeking answers in Christy Myers’ death,” the agency said in a statement. “This arrest represents the culmination of those continued efforts.”
During a Friday news conference held by the GBI, Myers’ daughter, Chelsea Wolfe, said her mother “is not forgotten”, WALB reported.
“Although today brings us a little bit of closure, it’s only the beginning of a new chapter, but a chapter that we are ready for….It is a new day, a new dawn, and may justice prevail,” said Wolfe, who is now 29.
Wolfe detailed how Myers’ unsolved death “always weighed” on her.
“It was a little bit of a unique kind of grief because I was so young when it happened,” Wolfe said, per the TV station. “So I grew up with not knowing who she was and not knowing, you know, who she would be now. And just the small things that, you know, seem small to everybody else that mean a lot to me that I missed out on with my mother.”
Following Lawrence’s arrest, he was detained at the Coffee county Jail, according to the GBI.
After the criminal investigation, the case will be turned over to the Waycross Judicial Circuit District Attorney’s Office, which would lead Lawrence’s prosecution, the agency said.
The GBI encourages anyone with information on Myers’ murder to call the agency’s regional office located in Douglas at 912-389-4103 or the Coffee County Sheriff’s Office at 912-384-4227.
