Still no conviction in 10-year-old Lenox-area murder

"We remain hopeful that our luck will change and that somehow we will be able to locate the proverbial 'smoking gun' and subsequently convict Mr. Bynum's killer," Howard said Monday. "We would appreciate the public's assistance in achieving this goal."

Bynum, 44, was just two weeks from getting married when he made a trip to California, leaving his car at a friend's house near the Lenox MARTA station.

Bynum, a marketing executive at Convergent Media Systems Corp., returned from the West Coast late on the evening of June 9, 1999, and took MARTA from the airport to the Lenox station.

He was walking back to his friend's house shortly before midnight and had just crossed a pedestrian bridge over Ga. 400 when he was gunned down.

Neighbors along Peachtree Drive off Piedmont Road heard the gunshots and called police. When officers arrived, they found Bynum dead in the middle of Peachtree Drive with at least one gunshot to the chest, Atlanta police homicide Sgt. Cecil Mann said.

A reward fund blossomed to $70,000, and the case was featured on the television show, "America's Most Wanted.

The state Department of Transportation named the 223-foot-long pedestrian bridge, which connects the Peachtree Park neighborhood with the MARTA station and Lenox Square mall, the Gordon Bynum Jr. Pedestrian Bridge.

A year after the slaying, the Peachtree Park Neighborhood Association and the Buckhead Coalition donated an emergency call box that was installed at the foot of the walkway and connects callers with police, fire or ambulance services.

Three years after the shooting, Atlanta police charged Tutman, 26, with Bynum's murder.

There was no murder weapon, confession, DNA or other physical evidence linking the former Marine to the crime, and when Tutman was tried in March 2004, the prosecution's case relied mainly on the testimony of two men.

One, the defendant's younger brother, initially told police in 2002 that he gave Tutman the gun used in the killing.

But the younger sibling changed his story on the witness stand, telling jurors that he lied two years earlier and falsely implicated his older brother because police threatened and pressured him.

The other witness, Christopher Michael Thomas, was originally a co-defendant of Tutman who avoided his own murder trial by turning on Tutman.

The jury acquitted Tutman, but when Fulton Superior Court Judge Elizabeth Long polled jurors individually to determine whether each stood by the verdict, juror JoAnn McGuire tearfully changed her mind, and Long declared a mistrial.

"I feel sad for the [Bynum] family because I feel we were not able to provide closure for them, but we felt the evidence wasn't there," another juror, Bev Stern, said following the trial. "We're not saying he's innocent— we have no idea."

"We felt we couldn't convict on shoddy evidence," juror Al Moses said in 2004. "It was weak."

Tutman remains under indictment in the case, according to Yvette Brown, a spokeswoman for the district attorney. He is out of jail on bond.

Bynum's fiancee, Laura Lee Kinney, is now a physician in Charleston, S.C., where their wedding was to be held.