It was a confusing day of testimony as the state presented the meat of its case against Franklin Gebhardt. And that was before the 60-year-old defendant started talking.
An interpreter was needed to understand Gebhardt’s garbled, clipped accent, surreptitiously recorded last year in an acoustically poor Spalding County holding cell by convicted child molester Christopher Vaughn.
The informant had his own connection to the 1983 murder of Timothy Coggins. Besides being among the small group of squirrel hunters who found the young black man’s badly mutilated body — stabbed more than 30 times, then chained to a pickup and dragged back and forth on a rural dirt road — Vaughn also claims to have heard Gebhardt boast about his involvement in Coggins’ death. Vaughn, who testified Wednesday, was 10 years old at the time.
Now he was to obtain a confession on tape. Was this to be a smoking gun, a potentially fatal blow to the defense? If so, it was fitted with a silencer, for, instead of an admission of guilt, Gebhardt offered a series of what can best be described as non-denial denials.
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Jurors were provided with a transcript. Everyone else was dependent on the testimony of Spalding Sheriff’s Office Capt. Mike Morris, who, with GBI special agent Jared Coleman, set the trap for Gebhardt.
Morris’ summary: While Gebhardt doesn’t offer a taped confession, he never proclaims his innocence.
Vaughn was placed in the holding cell with Gebhardt, telling him he had just been interviewed by law enforcement. The plan: Tell Gebhardt the truth, that you told investigators about the confession made 34 years ago and they knew even more.
“They’re talking about conspiracy to commit murder,” Vaughn can be heard explaining on the recording. “Charging me with conspiracy for not telling.”
Vaughn told him others had told investigators the same thing.
“They even had the party where you said it at,” he said.
Gebhardt remained coy. Asked by Vaughn if he remembered saying anything, he replied, “Not that I know of.”
But he was allegedly less circumspect to others. Four men — three in jail, one a member of the Aryan Nation, another an African-American, and another an old friend of the defendant — testified Thursday that Gebhardt had told them he murdered Coggins.
Patrick John Douglas, the white supremacist, said Gebhardt said he “didn’t need no help killing that (expletive).” William Moore Sr., charged as his accomplice, is scheduled to go on trial for Coggins’ murder in October.
Douglas also alleged that Gebhardt told him he was going to tell differing stories to opportunistic informants to make investigators look bad. (Benjamin Coker, the Griffin Judicial Circuit district attorney, insists no deals were offered to the incarcerated men in exchange for their testimony.)
That might explain why former cellmate Terry Reed told GBI agent Coleman that Gebhardt claimed to have cut off Coggins’ penis and stuffed it into the victim’s mouth. But was the defendant employing that same Machiavellian strategy just two weeks after the murder, when longtime friend Willard Sanders told investigators that Gebhardt told him he killed Coggins over a “drug deal gone bad”?
Defense co-counsel Larkin Lee got Sanders to acknowledge that Coleman told him the murder “wasn’t about drugs. … It was about a white girl.”
Jurors will have to weigh those varying accounts, among a series of curiosities they were presented with Thursday. One of the most curious? Why would a white supremacist snitch on a white man for allegedly killing a black man because he socialized with a white woman.
Perhaps the most damning evidence against Gebhardt came from his deep water-hole-turned-trash-hole, filled with decades of debris.
Using a hydrovac (think giant water pix), investigators emptied the well. Amid the sludge, they found a number of items they could connect, circumstantially, to Coggins’ murder.
A size 10 shoe was recovered, and a white undershirt — significant because Coggins was wearing only pants and underwear when his body was found. The clothing appeared to have burn marks.
A wooden handle from a knife, and two separate blades, also were located. And a link of heavy chain.
Yet, because of their unprotected storage, these discoveries could not be matched through DNA to the victim or the suspects.
There was some clarity Thursday from Larry Peterson, the GBI crime scene analyst who was there in 1983 and recalled from his own notes the savagery of the crime.
Coggins’ blood was found in four different areas, indicating at least three areas of struggle, Peterson said. Indications his body was dragged behind a truck were supported by his clothes, extensively damaged, and the soil and debris embedded in his hair.
Testimony resumes Friday, with the state saying it expects to rest by day’s end.
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