True Crime Story: It Couldn't Happen Here

It was real late, probably 2:00 Friday night,

Saturday morning, September of '98.

We got a call that somebody had seen--they said

it looked like a body or something strange

in the parking lot over at Taco Bell.

When we arrived, right around in this area here,

there was a woman laying in the middle of the road here,

and she was shot in the eye almost at point-blank range.

So the person watched her eyes go dark.

The tight-knit fabric of a small town can be torn apart

when a violent crime happens.

I grew up in a small town.

And when my husband and I decided to have kids,

we decided we wanted to raise them in a small town.

We like knowing our neighbors.

We know all the families that our kids go to school with.

There's just a connection that we really had difficulty

finding in a big city.

But in every small town that I've lived in,

there's a flip side to the coin.

When a violent crime happens,

you know all the players involved.

You know the victim.

You know the law enforcement, the judge, the prosecutor,

and chances are, you know the killer as well.

And that's where it gets incredibly complicated.

I remember the first murder

that took place in my childhood.

It was a local high school boy,

and he was stabbed at the gas station

right down the street from my house.

And it shook me up. It changed the town.

And I definitely think it planted a seed

to keep looking at stories like this,

because you want justice to exist

in these small, beautiful spaces, right?

So it's important that we shine a light on these stories

so that they get the attention that they deserve.

I have been down in Georgia for months now

'cause my husband works down here.

It's been fun driving through all these little small towns

and really get a sense

of, like, the history of the area.

And the small town we're in today is Adel, Georgia.

They've got delicious pizza, according to the sign.

This is, like, the country. Everybody know everybody.

Everybody's related in this town.

You know, you wave, everybody waves.

I came out here for a family reunion,

and I fell in love with the slow pace,

5,000 people in the town,

every morning like a Sunday morning.

Pretty much a lot of Southern hospitality.

It's a nice place to live.

Adel is small, population about 5,000.

Sweet, it's all-American.

But 20 years ago, this place was really rocked

by a series of super brutal murders.

There were four of them in, like, a two-year time span.

And for a town this size, that's nuts.

That's a horror show.

Now add to that,

there is still a dark cloud hanging over the convictions,

so the town has never had a chance to recover.

You can smell it, and see it,

and hear the surroundings.

All of your five senses are super heightened at the time

that you're at a crime scene.

It was pretty immediate

after we arrived on the scene

that they knew that it was Donna.

Donna Brown, the night manager at Taco Bell.

When I found out who that it was,

it kind of hit me a little bit in the chest

because I had known Donna.

She was interested in people and so nice to everybody.

We'd drive in through there,

and Donna going, "Hey, how you doing?"

and coming around the counter, and "How's your day going?"

She was a single mom.

She could get her kid to school,

and when it would be nighttime,

she would have to go to work.

It's hard to think that somebody would

take away somebody that's so nice to everybody.

It's just tough to believe.

That evening, she had to stay late

because they were having glitches

in the computer system.

And so, instead of all the employees leaving at once

and walking out with each other to the cars,

she let the employees go home.

Businesses that would close later at night,

they would call,

ask police officers to come and escort them to the bank,

make sure they dropped off the deposit without any problem.

That night, we didn't get a call at the Taco Bell,

so I guess she was tired and just gonna try

to take it herself and go on to the bank.

So she would have locked up here for the night

and walked this way across to her car, carrying the bag,

and coming across this way.

Right around in this area here was where she was confronted.

And now she's trapped between a locked door

and no way to get to her car.

From the shot, and the stippling on the face,

she was shot almost at point-blank range.

Somebody holding a gun that close to somebody,

it's an execution.

Murder is not a strong enough word for it.

This grass, it was very matted down,

and you could see

where somebody had been there laying in wait

for quite some time for her to leave.

The money was taken.

The suspect got in her car and left.

So when we arrived and found the body,

we immediately called the GBI,

or the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

In these small towns,

they don't have the infrastructure

or the resources to deal with serious violent crime,

because it doesn't happen often enough.

So it makes sense that they would call in the big dogs,

the big state law enforcement agencies.

They started asking us, trying to find the car.

We knew it was a Monte Carlo, dark color.

We had to find it fast.

There's no telling. If they're gonna kill one,

they might kill two or three.

And I-75 is literally 2/10 of a mile away,

and you jump on that, either way,

you could be in Florida in a matter of minutes

and Atlanta in a matter of a few hours.

We were kind of thinking that that was

probably gonna be a hard thing to find--was her car.

But then, two blocks away, at the Pizza Hut parking lot...

One of the officers just happened

to drive through here.

The parking lot was never lit.

This would be a perfect place to dump a car

if you were gonna dump it.

Alerted the GBI that we had a second crime scene.

With the car being parked here,

I was pretty sure that it was somebody local.

I was sure that, if it was somebody local,

we were gonna be able to catch him.

This is cute.

It's got a flower festival,

which is a very Southern deal.

So here's the main strip.

This is a cute, bustling downtown.

These mom-and-pop shops are family-owned businesses.

People still value the local community.

This is a small, tight-knit community,

so when Donna Brown,

the night manager of the Taco Bell,

was murdered, it really changed things.

People were scared because it kind of looks into,

you know, the heart of the town

when you have something like that happen.

So many people knew Donna Brown

from going to Taco Bell.

It wasn't something that they let go easily.

It's scary.

We're just kids, you know,

and it's, like, right in our back door.

It actually set the whole region on fire.

That incident did change how the town

and the surrounding towns feel about the security.

It did change my life.

We are headed to go meet with a law professor

at Georgia State University, Jess Cino,

and she has just immersed herself

with all of the murder cases in Adel.

Hi! - Hey!

- How are you? - Good, how are you?

I'm good. I really appreciate your time.

So this is a brutal murder in a small town.

So what are the first steps that the investigators take?

All through the night,

the GBI is processing the crime scene.

And Adel police are the first line in introducing

and bringing GBI agents in to talk to witnesses.

So the next day, that is sort of the, "Okay,

we need to question pretty much anybody who's on our radar."