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You are now listening to true Murder, The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them.
Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker Dck.
Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Good evening. On the psaltry August morning in nineteen seventy, the battered body of a young woman was hoisted from a dry well just outside Hogansville, Georgia. Author and investigator Clay Bryant was there witnessing the macabre scene. Bryant was tagging along with his father, Buddy Bryant, Hogansville chief of Police. The victim, Gwendolen Moore, had been in a violent marriage that was no secret, but her husband had connections to a political machine that held sway over the troop. County
Sheriff's office overseeing the case. To the dismay and bafflement of many, no charges were brought, that is until Bryant followed his father's footsteps into law enforcement and a voice cried out from the well. Three decades later, the book that we're featuring this evening is solving the West Georgia murder of Gwendolen Moore. A Cry from the Well with my special guest, State trooper and an investigator, Clay Bryant. Welcome to the program, and thank you so much for
this interview. Clay Bryant, Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about the case it was. It's been very a high point of my life, absolutely, and this book is testament to that. Let's start off right away with you were raised in Hogansville, Georgia, West Central Georgia. Your father was the local police chief. Tell us about your upbringing and some of the things that you learned from your father, Buddy Bryant.
Well, to be quite honest, for the most part, I was raised on the stateable police call. My dad was a local police chief, and.
I was.
Spent every week an hour I could with my dad. He was kind of my hero, you know. He was kind of a mixture between Andy Griffith and Chief Gillespie and a little bit of Will Rogers. He had a saying and some philosophy about everything. As Southern police chiefs go. He was well educated. He went to the Southern Police Institute. He was in the first graduating class of the Georgia Police Academy in nineteen sixty six. He was an FBI
fingerprinted expert. He was at he would. He loved his craft and he did everything he could to further himself in it. And uh, he also loved people. And that's the one thing that I admired about him most. He had time for everybody in the world. Didn't matter if you were, you know, the president of the bank at lunchtime at the city Club, or if it was one of the miscreants from in town that were banging on the door at Sunday morning at six o'clock trying to
explain what happened to him on Saturday. You know, it was just it was a it was a great place to live. Everybody knew everybody, and it was it was Mayberry. Uh. If you can envision that, I had a wonderful childhood. Yeah.
Now let's get to a time and a case that affected your father greatly, and obviously that's what this book is about. The events of August fourth, August third, and August forth in nineteen seventy. Tell us what had happened? You talk about A crowd had gathered gathered around South Lee Street at the old house adjacent to Junior Turner's yard. Tell us about the call that your father got and what happened to you and your father that day.
Well, as I did a lot of times, I was tagging along with my dad. I don't exactly remember what I was doing in the police station with him that morning, but he got a call from the Sheriff's office and there had been a body found in a whale just outside the city of Hoganville at that time time. The sheriff's office wanted my dad to go out and take
some photographs the body in the recovery. So of course he asked me, He said, you want to go, so ride in, jump right in a police call with him, and we rode out, myself and he and one of the other officers rode out just literally a stone's throw outside the city limits of Hoganville, and there in an abandoned well, about twenty feet down, you could see the body. It was looked as if it was in a fetal position, but like kneeling to pray. Uh, And I guess that's
just the way that Gwendolen landed in the well. It was a dry well that it had been curved to a house years before, and the house had burned down, and people in the neighborhood actually had been used in the old well to throw garbage in. And she was down in the well and there was a number of folks there. One of the kids in the neighborhood had found a body cause they were looking for from the
night before. It was, you know, said that she she they hadn't found her the night before, and she was her husband had been looking for her, and one thing and another. But there was probably twenty twenty five folks around. And we're talking about you know, rural True County, Georgia. Uh So there was just a few houses there, but everybody right close by was there watching the scene. And I never will forget a thing that moved me the
most about it. The definty sheriff went down on a cable that a record sent down as when they did put a cable around the lady and when they raised her up either, well, she was on that cable and you know, as a cable stretches, it spins around, and it was just a terrible display. And the sad thing is on the side of the well over there were three of her children, And yeah, I never will forget that that was that that site stayed with me for
a very long time and it does today. But uh, everybody knew that there was you know, that she had endured a a violent marriage and that all the neighbors had seen evidence of that, and there was very little doubt as to what had happened in the case. And uh, but nothing ever happened in the case. And it it just it ate my dad alive. I mean, he it was the one thing that it He just didn't ever turn loose. He'd see her husband on the street and he'd say, you know, he should be on death row
in Tattenhall County for what he did. He said, you know, it was just inhumane that it never was pursued the way that it should have been. There was no justice for her.
