MACON, Ga. — In 1995 someone shot a woman behind a Martin Luther King Elementary School.
She stumbled onto Shurling Drive where motorists thought she was drunk.
But, when officers arrived, they didn't find an intoxicated woman -- they found a dead body later identified as 43-year old Virginia Howard.
Now, her son, Larry Howard, is grown up and has moved away from Macon. He recently made a trip back home to keep asking questions about what happened to his mother.
"She struggled from behind the school... and collapsed on the side of the highway," says Larry. "The janitor heard a gunshot and saw a yellow Cadillac leave."
Larry says he was just 25 years old when it happened.
"She had a great heart and was very giving," says Larry. "She got addicted to drugs and it changed her DNA and the makeup of who she was and she became someone completely different."
Fast forward to 2018, Captain Shermaine Jones with the Bibb County Sheriff's Office is now the investigator on the case.
"In our line of work that's typically called a who done it. You have a body but you have no information as to how that body got there," says Jones.
Jones says over the years investigators have had many theories, including rumors that she was killed by an ex-lover, or someone seeking revenge, because she "snitched" to law enforcement -- but none of them checked out.
"Detectives have moved on to other places and there's so many unsolved homicides in Macon," says Larry.
Larry says though 23 years have passed, he's thought about his mother almost every day.
"She was nothing to them. But she was everything to me," says Larry.
Captain Jones says until Larry called him in November, he hadn't picked up Howard's case file for months-- and he wasn't even working in Macon when Howard was killed.
While there have been no new developments in recent years, Jones says he needs tips from the public to possibly help close the case.
If you have any information about what happened to Virginia Howard you're asked to call the Bibb County Sheriff's Office at 478-751-7500, or Crime Stoppers at 1-877-68-CRIME.
