They were high school sweethearts who married at 18. Randy Peters and Linda Agee later welcomed twin daughters and ran a produce business to support their family.
But on March 19, 1992, Peters was shot to death in his Walton County home. His wife immediately emerged as a prime suspect. So did Jeff Sargent, her lover for three years.
Sargent’s statement to authorities signalled they were on the right track: “If I tell you what I know, if I tell you why I was there, I will either get life in prison or the electric chair.”
He was served with a subpoena to testify before a grand jury, but the day before he was set to appear he did something that gave him an out: He married Agee. Georgia law protects spouses from being forced to provide evidence against each other.
Sargent never testified and died in 2006. But his suggestive remark to law enforcement was used in the 2015 trial where Agee was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Now 56, Agee maintains she’s innocent and on Monday she was back in court to ask for a new trial.
“Linda is doing a life sentence. And there are a number of fairly unusual legal issues that are involved in the case because of the passage of the time, as well as some of the unique twists and turns of the case,” her attorney, Bruce Harvey, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Harvey argued Sargent’s statement should never have been heard by the jury.
“The State replied upon it in opening and closing arguments,” her attorney, Harvey told the court Monday. “Without that evidence, there wouldn’t have been a case.”
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Layla Zon, the Walton County district attorney, was back in court Monday after prosecuting the case against Agee in 2015.
“We couldn’t make him testify because he was married to her until he died,” Zon said outside the courtroom Monday.
Judge Horace Johnson, who also heard Agree’s original case, declined to rule immediately on the motion.
Agee claimed she wasn’t at home when Peters was shot, but heard him in trouble when she returned from a ballpark where her daughters played softball. She didn’t call 911, but instead drove across town to Peters’ parents home, according to investigators.
“She told them that, ‘Randy may be in trouble,’ that she had seen a ‘tall dark shadowy figure’ in their home, and that they needed, ‘to go check on him,’” Zon wrote in a response to the motion for a new trial.
Peters was dead when a neighbor and his father arrived at the home to check on him. The house had been ransacked, but investigators noticed that valuables, including guns, electronics and jewelry, had been left behind and there were no signs of forced entry.
It soon emerged that Sargent and Agee had been having an affair for three years before Peters was killed. The same month of Peters’ death, Sargent’s divorce was from his wife was finalized.
But after Sargent and Agee married, the case went cold for more than two decade, Walton County Sheriff Joe Chapman later led the investigation into the cold case, which led to Agee’s arrest in 2014. After less than a week of testimony, Agee was convicted of felony murder.
But will that conviction stand? It’s unknown yet because there hasn’t been another case like it in Georgia, Zon said.
“I believe that we do have some unsettled law here in this area in our state,” the DA told the court, but asked the judge to deny the motion for a new trial.
If Johnson denies Agee’s request for a new trial, she could appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court, Harvey said. In the meantime, Agee will return to Pulaski State Prison in Hawkinsville.
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