Now, as you write in the book, you tell us about the history of the Marshall Moore, this is the man that was looking for his wife. And we haven't talked about what happened on August third, nineteen seventy. But let's go back to Marshall Moore and Gwendolyn. But how Marshall Moore, the background of Marshall Moore, and before we find out how he came to marry Gwendolen and then the life that Gwendolen and their children endured under the right under Marshall Moore.
Marshall Marshall was raised in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, North Georgian, Rayburn County, and he was raised in a family that it was a lot of domestic violence, and they were raised in a place where, you know, it was very rural, very poor, and Marshall watched his father mistreat his mother and it was a family legacy that
was passed down through the years. As a matter of fact, his grandfather and I was told this by members of his family, had killed his grandmother back in the thirties in Raven County and burned her body on a pyre in Raven County in the thirties and nothing was ever done about that. But back again, back then, nobody knew about the family and it was just a legacy of brutality that it was passed down to him. Now, he and his father actually the first time he'd got got
into trouble, uh, he was as a juvenile. He and his father committed a burglary his father was prision and he did some time in a juvenile home and UH when he left there, he found his way to Adamsville, which is on the west side of Atlanta, uh, right outside of Atlanta, and he uh a family took him in and they were neighbors UH with the McDaniels, which uh Wynellan Moore was Wyndellan McDaniel prior to UH, prior
to their marriage. UH. Her parents were good, loving people, UH, hard work and he worked for the railroad and this and that, and Marshall came down and she married him when she was fifteen years old. UH and she while she was just had gotten out of the middle school at uh Margaret Faye Middle School in Adamsdale in Fulton County, and U immediately she was pretty much I tried to be isolated from her family and UH her path was set.
And it only it took fifteen years from the marriage to the time that she was lifted out of that well. And she endured some unspeakable atrocities. And again this came from her children and members of his family and her family. And it's a I I it's a it's it's a horrific story. Actually, but uh, every one it needed to be told.
You explain in this book that uh, to to fully understand the situation here, you talked about the grandfather, uh, killing the grandmother and putting in a fire pit and no one saying anything, but this is nineteen seventy in Troop County, Georgia. But unbelievably, and you say that to fully understand the cultural, political, and social climate in nineteen seventy Troop County, Georgia, you said, you need to know
a little bit of the regional history. And we're talking about John will and lou Shephard and their offspring and so tell us about the cultural, political, and social climate in nineteen seventy and where this culture started and some of the players involved.
Well, the Shepherd family originated just across the Alabama line from Lagrange, Georgia. They had several children. They but two of some of the children migrated down to Phoenix City, Alabama, and some of them came into Lagrange and set up businesses here. The ones that went down to Phoenix City, they helped build a gambling criminal empire, gambling, illegal electal, prostitution, everything,
every vice you can imagine. Uh. Time Magazine in the forties and fifties regarded and I exposed a regarded to Phoenix City as the wickedest city in the United States
of America. As a matter of fact, General Patton had it declared alf Lennson in a letter to the Department to the Secretary of the Army when they were bearing the third Army to go to Europe, he stated the fact that he said, if it were up to him, he'd take a sherman across the river bridge between Columbus and Phoenix City and destroy Phoenix City for the terrible influence that was having on the men that he was
trying to train to go fight a war. Yeah, but the guys that went south to Phoenix City was primarily was Hohite Shepherd. A family referred him as Big Hoyt. He opened up a place called Obama Club, and it was run by Hoyt and his family, and they ruled Phoenix City with an iron hand. They had the law enforcement to prosecute everything that had to do with the politics in Phoenix City, Alabama. They owned, and in doing so it enabled them to literally get away with murder.
For years, the stories of Phoenix City had been well chronicled in the Phoenix City Story and one book by Ms. Margaret and Barnes, Tragedy and Triumph of Phoenix City, Alabama and nineteen fifty five. Phoenix City was the only The Attorney General elect was murdered before we could take office on the streets Hia City by the sheriff chief Deputy, and that resulted in martial law being declared in Russell
County and Phoenix City, Alabama. That is the only time Marshal Pawfic has ever been declared in the United States of America. UH. There was a big in UH federal investigation and it resulted in UH a couple of hundred indictments and several convictions ranging everywhere from murder to aiding UH folks that were in the gambling business. It was.
