The Gwinnett County Police Department has solved a nearly 50-year-old cold case thanks to new technologies with DNA.
Remains, including a skull, bone and other bone fragments found in 1982 off Deshong Drive in unincorporated Stone Mountain, have been identified as Marlene Standridge who disappeared in the early 1970s. She was last seen alive with her two children in Piedmont Park before disappearing without a trace.
Her daughter Janis Adams, who was 3 at the time, was found abandoned at the park along with her 6-year-old brother.
After searching for answers to her mother’s disappearance for years, Adams submitted her DNA to a law enforcement database several years ago. Last month, she got a phone call from a Gwinnett Police detective with news of a match.
The detective told her Standridge was likely murdered and may have tried to hide her and her brother at the time in order to save them.
“When the detective told me she was probably taken that day and that’s what happened to her, it was just a real enlightening moment,” Adams tells WSB’s Sandra Parrish.
Police believe the murderer was likely James Willie Brown who was executed in 2004 for the gruesome murder of Brenda Sue Watson in 1975. Claiming mental illness, he would be tried twice for the crime after winning an appeal on the first conviction that he wasn’t first deemed fit to stand trial. He was subsequently deemed fit and convicted again in 1991.
Investigators believe Brown was responsible for multiple murders of women over the years, but was only charged and convicted for the murder of Watson.
“It was a bittersweet moment,” says Adams. “I hate that she was murdered, but I got closure which was something that I’ve needed for… almost 48 years now.”