Lost on Oconee: A boat empty, a woman dead, a man missing, few answers

The man’s security cameras had marked the time of his arrival. Nine minutes later, he boarded the empty vessel to secure it. What was onboard only proved more perplexing — sacks of snack food, a fishing pole, some live bait. None of the items shed any light on what had become of the engaged couple believed to have been the last people on it.

Joycelyn Wilson, an instructor at Spelman College, and her fiance, Gary Jones, a teacher and coach at Westminster Schools, were seen launching Jones’ boat not long before 4 p.m., at a ramp some 7 miles up the lake, near the hotel they’d checked into around the same time. It appears they traveled from Atlanta to celebrate Jones’ 50th birthday.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

What happened to them in the next 90 minutes or so, up until 5:24 p.m. when someone on the lake spotted their riderless boat circling in the water, its engine still running, has remained a mystery for two weeks.

Wilson, 49, was found dead the next day, her body floating half a mile or so down the lake from where the boat came to rest.

The only sign of Jones to emerge other than his boat, his black Chevy Avalanche pickup parked in front of their hotel and his billfold with his ID in it on the boat, were a pair of Nike sneakers floating near the shoreline a quarter-mile across the water from where the small vessel was found. His cellphone hasn’t turned up. It last “pinged” a cell tower in the area at 5:06 p.m.

The couple’s voyage that Saturday evening has baffled investigators.

Was their two-person craft too tiny for Oconee, a Creek word meaning “great waters”?

Some, including the Putnam County sheriff overseeing the case, insist that it was, although it’s far from clear if that played a role in what happened. Sheriff Howard Sills likened it to landing “an ultralight (aircraft) at Hartsfield.”

Other factors, too, have confounded authorities in what they have termed “a death investigation.”

Where were Jones and Wilson headed?

There has been speculation they were bound for dinner at a waterfront restaurant. If so, it would likely be dark before they made the return voyage to their hotel. Yes, their boat had running lights, but no battery to power them.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

When Wilson’s body was found in the lake, her right hand was clutching her cellphone.

Is Jones’ body also in the lake? Was anyone else or another boat involved in the death or deaths?

On Thursday afternoon, 12 days into the case, the sheriff stood in a vehicle shelter near his office where the boat and Jones’ truck have been stored behind locked doors. He inspected the boat and the engine, and he again noted the couple’s gear and their multitude of refreshments.

In plastic bags and in other containers on the craft were a vast assortment of snacks: granola bars, Ritz crackers, three packs of Nekot cookies, two bananas, packets of applesauce, a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, a pack of Tums, 11 bottles of water, a roll of paper towels still in its plastic wrapping, a neon-green Zebco fishing rod, a $3.39 container of night crawlers — live worms — for bait, a tackle box, three life jackets.

Looking over it all, there was no explanation. Nothing added up.

Sills was at a loss.

‘Almost impossible to find’

Last weekend, at the conclusion of the first week’s search, the sheriff went on camera to entertain questions from a pair of television reporters. Sills, at a boat ramp with his back to the lake, stood just around a bend from where the couple’s boat was found on Feb. 8.

At that point it had been seven days since Jones vanished and Sills explained to reporters the difficulties and perils of trying to find a person who has gone missing on a 19,000-acre lake — roughly 100 times more expansive than Atlanta’s Piedmont Park.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Sills, 69, seasoned from decades of hard-to-crack criminal cases — half a dozen or more of them death penalty prosecutions — has a storied, theatrical flair for talking to the news media. He possesses what is a vanishing skill among law enforcement officials often afraid of saying the wrong thing.

On this day before the TV cameras, Sills, who can cite Faust and Faulkner and is a weekly devotee of “The Grand Ole Opry” broadcast, revealed little, but he did so with a downhome-yet-learned aplomb.

He recalled how half a century ago, when he was a deputy in Bulloch County while still a student at what was then Georgia Southern College, he helped search for a drowning victim on the Ogeechee River.

He spoke of how an old fisherman on the river bank imparted some wisdom about nature and how, now at Oconee, finding someone lost in its 80- to 90-foot depths is beyond difficult.

“Son,” the old man told him, “y’all are just wasting your time. That old river there, she’s gonna give that body up when she wants to.”

Sills said the lake, with 374 miles of shoreline, and Georgia’s second-largest behind Lake Lanier, presents an expanse of the unseeable. The underwater environment where Wilson was found is a tangle of submerged timber, a partially still-standing forest of old pines and hardwoods, remnants from when the river valley was flooded to build the lake.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

“If you don’t know exactly where a body went down, it’s almost impossible to find it,” he said, adding that “it’s conceivable that the body might never come up. But I think it probably will.”

He said the average observer of the couple’s disappearance, unfamiliar with Georgia’s Lake Country here 75 miles southeast of downtown Atlanta, may not realize that the authorities from time to time find empty boats adrift. It isn’t that uncommon. Especially after storms when they might come untied.

“An entire day had passed before I knew that the boat was actually under power and running at the time,” Sills said, “and just some peculiarities about all of it.”

Sills was asked by a reporter when or if his department might, in seeking more answers in the mysterious vanishing, turn to its homicide division.

“You’re looking at the homicide division,” said Sills, meaning that he constitutes the county’s front line of all suspicious death probes. “It’s been engaged since I found out about it.”

He said Jones and Wilson had been in good health and, from what he had heard, could swim. He also said the engine was too much motor for that size boat — 18 horsepower on a craft rated for a 10-horse engine.

“I’m not being critical,” Sills said. “I’m not saying that he caused this, but I’m telling you the facts of the matter. So it was a dangerous kind of situation to start with.”

The case has proven so puzzling that Sills has during at least one TV interview resorted to citing an ancient Greek mathematician and physicist’s principle of fluid dynamics and buoyant force.