It was quite the feel but a lot of those folks migrated and their influence migrated up into Troup County, Georgia, and they came in and took control of the Troop County Democratic UH Committee. And back then there there wasn't any opposition in the South to UH. In a way of party politics. You were a Southern Democrat or you weren't anything. And right they they presented their candidates to run and for judgeships and law enforcement positions and prosecutor
positions in every other position. And it wasn't just in True County, but that's just the way it was in a lot of decision town. The sheriff had a lot of power. He and the and the judges. They they you know, they held the key to the jail. And because of that, uh, the power they wilded was just you know, remarkable, And because of that it allowed for a lot of criminal enterprise developed and the result of
that was situations like Gwyndell and Moore. Her husband had some ties to some of these folks that were in these criminal enterprises, and because of that, her case was just basically swept under the road.
It's about the collusion between Shepherd and the sheriff Matthews. But also that four months after Marshall everyone knew that he had killed his wife and put her into this well, he remarried this Shepherd's daughter, Priscilla, just to that's correct, just to demonstrate the power that he had to elude or evade prosecution for this. Now with this evading prosecution for this charge, I know that he marries Priscilla Shepherd. But how do they actually go about not prosecuting this
marshal at all? How is that possible?
Well, you've got to remember now this is nineteen seventy, two thousand and twenty. There wasn't any support groups. There wasn't anybody. She was not from there. Uh, there wasn't anybody standing on the courthouse steps, you know, having a fit because she and in the words of her s of her one of her sons, my mother was a prisoner and a slave. And again they weren't from the area. They came in and he'd made and he'd made some uh friends and high places, uh, simply because of how
he was. And uh, there there was there was no comfort for her. I mean, there was no place to govern with the neighbors. Now, the neighbors actually would witness it, her getting beaten, would hide her under the house, you know. Uh it it was just a tragic story. Again, there were there weren't any support mechanisms for anybody back then. And uh, she even if she left him on several occasions, sometimes would go to his family and sometime to her,
but he'd always track her down. Back to that same statement of her son, you know mother was a prisoner and a slave, and that's what she was until she was sure she died. And after he married the shepherd lady h he couldn't be quiet, as I guess someone to say rough with her as he had with her with Gndolin, because he would have been the one that wound up in the well if that would catch m hm letus.
He said, I was an opportunity just to suffer a second for these messages.
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Now, you talked about that he wouldn't lay a hand on Priscilla Shepherds, that certainly he wouldn't do that, But you talked about that the beatings that Gwendolen endured were even witnessed by the sheriff's deputies because they had you remarked it that because it's so hot, they had these
big windows. So they were called once upon a time by the turners and these police officers, these law enforcement witnessed the beating and the berating of Gwendolen Moore at the hands of her husband, didn't they and nothing was done.
Well, on the twenty eighth day of July of nineteen seventy, she was lawful what was called. She went to the hospital and she received stitches and treatment in the emergency room and sent back home to endure some more and what less than a week later, she's dead in the well. But it's hard for me. On several occasions, neighbors had called and reported the violence that they were witnessing, and it was always a case, you know, I guess their
answer was a man's home as his castle. And there's no explanation for me for that, I mean, you know, I just it was just so blatantly wrong that there is no words to try to defend what they did. I just can't.
Let's talk about August third, nineteen seventy, because later you tahal to this one of the sons, Allan, who was fourteen at that time, and Alan, we'll never forget what happened that day. He was old enough to remember, and he was involved, at least in his mind, in the death of his mother. Let's talk about August third, nineteen seventy. You say that Gwendolyn had let Alan, Ricky and Larry go to the swimming pool in Hogansville with a neighbor.
But however A Marshall showed up at the swimming place and ordered the kids into the car ticket from there. Tell us what happened that day?
