Authorities said on Friday that an Alabama man is being held in connection with the stabbing death of a lady at her Georgia home 24 years ago.
On August 22, at around 11:30 a.m., U.S. Marshals detained Clerence George, 63, at his Birmingham residence. In 2000, he killed Julie Ann McDonald, and he is currently being held at the Jefferson County Jail pending his extradition to Georgia on murder and aggravated assault charges.
At a press conference on Friday, Walker County Sheriff Steve Wilson stated that McDonald, a 43-year-old pharmacist, had been stabbed several times and was most likely dead for three or four days when her body was discovered inside her LaFayette, Georgia, home. LaFayette is located about 100 miles (161 kilometers) northwest of Atlanta.
At the time, he claimed, there were other suspects, one of which was George, a McDonald acquaintance discovered to be in possession of her checkbook. But not enough evidence was available to warrant any arrests.
Authorities are not yet disclosing a potential motive for McDonald’s death, according to the sheriff.
According to al.com, George, who would have been 39 at the time of McDonald’s murder, had a long history of arrests in Alabama but none for serious offenses.
Investigators revived the cold case in 2015 and provided material for analysis, but once more there was insufficient evidence to bring charges. The case was revived in 2023 and once more this year, but this time formal charges were brought about thanks to technology.
Reinterviewing witnesses and pounding on doors, according to investigators, is a classic police tactic that is essential to cracking cases like this one.
Wilson and representatives of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, who collaborated on the inquiry, stated they never quit up on crimes that remain unexplained.
Thank you to everyone involved in the McDonald case, GBI Special Agent In Charge Joe Calhoun said.
“There was some really good work done here and not all of it was scientific,” he said. “There was some leg work and door-knocking. The GBI never stops working on unsolved cases. There was a tremendous effort by these investigators, who sometimes ran into a brick wall, but they kept going.”
Although a number of the victim’s family members have since passed away, authorities claim to have informed McDonald’s niece and nephew about George’s arrest.
“The biggest gratification I’ve seen in working these cold cases is giving the family some relief knowing that someone has been found guilty in a court of law by their peers and that someone is held accountable for a death that was totally unnecessary. There’s some sense of relief that the family can put it behind them and go on’’ Wilson said. “Not that it gives them great joy, but it’s the fact that they know a person has been held accountable for that death.”
