BOGART —- Two weeks after a manhunt began for former University of Georgia professor George M. Zinkhan III, his body was found Saturday in a grave he dug himself.
The nationwide search began for the fugitive on April 25 when Zinkhan's wife and two men were gunned down outside a theater near downtown Athens.
It ended a little more than a mile away from where his red Jeep Liberty had been found on April 30, hidden in a ravine in a rural section of western Clarke County not far from Zinkhan's home in Bogart.
Cadaver dogs found the well-hidden body, with a bullet wound to the head, covered with debris about 9:50 a.m. in a heavily wooded area about 1,000 yards from Cleveland Road Elementary School.
"A person not accustomed to the woods would not have found it," Athens-Clarke County Police Chief Jack Lumpkin said. "The body was beneath the earth. . . . The body was purposely concealed in a manner not to be discovered."
Searchers also found two handguns in the grave.
The State Crime Lab, a unit of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, confirmed the body was Zinkhan's early Saturday evening.
Saturday's discovery was made by dogs from the Alpha Search and Rescue Team, based in Atlanta.
A team of volunteers and two cadaver dogs from the rescue team started searching the area Friday, spending about 10 hours in the dense woods.
When one of the dogs —- a 5-year-old German shepherd named Circe —- showed some behavior changes, searchers decided to return to the location Saturday morning.
"We came back today for a more detailed effort," said Steve Barden, a volunteer with the team.
This time, the search lasted 10 minutes. Madison, a 7-year-old Australian shepherd, did what she trained two years to do when she led the volunteers to the buried body.
The discovery was made outside a search area that had been set up after Zinkhan's Jeep had been found. The day after the vehicle was spotted, as many as 200 heavily armed law enforcement officers scoured an area of 322 acres spanning the Clarke-Jackson county line.
Zinkhan was last seen driving the Jeep on April 25 after dropping off his two children with a neighbor, saying he had to tend to an emergency.
The children, ages 8 and 10, had been in the Jeep earlier that day when it was parked near the Athens Community Theatre at the time of the shootings that took the lives of their mother, 47-year-old Marie Bruce, and two men, 40-year-old Tom Tanner and 63-year-old Ben Teague.
The three victims were attending a reunion of the Town & Gown Players when Zinkhan appeared. About two dozen witnesses said Zinkhan got into an argument with Bruce during the event, left and returned shortly afterward and began firing two handguns. Two other people suffered wounds in the attack.
A motive for the killings has been unclear, although the FBI agent in charge of the investigation had said that Bruce was seeking a divorce. But Bruce, a lawyer, had never filed divorce papers in Clarke County.
On Saturday, law enforcement officers cordoned off the playground at the elementary school.
Aaron Clanton, a teacher at the school, arrived around 10:40 a.m. for his son's birthday party, which was supposed to take place in the playground. He said police were already on the scene. The party for toddlers and their parents was moved to the school's gym.
Bob Covington, the neighbor who took care of Zinkhan's children the afternoon of the shootings, called Saturday's discovery "another sad chapter to the story."
"For the community, the families, his kids and this neighborhood, this last chapter will provide some healing," Covington said. "It's been two weeks of people being on pins and needles, every time you see a police car. I think this will ease a lot of tension. People can get back to their lives and move on from this horrible tragedy."
Reached by phone at her home in Baltimore, Zinkhan's mother, Mary, said she was aware of the discovery.
"I've heard that news," she said. "I have nothing to say about it."
Zinkhan was a well-respected professor at UGA, where he served as the Coca-Cola Company Professor of Marketing. He came to the university in 1994 to head the marketing department in the Terry College of Business. He had taught at the University of Houston before coming to UGA.
He was a prodigious researchers, having written or co-written six books, more than 100 professional journal articles, 27 chapters in other books, 20 published works of poetry and 80 other publications and working papers.
For several years, Zinkhan also had served as a judge for the university's noted Peabody Awards for electronic media.
The university fired Zinkhan after the shootings.
UGA President Michael Adams expressed condolences to the friends and families of the victims on Saturday.
"Our hearts go out to each of them as they try to bring closure to and cope with the pain and sorrow these losses of life have caused them," Adams said. "May they ultimately find healing and peace."
Saturday's discovery brought an end to speculation about Zinkhan's whereabouts.
On May 2, law enforcement officers staked out Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta because Zinkhan had booked a flight on Delta Air Lines to the Netherlands. Zinkhan had a home in Amsterdam, where he taught part time at a university.
Others thought the outdoorsman was hiding on the Appalachian Trail, which had been the subject of at least one of his poems.
During a news conference Saturday afternoon in Athens, Lumpkin described an exhaustive search that covered more than 1,100 acres, including rivers, vacant homes and other properties.
The location where the body was found was beyond the initial search areas, he said, and the thickness of the woods would have made it hard to see from the air.
"A person walking in those woods would not leave a path," Lumpkin said.
Staff writers Kent A. Miles, Marcus K. Garner and Rhonda Cook and The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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