Well, actually he had come home and write she told him that the kid had got on the swimming though. That's when the worst of this beating. Who plays the one that Ronnie Turner witnessed from the front porge, And it was a tremend beating. He uh described vividly what had happened and Marshall after the beaten. I don't know if she was unconscious of what, but she was on the floor and Ronnie could see it through the through
the bedroom window. As long as she was standing up, he could see what was happening, but he said he never would forget that she Marshall had left at that point. He was going to get the kids at the swimming pool. He had to have a complete told control over every aspect of everybody's life. And he said that Gwendolen got up out of the floor and pulled usself up on the bedpost. And the last time he saw she was
going out the door. And we're talking about I'm talking to him in two thousand and two, late two thousand and two, early two thousand and three, and he vividly describes the clothing the woman has on. Wow, and which you have to question the ability of an eyewitness sometime, you know. And I said, I said to Ronnie, I said, Ronnie, you're telling me that she had on a white blouse,
yellow shorts. And she got up out of the floor, putting putting her blouse back on, and I said, you know, how can you remember that you saw it one time thirty three years ago. And he looked me straight in the face and said, no, chief, I've seen it nearly every day for thirty three years. And that in such
a powerful statement, you know. And at that point she made her way over to Junior Turner's house where Junior's daughter and her boyfriend was there, and as they had done in the past, they hid her in the crawl space under the under the house to keep her away from Marshall and Alan. When they got back from the pool, she was gone. And of course, uh, Marshall didn't want any part of her going around the neighborhood looking like she looked at that point, and he sent the kids
out to look for her. Well, Alan knew that she had in the past sought refuge under the house, so he goes under the house. He finds his mother under the crawl space of the house like a dungeon. She's popped up against an old space heater and uh, eyes swollen shut, and you know, she's bloody, and Alan and her talk and she tells him that she's gonna try to get some help and she's gonna try to come back and get him. And Alan he comes out from
under the house. He tells his dad he couldn't find her, and at that point this Marshall's search for her continues, you know, and the next thing you know, she's found in the well. The next morning, Alan, when I interviewed him in two thousand and two about this after the the case came back up. You know, he actually was
r Now, he didn't run away from home. He was run away from home when he was fifteen years old, and he went and a aunt took him in down in Lagrange, Georgia, and she st He stayed with her for a couple of years till he went in the navy. She signed for him to go in the navy as his guardian. Spent twenty years in the navy. You know, uh,
just a good, productive citizen. And when I talked to him on the side of the interstate that day, when after I had called and told him I was opening the case back up, he had tears running out of his eyes, and he said, if I had just taken her by the hand and taken her and ran to the police station, maybe my mama would be alive today. And that had haunted that man for his entire life, and in his own words, it had profoundly affected him and his relationships with other people and so forth. It was,
you know, this terrible incident and this effect Gwendolin. It affected a lot of people in him especially.
You talked about how this case affected your father and so we fast forward to nineteen eighty and one of the big dream of your father and what was this dream? And tell us a little bit about what happens in nineteen eighty with his effort to achieve this.
Dream my dad it was a you know, every everybody says, you know, well, you know you got the greatest dad in the world, and you know, my parents are this from my child's this My daddy was a fair minded man, and he was a he was He treated everybody well and if he needed putting it in jail and he was all for it. But if he he tried to do the right thing. And he saw this this conduct going not just in this case, but other cases. In nineteen eighty, he decided that he was gonna h run
for sheriff and try to clean his mess up. And the summer of nineteen eighty was the hottest year old
record up to that point. It was I forget how many days in August did It was over a hundred degrees and he basically walked every every residence in Troop County, and in a five man race, it was it narrowed down to him and Sheriff Bailey, and a runoff and my dad was gonna win that runoff pretty much by a landslide, because people at that time had become a little more educated and saw the things that had gone
on and it was just time to change. And Uh, ten days before the run off election that my dad uh was surely gonna win, he succumbs to his third heart attack, the right old age of forty six, and uh he was followed uh by one one of the guys that uh was in the race with him was past sergeant of our local state patrol uh Georgia State Patrol post and actually was had been my boss when I first went to worked for the Georgia State Patrol's
name was Gene Jones. He had endorsed my dad, and in return, when from my dad's death, UH, my dad's campaign committee they endorsed Jones and he won the election. And UH at that point a lot of the things turned around and it started down a better road. He was a good law man, and he held the officed for two or three terms and and did a lot of good a lot of improvements, and just things like this ceased to happen.
Yeah, you were devastated, you write. After obviously was the murder, a pardon me, the death of your father heart attack, so close to achieving his goal. And but you write that your father not only wanted you to be a peace officer, but he wanted you to be a prosecutor. So tell us something good his dream of you being a prosecutor and what you did with that, well, my.
