Scott Howard

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The Truth Was Blacked Out. I Went Looking Anyway. Thirty-four years after Jennifer Stone was killed on Hull Street, here’s what the file says, what it doesn’t, and why I wrote Murder of One. 📷 On the morning of April 23, 1992, Jennifer Lynn Stone was murdered in the carriage house at 187 Hull Street in downtown Athens. She was twenty-two, a senior in UGA’s journalism school days from graduating, and a gifted photographer. She missed two project meetings that day. By evening, friends went looking for her and found a side door standing open. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. Her cameras were gone. No one has ever been arrested. The killer left DNA at the scene, and in thirty-four years it has never been matched to anyone. I knew Jennifer. For two decades I’ve been trying to understand how a case with that much physical evidence simply stopped moving. Murder of One is what came out of that. The file that landed on my desk Part of my research was a stack of documents most people in Athens have never seen. There were federal DEA reports and a 1991 police informant report. There were contemporaneous Athens Observer coverage and the GBI’s cold-case bulletin. And there was a thick bundle of letters and statements written years later by a federal inmate. That inmate claimed he knew who killed Jennifer and why. He described a contract killing tied to Athens’s early-’90s crack trade, a hitman paid in cash and cocaine, and a cover-up reaching into lawyers’ offices and the courthouse. A fellow inmate backed him up. It reads like the ending of a thriller. That’s exactly why I didn’t trust it. What happened when I checked The inmate was trying to get his own sentence reduced. The man who corroborated him had been paid by him. The two details that sounded most like inside knowledge, Jennifer’s cameras and the name of the supposed killer, had both been in the Athens papers in 1992. Where his story could be tested, it failed. The cameras were traced to three other men who were charged with stealing and selling them, and the crime lab’s DNA ruled out all three. Police said publicly at the time that the man he named wasn’t tied to the case. But one thread held. A police report written months before the murder confirms that the drug network he described was real. The dark side of Athens in 1992 wasn’t invented. It just kept different hours than the town on the postcards. So I was left with the question the book is built around. If the official story was thin and the jailhouse story was worse, what actually happened to Jennifer Stone? And why did the town stop asking? Why the pages are redacted The graphic at the top of this post is a statement with the important words blacked out. That’s what this case has felt like for thirty-four years. The evidence exists. The DNA exists. The files exist. The answers are still hidden behind black bars, and some of them are hidden on purpose. Murder of One is my attempt to pull those bars back carefully and honestly, without pinning a murder on anyone the evidence can’t support. Jennifer deserves the truth, not just another story. What would actually solve this This case doesn’t need more rumors. It needs someone to compare that unmatched DNA profile against the people whose names have circled this case for decades, and to take a serious look at files that have sat untouched. That’s why I’ve formally asked Georgia authorities to review the case under the Coleman-Baker Act, the state’s cold-case review law. Get the book, and see the evidence yourself Murder of One is available now. Order your copy at murderofone.com. When you buy the book, you also get access to the research behind it: the documents, newspaper archives, and records I worked from. I want readers to see the evidence and decide for themselves, rather than take my word for it. [BUY THE BOOK button → link to your purchase page on murderofone.com] If you know something Someone in Athens still knows what happened on Hull Street. If that’s you, or someone you know, please call the Athens-Clarke County Police Department at 706-613-3330, the ACCPD Cold Case Unit at 706-705-4775, or the GBI Region 11 Athens office at 706-552-2309. Please share this post. Every person who reads Jennifer’s name makes it harder for this town to forget her again. — Scott Howard

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