One of Sills’ deputies saw the sheriff on the news one night and later texted him a mock headline, ribbing his boss: “Archimedes now involved in the case.”

‘Not supposed to have crime’

In recent days, Sills has been informed by the medical examiner who performed Wilson’s autopsy that a person who might have drowned gripping something is, as Sills was told, “not unusual.”

The sheriff has yet to divulge her cause of death, if it is known.

Wilson’s recovered phone has since been dried and as of a few days ago an “extraction” of its contents was underway, the sheriff said.

Sills has also pondered what might have happened aboard the couple’s vessel.

He wonders if, maybe, someone tried to crank the Hangkai engine with its pull-cord starter while its forward gear switch was engaged. The tiny craft, a Sundolphin Pro 120, could have lurched, possibly knocking Jones and Wilson overboard.

“The more I look at it, the more I think that might have happened,” Sills said, though he was not certain the engine would crank while in gear. “I would think today that they’ve got safety mechanisms. ... But where the (gear) lever is on that (boat) it would have been easy to have pushed it down into gear from neutral.”

Still, it’s just a theory.

Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com

Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com

Some have suggested another boat collided with the couple’s vessel and kept on going. Sills refutes that possibility.

“It just didn’t happen,” he said. “There just no evidence of it at all.”

The Oconee area has ridden the wave of a real-estate boom since the lake was built nearly half a century ago, attracting the wealthy and everyday outdoors types alike. As the high-profile case has unfolded, news surrounding what might have happened has fueled all manner of speculation.

“There are more multimillion-dollar homes than there are on Sea Island. So that in itself, you’re not supposed to have crime there. ... That and all these people coming here from Atlanta, building these homes in this idyllic community is what keeps us in the media,” Sills said.

Despite its rural and agricultural leanings, Putnam County, with a growing population of about 23,000, is no stranger to cases that have captured the curiosity of metro Atlantans.

The unsolved slayings of Shirley Dermond, 87, and Russell Dermond, 88, a married couple killed in 2014, still make the news. The pair lived on the lakefront. Russell Dermond’s decapitated body was discovered in his two-car garage. His wife’s body was found 10 days later, weighed down with a concrete block and sunk in the lake in the same 3-mile stretch of open water above the Wallace Dam where Wilson’s body was recovered.

While other incidents and crimes have taken place on the lake, data provided by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources shows it is relatively safe. Prior to the discovery of Wilson’s body, the last drownings on Lake Oconee were reported on July 24, 2022, when the water claimed two lives within hours.

In the first incident, 79-year-old Donald Evans fell and struck his head on a dock, causing him to fall into the water. Hours later, 18-year-old Juantavious Deshaun drowned after jumping from a bridge into the lake, the DNR reported.

‘Still hope for this world’

Sills seems to relish the chase, the hunt for answers. But with notable cases come scrutiny and criticism in the form of armchair second-guessers.

In the Dermond probe, a tipster was insistent that the killer was a mother alligator, an absurdity which Sills nonetheless had to deal with. The alligator theory has again presented itself in the current case, from a TV reporter. Sills gently explained there was no sign of a gator attack and that such reptilian presence is all but unheard of this far north.

The other day during one of the lake searches for any sign of Jones, a volunteer plucked from the water a piece of beige, molded plastic that the volunteer was convinced was a piece of Jones’ boat. Sills explained as best he could that the adrift plastic was instead a tray from someone’s tackle box.

Local fisherman Brad Stalnaker, 46, who also runs a large landscaping company, has lived here most of his life.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

In recent days, Stalnaker has helped in the search for Jones every time he’s been on the lake. He has met people from Westminster Schools, where Jones worked, as they ventured to the lake in a show of support and to help find Jones.

“What it shows is there’s still hope for this world yet,” Stalnaker said. “That no matter the color, race, Black, white, pink, purple, woman, man, that you don’t even have to know somebody if you just want to go help.”

‘Particularly challenging and difficult’

As out of the ordinary as the incident may seem, a simple explanation is also plausible.

Perhaps Jones and Wilson, who planned to marry on March 14, went for a cruise down the lake. Maybe one or both of them fell in. Maybe Jones, struggling in the water, kicked off his shoes to help him swim. Maybe they couldn’t climb back into the boat.

Even if the outing doesn’t seem rational, at that late hour in the day, there was plenty of daylight left.

Sure, there were a lot of snacks onboard, but who’s to say how anyone packs for a boat ride?

“Maybe,” Sills suggested, “they were planning on loading the boat up and leaving all that stuff in there for the weekend.”

More searches were planned for this weekend.

At midday Thursday, with temperatures hovering above freezing, biting winds whipped whitecaps as a quartet of search boats launched from the Long Shoals ramp, just around a bend from where the couple’s boat was found.

The searchers aimed to perform what were described as grid searches on the lake, combing back and forth from the water’s most southerly point, the Wallace Dam, up to Riley Shoals some 3 miles north.

Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com

Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com

Richard Pickering, one of the search coordinators from the nonprofit Emergency Dive Response Team based near Lake Lanier, said, “This is a particularly challenging and difficult mission that we are on right now.”

He and his fellow searchers have no plans to stop looking.

Later in the day Thursday, Sills was back at his office. He fielded phone calls about the case while an assistant plotted GPS coordinates to create a map of where significant findings were made in the case.

The sheriff figured he was doing all he could. One of his deputies was out on the lake. There have been no plans to call off the search. And Sills never quits.

Even so, he seemed resigned to the notion that, for now at least, the elements were in charge.

“I’m at the point now,” Sills said of the still-missing Jones, “that he ain’t coming up till he comes up.”

— Staff reporter Alexis Stevens contributed to this report.