Dad, he more than anything in the world, he wanted to see maybe a prosecutor. And while I was on the state patrol myself or I'm a trooper, comrade. We went to law school at Woodrow Wilson School of Law in Atlama, and uh we we graduated in June of nineteen eighty and ready to take the bar exam and whatnot. And in a situation where my dad and he his passing. So I never had any desire to be a lawyer, to be honest, but I just you know, I said my dad, I'm a hero, you know, and I wanted
to make him happy. So he basically paid for me a free legal education that I promptly wasted. And uh yeah, I stayed with State Control for about another year. They offered me his job the chief policed and hoping for Georgia and for every wrong reason in the world. I
took it and stayed there for twelve years. And one thing about it, though, if you consider, you know, if you t in life events like that, if you changed one thing to change everything, and had I not gone to the City of Hoganville, the events of my life would have played out in a different way. And this murder and three others, three other coal cash murders that I had the good luck to solve and resolve, they would have gone unpunished. And so you know, I'm happy
with the way it turned out. But it was again my father's dream of me being a prosecutor kind of went by the wayside. But I believe I can honestly tell you that he looks down at accomplished months that came from it. I think he's well pleased.
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a prosecutor and this case gone completely cold. It's still stayed with you, but you got a call in fall two thousand and two from the District Attorney Roy Ollinger, tell us what happened in this phone call? What was imparted to you?
Well, Royd told me, wrote Royd. He had retired from the GBI and he went to work for Peach Candelacus at the District Attorney's office and he was fictioning to retire, and he called and told me that, you know, the job was coming open and maybe i'd like to talk to Pete, who was, you know, a friend of mine, and get back into law enforcement because I had left law enforcement, been out about ten years. And I called Peach Scandalacus and he told me, yeah, we'd be interested
in you coming to work for us. So I applied for the job, and of course history shows that I went to work there in the DA's office as an investigator in True County. And as i'd been to work ten days, I think I went to work on October the fifteenth and I was sitting at the office and I got a call from investigator with the Sheriff's office and he said, Clay, you remember a situation where a lady was found a Well and Hogan were back in nineteen seventy and we were talking thirty three years later,
and he said, there's no record. We don't have anything about it. And he said, I'm looking at a death certificate says clearly Mark this was homicide. Describes as the injuries and how they uh over a period of days, how they were inflicted, and you know, and I it it was just like the light went on, you know, I said, not only do I remember, I said her name was Gwendolen Moore. He said that's right, and I said, I was standing there when she came out of the well,
and you know, it shocked him, It shocked me. It was just like, you know, divine intervention. And he said, I'm gonna send you a copy to this death certificate and said, if maybe you can help this lady. Her l young lady's name was Leslie Power and she had actually was a great niece of Wendolen Moore, and when she was cleaning out her grandmother's a fact, she found this death certificate that of a great aunt that she never knew she had, and she just wanted to because
of the questions raised on the desk certificate. She wanted to find out something about it. And Larry said, I'm gonna fact the desertificate over to you, and and he did. And I get to looking at the at the top of the at the death certificate, and of course I'm looking at the meat and potatoes. If you would have just about the injuries and the fact that it's marked a homicide and what the cause of death was. And I look at the top of the of the facts
and it's October the twenty fourth, two thousand and two. Yeah, it's my daddy's birthday. Wow. I know, I don't believe. I'm not a I'm not a paranormal guy. But when I saw that, it was just like an epissany you know, he had such an interest in this case for so long. And again I don't I'm not a big promoter our normal activity. However, I do believe in divine intervention. I think sometimes God puts folks in places, in situations to where they might and right or wrong or do some good.
And I believe this was surely one of those. Yeah, And we started with the investigation. From there. I looked at the report. I had a lot of people help me. We found records from thirty three years old that there's no way on God's green Earth you would ever should have been able to find them. You know, that was
before things were archived and this and that. We found the things that we needed to do from a record standpoint to be able to reopen the case and travel forward, and we did some of the things in the old
GBI report. They talked to Alan Moore. One of the things that they talked to him three or four days after mother's funeral, and what he said, and he related the story about finding his mother and this and that, and he then he tells the case agent, you know, my dad killed my mother, and if he finds out I'm talking to you, he'll kill me too. You know. That's that's power of the statement company your child, you know.
