Georgia man pleads guilty to manslaughter in 1983 killing of a black man

In October 1983, the body of Timothy Coggins, a 23-year-old black man, was found on a grassy roadside in a small Georgia city about 40 miles south of Atlanta. He had been stabbed more than 30 times, and been dragged behind a truck. X marks had been cut into his body.

On Thursday, a second defendant was convicted in the killing of Coggins and sent to prison.

“Instead of telling someone that our family member was brutally murdered and no one was arrested, we can say, ‘Hey, we finally got justice,” Heather Coggins, a niece of the victim, said in an interview. “Thirty-five years later, but we got justice.”

On Thursday morning at the Spalding County Courthouse in Griffin, Georgia, Bill Moore, 59, sat in a wheelchair before Judge W. Fletcher Sam of Spalding County Superior Court and pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and concealing a body, but did not provide any further statement. He will serve 20 years in prison and 10 years probation as part of the plea deal, said Marie Broder, chief assistant district attorney. He had originally been charged with murder.

In June, Frank Gebhardt, Moore’s brother-in-law, was convicted at trial of murder, assault and battery. He was sentenced to life plus 30 years.

Ben Coker, the district attorney for the Griffin Judicial Circuit, said in an interview Thursday that the authorities believed all along that the killing was racially motivated, and that Gebhardt and Moore, who are white, had killed Coggins because they believed he had had a relationship with Gebhardt’s white girlfriend.

During Moore’s sentencing Thursday, Heather Coggins said, she held his gaze as she addressed him on behalf of her family.

“We are a family of faith, and we forgive you,” she recalled telling him. “And I hope that whoever you pray to, that you ask for forgiveness. And we pray that you’re forgiven.”

“But,” she concluded, “I also hope that you spend the rest of your natural life behind bars.”

Harry Charles, a lawyer for Moore, could not be reached for comment.

Investigators had quit actively investigating Timothy Coggins’ murder just two weeks after the killing, Coker said. Two months later, he added, the case was closed.

But last October, new information emerged, and five people, including Moore and Gebhardt, were arrested. The other three, Gregory Huffman, Sandra Bunn — Gebhardt’s sister — and her son, Lamar Bunn, were each charged with obstruction. They await trial.

Huffman, who was a detention officer with the Spalding County Sheriff’s Office, is accused of alerting Gebhardt to part of the investigation, the authorities have said. Bunn is accused of feeding Gebhardt information about how to avoid DNA testing, and Bunn, who worked at the Milner Police Department in Lamar County, is also accused of providing information to Gebhardt, obstructing the investigation, Coker said.

Witnesses told the authorities that they had watched Timothy Coggins, Gebhardt and Moore leave a predominantly black nightclub in Spalding County on Oct. 7, 1983, according to Coker. Another witness, Coker said, testified that he saw the three early the next morning in Sunny Side, a city in the northern part of the county.

Coggins’ body was found on Oct. 9, 1983, Coker said.

Moore’s plea, he said, “closes a chapter of a very hard-fought battle for Timothy Coggins.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.