A Georgia man convicted of strangling a woman, dumping her body on the side of a road and stealing her car will spend the rest of his life behind bars.
A Douglas County judge on Tuesday sentenced Eric Jackson Greene, 42, of Villa Rica, to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the 2019 murder of 55-year-old Sheila Bryant. He was sentenced to an additional 10 years for stealing Bryant’s car.
Credit: Douglas County Sheriff's Office
Credit: Douglas County Sheriff's Office
Deputies in Paulding County pulled over Greene in Bryant’s vehicle on Feb. 7, 2019. He was arrested on an outstanding warrant but was at that time considered a person of interest in the Bremen woman’s death.
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Two weeks earlier, Bryant’s partially nude body was spotted by a passerby on the side of West Union Hill Road near Ephesus Church Road. She was strangled at another location and left there, according to the results of an autopsy performed by the GBI.
Investigators found DNA evidence that indicated Bryant had been sexually assaulted, prosecutors with the Douglas County District Attorney’s Office said. Greene’s DNA was also found under the woman’s fingernails, “which was evidence that she struggled against him during the attack,” a spokesman for the office said in a news release. “Greene took a selfie of himself in her vehicle after the murder, and a search of his phone revealed that he recently had searched for rape-themed pornography,” the spokesman said.
During a February trial, prosecutors said Greene abused two women with whom he had previously been in romantic relationships and strangled them both.
Greene was not charged with sexually assaulting Bryant because the information came to light after he had already been indicted, according to senior Assistant District Attorney Samantha Newman.
“Re-indicting him would have slowed down the process and delayed the trial,” Newman said.
She added that leveraging the charges against Greene would have caused Bryant’s family the undue stress of having to sit through a second trial.
“And we just want closure for this family,” Newman said.
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It took a jury less than two hours to convict Greene. He was found guilty of malice murder, felony murder and theft by taking, with the two murder charges being combined for the purpose of sentencing.
“(Tuesday’s) sentencing was about Sheila Bryant,” Newman said in a statement. “We weren’t able to take away her family’s pain, but we were able to secure justice for her.”
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