But we were able to the problem that we were gonna have was that topsy was done by a medical examiner and Lagrange, Georgia doctor Joseph Krafka. Doctor Krafka had long since passed away. You had to have somebody that could testify to the cause of death, and didn't have anybody to authenticate that record. So without that, we were dead. It's gonna be dead in the water. So I contacted the g YEAH, doctor Chris Ferry, who had had dealings
with him on several occasions. He was a pathologist for the Georgia State Crime Laboratory, and I was able to get an a point with him. I took the death certificate in the things I had with me up there, and he says, well, Clay, he said, I think there's a possibility that we could actually come up with a legitimate cause of death. But in order to do that, we've got to exhume her body and look for the injury as it caused. And you know, at that point
you don't really know what you know. You don't want to open a lot of really ugly wounds this family that were the victims of this mess without you know, involving them in the decisions you made. And we had a meeting myself and Peach Candalacus, who without his support, uh,
none of this was ever happened. M We had to meet with the family Alan Uh, her sister, Uh, several nieces and nephews, and they uh I Alan said I want my mother exhumed, and that allowed us to be able to By giving his permission to be in the next to ken Uh, we were able to exume our body and we took it to the crime lab and course you know it thirty three years later, it's nothing
but scaltil remains. And as doctor Sperry was taking the remains out of the coffin and he'd meticulously wash every every boone and placed it on the uh mm gurney, anatomically correct building. It coming back, you know, from the skull down and what we thought was in according with Dr Kraft's cause of death, he said it was secondary to most likely to a concussion that had progressed over a period of time, right, and that, uh, that was the cause of death. And in that you would think
maybe there's gonna be a skull fracture there. Well, yeah, he took took the skull cap off and he says, you know, her nose been broke more times than I can count, he said, but I don't see anything in her skull that I could say was an immediate cause of death. So now we're about six seven months into this investigation, and this is absolutely one of the hardest things, you know, myself and Linda Carwell she was a assistant
dad that was gonna prosecute case. We're sitting in the floor of the morgue literally, you know, absolutely devastated, by that news, right, And I mean to the point where you got tears running out of your eyes because you know you're trying so wrong, so hard to right or wrong. It's been so long standing, and you hit this wall. And we're sitting there in that, you know, just at
the bottom of the pit of emotion. And Doc Sperry's steady working, cleaning up the remains and putting them on the table, and he gets down in the cervical station of her neck and he says, oh, this is provocative, and you know that just kind of goes over the top of your head, you know, because you already heard the worst. And then in the next sentence he said, nope, this is murder. And what he had done, he'd gotten down to where the highway process covers your voice box.
It's a bowl of bony structure. And uh, it is an absolute indicator of manual strangulation. And we went from the lowest low you could go to. She was manually strangle to death. You have a cause of death, to the top of the pinnacle of the roller coaster ride.
You know.
It was just it's hard to describe, but that gave us the cause of death. We were able to came back to La Grange immediately told told Pete about it, and I said, you know, we probably are going to uh probably. My thought was we were gonna wait until so we would wait until the grand jury met and we do an indictment, you know. But came back, told Pete that and I said, well, we are, We're gonna indict him and he said no, he said, we're gonna
go take a want for it. I said, y'all done some great work on this case and devoted so much time to it. Y'all deserve that. And with that went to the judge and gave our dog and pony show. And the next thing, you know, we had to want for Marshall Moore and we had him arrested. But Marshall had developed throat canton. They were able to put the trial off out for him god a year more and finally Judge says, we're gonna try him. If we have to do it on a stretcher, we're gonna try that. Yeah.
So it was, you know, it was a hectic. It was a hell of a journey, you know. But I can tell you this, I believe Again I'm not much on the paanormal, but I believe my daddy was looking down as who was proud of what we did.
Yeah, let's Jesus as an opportunity to stop just for a second for these messages.
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Now you talked about and you take us right into that morgue where you're sitting with Linda Calwell, another person that was instrumental in helping you get to that point that did you get able to hopefully prosecute Marshall Moore for the murder of Gwendolen her his wife Gwendolen. And then there was this. You were worried because by the language that he was using, and then the discovery where
he said it was murder was provocative. No, it was murder, and it's the hy eight point bone clearly indicating that she was strangled. So now with this, you talk about the delay in this because he has a good lawyer, he has a good attorney, and he's using every motion and he can to delay this. At the same time he has this throat cancer that he's dealing with. Tell us just a little bit about that that weight you say about two years. I think that this was back and forth.
