DNA Solves 50-Year-Old Stone Mountain Cold Case

STONE MOUNTAIN, GA — Gwinnett Police Homicide have identified previously unidentified remains found in 1982, the department announced in a news release.

Using genealogy DNA from the victim’s daughter, police have identified the remains as belonging to Marlene Strandridge, a woman who went missing in 1972. Standridge’s daughter, Janis Adams, never knew what happened to her mother, who disappeared when she was an infant. She spent her whole life trying to track down her mother.

“We grew up thinking our mom just abandoned us and she’s never coming back,” Adams told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, noting that her mother, who was 22 at the time, was described as a free-spirited hippie who may have not wanted to be tied down by the demands of motherhood. “It just never sat well with me. I know mothers don’t do that.”

Adams recently submitted her DNA to a law enforcement database, at a friend’s suggestion. In March, a detective at the Gwinnett Homicide Unit shipped the unidentified skull, which was found in the woods off Deshong Drive in unincorporated Stone Mountain almost 40 years ago, to Othram Labs. The lab matched the DNA of the skull to Adams’ DNA. When they called Adams, she confirmed that her mother was named Marlene Strandridge.

In August, the department invited Adams and her uncle Stanley Standridge (Marlene’s brother) to speak with the detective. They obtained another DNA sample to confirm the match.

Finally, on Monday, Othram Labs confirmed that Adams was a match.

Police long suspected James Willie Brown, who was convicted of committing at least two other killings near Stone Mountain during the 1970s, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Brown was executed in 2003.

Although the case has been at least partially solved, Adams told the AJC she still wishes she could have known her mother. “My mother was like the one thing that if I could have found about, I would’ve liked to have known, she said.”