According to a recent estimate by the Equal Justice Initiative, thousands of Black Americans were lynched in the decades between the Civil War and World War II—with Georgia second only to Mississippi in raw numbers killed. These brutal extrajudicial killings, often staged as wicked public spectacles, took place across the country but were especially pronounced in the south, where white citizens shared both fear and resentment toward their now-emancipated Black neighbors. With American slavery vanquished, white southerners were now determined to wield indiscriminate terror to maintain a societal system of white supremacy. A quarter of southern lynchings, the EJI study found, were fueled by obsessive revulsion at the concept of sexual contact between Black men and white women.
“The miscegenation laws of the South...leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women,” the journalist Ida B. Wells wrote in her 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors. “White men lynch the offending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women.”
Eventually, these lynching spectacles died out. Yet white vigilante violence never fully disappeared, nor did the promise of impunity for its perpetrators. The message, codified by the shameless crimes of generations of white southerners: White men are free to steal the lives of Black men—especially those who’ve pursued a white woman.
As Coleman looked more closely at Coggins’s death, he began to see a familiar story.
Frankie Gebhardt was already in custody at the Spalding County Detention Center on an unrelated sexual assault charge when, in April 2017, investigators came to question him about the 34-year-old lynching.
“I don’t know a damn thing about that,” the 59-year-old inmate insisted.
Gebhardt said he didn’t remember hearing about the murder and definitely didn’t have anything to do with it. He didn’t remember ever bragging to anyone about having committed it either. But then again, after 23 years spent as a drunk, Gebhardt conceded, there was a lot he didn’t remember. When investigators asked about the rumors that he’d thrown the murder weapon down his well, Gebhardt quipped back, “Well, y'all come out there and dig my damn well up." When, toward the end of the interview, Coleman showed him the photo, Gebhardt erupted. "I ain't never seen that picture,” he exclaimed. “I ain't never seen that nigger."
Gebhardt had spent his entire life living at or near Carey’s Mobile Home. Having dropped out of school after sixth grade, he supported himself by working shifts logging timber. On the weekends he’d host wild, debaucherous parties featuring beer and pills and shrooms and, at least one time, the drunken butchering of a cow on the kitchen floor of one of the trailers. For years he’d been inseparable from his brother-in-law, Bill Moore, who like Gebhardt had a reputation for violence. They were known as “frequent fliers” at the local courthouse.
“Just a regular guy who was brought up kind of rough,” explained Larkin Lee, Gebhardt’s attorney, who acknowledged his client was “no stranger to drinking and fighting” and had a “propensity” toward racial slurs. Still, Lee said Gebhardt has always denied to him that he had any involvement in Coggins’s death. “I think a lot of people have heard it over the years. I’m not sure that Frankie has ever said it,” Lee told me. “It’s one of those things where it’s a rumor, and 30 years later people swear that they’ve heard it directly from him.”
But as Coleman worked the case, he encountered person after person who insisted that Gebhardt had, in fact, bragged about the crime. They generally claimed that Gebhardt had discovered that Coggins had been sleeping with his “old lady,” a white woman who went by “Mickey,” and that Coggins had previously ripped off Gebhardt in a drug deal. (Coleman identified “Mickey” as Ruth Elizabeth Gay, who left the state permanently after Coggins’s murder and died in 2010.) And so he and Moore picked up Coggins from the nightclub, took him to the Hanging Tree, stabbed him, dragged him from the back of their truck, and left him for dead.
The reports of Gebhardt’s confessions varied. An inmate who’d been friends with Gebhardt and Moore years earlier said the men had boasted of how they’d dragged Coggins. The first words from one longtime resident of the trailer park, upon hearing why investigators were at his door, were: "Frankie Gebhardt killed that boy.” An ex-girlfriend told Coleman that Gebhardt would beat her while threatening, "If you keep on, you are going to wind up like that nigger in the ditch.” A man whose mother had once dated Gebhardt recalled both him and Moore admitting that they’d committed the murder, with the latter drunkenly lamenting “the old days” of “killing Black people for no reason.” For over 30 years, there had been plenty of witnesses. But no one had bothered to seek them out.
Even after Gebhardt became aware that investigators were zeroing in on him, he kept telling people about the crime. At one point, police executing a search warrant seized 60 knives from his trailer. Not long afterward, a new inmate came forward to speak to investigators. He told them Gebhardt had recently confessed to having stabbed Coggins, bragging that investigators had just seized 60 of his knives but that he had disposed of any evidence years ago.
Before long, arrest warrants had been issued for both Gebhardt and Moore, whose families and friends insisted the men were being railroaded by an overeager sheriff’s office. “We have no knowledge of this Timothy Coggins case,” insisted Brandy Abercrombie, 41, Moore’s daughter and Gebhardt’s niece. “I’ve never heard of this [case] in my entire life.”
It had taken decades, but there were finally charges in the death of Timothy Coggins. Investigators had their suspects, but with murder trials looming, they were still short on something crucial: evidence.
In his first meeting at the prosecutor’s office, Coleman calmly explained how he’d stumbled across a decades-old cold case he believed they could solve. There were some problems, he conceded. Almost everything from the original crime scene had disappeared: the soil samples and tire tracks, the DNA collected from the slain man’s body, the wooden club possibly used to beat Coggins, the empty Jack Daniel’s bottle discarded near the scene, the hair samples collected from the victim’s sweater and jeans—all of it lost during the years the case sat cold.
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The lack of evidence flustered Marie Broder, a sharp-witted 34-year-old prosecutor who’d been the prot?g? of Layla Zon, a prosecutor turned judge in the nearby Alcovy Judicial Circuit. Zon had taught her how to be aggressive and firm, but not so firm that she’d be written off by her colleagues, the judge, or, most crucially, jurors.
Broder zeroed in on finding the piece of evidence that could cement the case: the knife used to kill Coggins. Investigators knew that if the murder weapon still existed, it was most likely at the bottom of Gebhardt’s well. But that presented a problem: The well was too close to the trailer, impossible to excavate without destroying the house.
“We need to get in this damn well,” Broder insisted to Coleman during a phone call one night.
“I’ll find a way to get into it,” Coleman assured.
Soon enough, they’d located a hydrovac company in Atlanta that could blast water into the well and then vacuum up any loose debris without destroying the trailer. Before long, they were sucking up years of dirt and trash.
When they emptied out the vacuum tank, they discovered a bounty of evidence: a pair of Adidas shoes like the ones Coggins’s family said he was likely wearing on the night he vanished, a white T-shirt that appeared to be torn by multiple stab marks, and, most crucially, an old broken knife.
They had their evidence. Now it was time to prepare for trial.