It was absolutely harder was to us. You know, we want to we want to try the case of hinds some resolution in it. And his attorneys named Bill Stemberger from Muna, Georgia, excellent attorney, and you know, he had discovery on the case. He knew what we had and his his mission in life at that point was postponed, inevitable,
and he was able to do that. Oh, Marshall. The one thing that they got the judge, I think at one point he said that they had a surgical procedure schedule and they put the thing off again and they came for the surgical procedure and it didn't happen. That's when Judge Keebile got upset and said, you know, if we had to try him on a stretch of with what we'll do. And that got us to that point, you know. But it was during that time. Oh now we'll say this because we arrested. We arrested him and
it got a bit of publicity. And there was another case in nineteen eighty seven that appearance and a friend of mine, it was his father, disappeared. Myself and Peach Kandal like us, he ran a body shot. He we took Peat's vehicle over there and a storm had come through and a tree fell on a Peach pickup truck and we were over there. He said, you know, what'd be the chance of y'all looking into my dad's disappear
And well, we can do that, and we. Victim's name was Fred Wilkerson, and as luck would have it, we were able to transition from that case right into Fred's case, and other than just the having to wait and be put off, my focus had jumped right onto Fred's case and we were able to move forward with it and develop some information that hadn't been acted on before and we actually were able to locate Fred Wilkerson's body in a well and some twenty nearly twenty years later, UH,
and the family was able to give them a decent burial and we were able to convict the person's responsible for killing Freend and that just kind of rolled over
into another case and UH to another case. And during the time that we operated UH doing this, UH actually went to a seminar in Charleston put on by the n CIS, who has the largest cold case investigative squad in the world because of you know, they do naval bases and marine bases and UH there you know, have a transient population, so a lot of their cases end up going cold. UH, but they are the authority on
cold cases UH pretty much in the country. And at that seminar, they actually used one of my cases to UH as a case study in the presentation, but they looked at my other cases and they stays as far as they could tell that during the time that we operated. Now we that I was the most prolific cold caase investigator in the United States and single event homicides, which you know, that was an honor that I thought was you know, for them to say that. Of course, I'm
very proud of it. But we saw four cold case murders. The oldest was thirty three years old and the youngest was fourteen years old, and everybody got prosecuted, and in the subsequent ones after the Mored case, all of them found guilty and got life in prison. So we really had had a good run. It was accomplishment that you know, it'll go with me to my grave and back to that same thing. I hope my dad looks down and says, you know.
They really did well, and his dream of you being a prosecutor really actually didn't come true. But in terms of aiding and being instrumental in prosecution, uh, you end up being the facto prosecutor of sorts in that at least these people were brought to justice, and like you said, these court cases were closed.
The great thing was that every one of those where it's where it says prosecutor person that took the warrant for him. On all these other cases too, they say Clay Bryant, and that you know, that's thrilling to me. We uh uh, you know, my dad, he, like I said, he was a person that he had a saying for everything. I remember one time we were riding along the patrol car.
He ride with me some times around from the state control and uh, he said, I'm just gonna tell you, boy, He said, down follow the police profession was a day to put an air condition a patrol car. And I said, what in God's name were you talking about? He said, think about it. So he said, simplistic, but it's the truth. He said, that day it became more comfortable for you to isolate yourself from the people that you most need to stay in touch with to be good at your job.
You don't know what they were, right, of course, I can live with the air conditioner. But the theory is so true, you know. And it goes back to that thing. You know, if you're going to be a peace officer and not a policeman, you need to be part of your community, and that community needs to have faith and respect for you to because they know things that you don't.
He also said this, He said, you know, everybody on the front view of the First Baptist Church is my friend, he said, but there's a lot of things they can't tell me. And he said, there's good and the worst of people, and there's bad and the best people, and you have to take them for what they are and use them to make the right thing happen. And in these cases, I think we did.
You said that he made a big, a great distinction between being a peace officer and a police officer.
What did he mean by that truth, Well, you know, a policeman is exactly that. You know, a peace officer is a person that tries in his view, a policeman is a guy that walked out there with the law book and it's everything that you know, all The thing that I'm gonna do, for the most part is if anything's against what the statue says, we're gonna that's the
only thing we're gonna deal with. But if you're a peace officer, you want the right thing to happen that you know, you want to keep a family together if you can, instead of of tearing it apart. You need to contribute the good things in your community, not just police the community, but make it a better place for people to live. And that's kind of the way about
Daddy was. You know, Uh, in these other cases, you know, there were times when I just absolutely would hit an impass and it always seemed like you know, I didn't get choked up talking about it. I always seemed like somebody setting on my shoulder that steered me in the right direction.
Yeah, let's get back to this prosecution that was so important to your father, so important to you that this Marshall Moore be accountable for the murder of Gwendolyn and some you had met with and the prosecutors had met with Alan and his brothers and his siblings and his family to talk about whether they would exhume the body.
And they were supportive of specially of you and your team, but spoke especially of you and their confidence in you, and they were willing to exhume their loved one's body in the aid of this prosecution. And you say that Marshall had an excellent attorney, but he went through every motion to be able to delay the inevitable trial. Let's talk about what happened to again have him evade culpability.
