Nearly two decades after the fact, tragedy meets justice.
One day in 1987, Fred Wilkerson up and vanished in Troup County, Georgia. It was a mystery beset with suspicious circumstances, but the evidence never led anywhere, and the case went cold, Wilkerson’s whereabouts unknown. That is, until a remarkable set of circumstances allowed author and investigator Clay Bryant to breathe life back into the case nearly two decades later. Diving into what had previously been overlooked, Bryant was able to locate and recover Wilkerson’s remains and successfully prosecute the killer, who’d crafted a calculating plot to take everything the victim had and murder him in order to keep it. The story concludes with the Wilkerson Family finally getting closure and the killer getting sentenced to life in prison. Join Byrant as he unravels this West Georgia cold case.
Lewis Clayton (Clay) Bryant was born and raised in Troup County, Georgia, and began his career in law enforcement in 1973 as a radio operator with the Georgia State Patrol. In 1976, at the age of twenty-one, he became the youngest trooper on the Georgia State Patrol. In 1980, he became police chief of Hogansville and stayed in that position for twelve years until resigning in 1992 and going into the private sector. He has been recognized as the most prolific cold case investigator in the United States for single-event homicides. His cases have been chronicled on 48 Hours Investigates, Bill Curtis’s Cold Case Files and Discovery ID Murder Book and featured in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, as well as articles in many local and regional newspapers.