For her murder sat in jail a resident of Georgia, but more than 38 years, the investigators did not know who she is and what her name was until this moment.
Shirlen «Cheryl» Hammack was killed on Halloween in 1981 in Quitman, Georgia and buried in a shallow grave in a cornfield. She remained unknown by the victim of a crime, or, as they say in the US, Jane DOE, until this moment, when the concerned woman took a photo of her headstone on the 37th anniversary of the murder and posted it on Facebook.
Attributing «known only to God,» she placed a photo of the headstone and talked about the investigation of this crime, according to WTXL-TV. And it worked! Kyle Bishop saw a post in Facebook and said investigators had learned that in the picture my childhood friend of Shirlen, who disappeared after he joined the traveling artists, reports the station.
The body was exhumed and DNA mother of the girl showed coincidence.
It’s now been CONFIRMED by authorities that Brooks County Jane Doe (The Doe Files #4 https://t.co/9shQbNaybT) has now been IDENTIFIED as Shirlene ‘Cheryl’ Ann Hammack. Another Jane Doe finally has her name back💙 pic.twitter.com/LiJbAvfv0o
— Kirsty Skye🐺 (@DaughterOfRemus) January 9, 2020
The staff of the Bureau of investigation of the state of Georgia (GBI) announced the identity of the body Thursday.
«It was hard when I was growing up,» he told the news station the sister of Johanna Hammock Hammock Hey. «Not knowing whether she cared about her. A lot of excitement. A lot of searches. We searched and searched and just not found the answers».
The GBI investigator Jamie Steinberg told the station that this case differed from the others in that the offender in the crime — George Newsome — was condemned for it, despite the fact that the victim’s name was unknown.
Newsome was also part of a team of itinerant artists, and he admitted that he strangled and stabbed the girl with a knife over an argument about another man. He was arrested shortly after the murder, but initially he refused to admit it. Investigators have connected him to the murder after he found the rope that he strangled the girl in the stolen trailer, told the GBI.
He started to go more towards the investigation after he was captured in Alabama, where he stayed after his escape from prison and spent 2 years on the run. Sentenced to life imprisonment he died in prison in 1988, when he was 58 years old.
Newsome died, and without revealing to investigators the identity of his victim simply because he didn’t want to say or because he didn’t know, said GBI.