Well, as heartbreaking as it was to us, after about two years, it was inevitable, we're going to trial. Basically, Marshall goes in the hospital in he starts rejecting treatment. Uh. And I forget exactly what the date was, but Marshall Moore succumbed to his censer prior to us being able
to get him to trial. But and as injust as that was to me, the simple truth is that Gwendolyn Moore's voice was heard from that well and he was held accountable for it, and he to this day, from a judge and an authority a whole lot higher than us, he's been. He's been held accountable for it today. And
you know, again, that is what it is. I would have given anything in the world for us to gone to trial, like I said, but you know, his attorney knew the evidence that we had and the witnesses that were that you know, some of which now have passed away. But at the time they we stood ready to go to trial. And lord, note, I thought we had everything, including the smoking gun, and there's no doubt in my mind he would have been convicted and held accountable for it.
But that wasn't meant to be. But in the other subsequent cases we were lucky enough that every one of those went to trial, and as of right now we got to five folks that are in jail for l life in prison sentences. Uh for murders they committed and they long thought they gotten away with so you know,
we had a good run. And this hopefully is the first book in a series of We're gonna probably write some about the others, but just when Actually I wrote the book fifteen years ago, when I was doing the case, and that's why you know so much passion in the book. Yeah,
and you know we uh uh. Our cases have been chronicled on four twenty eight hours Investigates, so Bill Curtis's Cold Case File of Discovery, Ida's murder book, and this case will be a new thing will be come out on I think it's August the twenty seventh or twenty sixth on Discovery. I d in a series called the Detective Diaries, which is a compilation I'm told of what they believe to be the best colcase investigators in the country.
And this is gonna be one of their lead lead stories will be two hours long, and it and one of the other cases of Wilkinson case will be the subjects of that. So you know, that's got morticon more to congratulations.
It's it's interesting too when you talk about that it was such a disappointment for him to evade this prosecution. However, as you write, he knew, his lawyer knew definitely, and it advised him that he was likely to be prosecut he was likely to be convict it, and he did the desperate measure of avoiding that prison time, avoiding that court case period by starving himself the death basically essentially,
so you had him on the run. Like you write in the early in the book, you talk about a hunting analogy, but your father from the grave, Gwendolen Moore from like you say, I cry from the well, but from the beyond, and then yourself in this faithful series of events, you become the person that's the person to prosecute, the person to make right this case. So I think that you talk about this providence and you talk about fate, and I think we definitely this was justice for Gwendolen Moore.
An incredible journey to be able to do that, and with the help of so many people, but also with like you said, say, your father looking over you, approving of what you finally were able to accomplish, you.
Know, and even in cases on down the road, there were times that things came up that there was absolutely no explanation for. There was one case where guy was charged with kidnapping, great murder, and I was looking for another victim that he'd had in years past, and there
was no record of it whatsoever. I ended up eating dinner at a restaurant with some other folks and the mention of the guy's name comes up, and a lady at the table is the victim of the crime that I was trying of one of his victims, and she was the person that I could not find anything about. What's the chance of that? Yeah, there can't be a thing in the world say that's what good Lord intended to happen. Yeah.
Absolutely, And I want to thank you. I want to thank you so much Clay for coming on and talking about your book, Solving the West Georgia Murder of Gwendolyn Moore. I cry from the well. I know that this is a history press release, and this is on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and everywhere. Is there any way they might find out more information about this case?
Well? Uh, the Atlanta Journal Constitution wrote extensively about this case in other cases, and uh, the True County Archives has a history of it in True County and Lagrange, Georgia. And also they also failed the book as well. But anyone that I would like to buy a book through the Hill Try Press or or even from me. I've got a social media page and it's Clay Bryant sor uh just Clay Bryant sr At on Facebook, and I'd be glad to try to talk with him about it
or discuss anything they wanted to about it. Or it's an open book. And you know, I'm proud of the work that we did, and again I look forward maybe to doing three more and hopefully their stories will be as as good and compelling as this, and I feel like they are.
Yeah, well, we look forward to more books by you. This is if this is any indication of the writing ability that you have. So thank you so much Clay Bryant for coming on and talking about solving the West Georgia murder of Gwendolyn Moore. I cry from the well. Thank you so much, Clay. It's been a pleasure.
Good night I've been I've definitely enjoyed it. Dan, thank you. Have a pleasant e I'll just can I