In a jailhouse interview last year with investigators, Franklin Gebhardt deferred repeatedly when asked if he had anything to do with the brutal slaying of Timothy Coggins some three decades earlier.
“I ain’t going to tell you I did,” Gebhardt told investigators during the interview. “I’m not going to tell you I didn’t.” The recording was played for jurors Friday as the trial against Gebhardt nears conclusion.
Gebhardt and his brother-in-law, William Moore Sr., are charged with the 23-year-old black man’s murder in 1983. Moore will be tried separately in October.
Investigators asked Gebhardt if he took credit for the murder, as five witnesses told police.
“Not that I know of,” he said, before confessing to being an alcoholic for 23 years. “When you’re drunk you’re liable to say anything.”
But, as defense co-counsel Larkin Lee pointed out, Gebhardt “didn’t admit to anything.”
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Lee accused the interrogators — Spalding County Sheriff’s Capt. Mike Morris and GBI Special Agent Jared Coleman — of trying to manipulate his client, who says he has a 6th grade education, into a confession. Instead they got equivocation and some anger, but nothing like the emotion he showed in court Friday. As the recording of his interview with law enforcement played, Gebhardt broke down in tears.
Interviewed without a lawyer, Gebhardt offered to provide investigators a hair sample they could match against one found on Coggins’ body. He did not know the original hair sample had gone missing.
And when told that a witness claimed Gebhardt had thrown the knife allegedly used to kill Coggins down a well, Gebhardt dared investigators to dig it up.
“Will that solve it?” he said.
They did, and it didn’t. The well, filled with trash and debris dating back to the 1980s, was dredged soon after the interview and turned up potentially incriminating evidence including a metal chain, a knife handle and two blades. An undershirt and a size 10 tennis shoe were also found, noteworthy because Coggins was wearing only underwear and jeans when his body was found.
But after sitting at the bottom of a dank well amid the other debris, the recovered items offered nothing in the way of DNA that could have linked them to the crime.
That didn’t stop investigators from telling Gebhardt they had some of his DNA. Morris, under cross-examination, said it was an interview technique.
The absence of such physical evidence has left prosecutors reliant on statements from five witnesses who said they heard Gebhardt brag about killing Coggins. Four of them are in prison, and their stories vary on key details, including motive.
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A longtime friend of Gebhardt’s initially said Gebhardt had told him the killing was over a drug deal gone bad. But that account didn’t square with the racial motive alleged by the state.
On that front, Gebhardt did himself no favors when asked during the recorded interview about his feelings toward African-Americans.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t hang with many black folks because I don’t like black folks around me,” said the 60-year-old resident of Sunny Side, not far from where Coggins’ mutilated body was found.
Asked if he killed Coggins because he had slept with Gebhardt’s sister, the suspect became irate.
“I know my sister didn’t sleep with no (racial slur),” Gebhardt said.
Jurors were dismissed early Friday and testimony in the murder trial is expected to wrap up early next week. Judge Fletcher Sams said he expects jury deliberations to begin sometime Tuesday.
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