A South Georgia man indicted for killing an East Cobb couple in 2015 has had the dismissal of his murder indictment upheld by the Georgia Supreme Court.
By a 7-2 vote, the state’s high court agreed with a lower-court ruling that a Telfair County grand jury that indicted Ronnie Adrian Towns was unlawfully constituted because “some of the grand jurors were not selected randomly.”
The ruling was announced on Monday.
(You can read the entire court ruling here.)
Towns was charged with the Jan. 2015 murders of Elrey “Bud” Runion, 69, and his wife June, 66, of East Cobb, who had traveled to McRae, Ga., to buy a 1966 Ford Mustang Towns had posted for sale on Craigslist.
After their daughters reported them missing, the bodies of the Runions were found in their car in a pond in Telfair County a few days later. Authorities in that southeast Georgia county said the Runions had both been shot in the head.
Prosecutors alleged that Towns tried to lure the victims with the prospect of buying the car, but intended to rob them.
Towns, who was 28 at the time of the Runions’ deaths, turned himself in, and he was indicted for murder by a grand jury.
According to the Supreme Court ruling, 50 prospective grand jurors were summoned to appear on March 16, 2015, but fewer than 16 showed up on time. The presiding judge ordered some of those who hadn’t appeared to be located by the Telfair sheriff, and asked the court clerk to identify four possible candidates for the grand jury from a list of prospective petit jurors who could show up quickly.
Two of those four reported, and others summoned for the grand jury later also reported, and a grand jury was empaneled on March 16.
That grand jury, with the two originally on the petit juror list, returned a murder indictment against Towns the same day.
Towns filed a motion to dismiss the indictment, alleging the two on the petit juror list were not chosen at random. Towns’ attorney said the clerk telephoned those four individuals, whom she knew personally. In a 2017 ruling, the trial court concurred and dismissed the murder indictment.
Prosecutors appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court. The high court majority concluded that while the petit jurors were selected at random from a master jury list, in selecting the two individuals who eventually served on the grand jury, the clerk:
” . . . relied on her personal knowledge of the prospective petit jurors, her own assessment of the extent to which she had the information necessary to contact them, and her estimate of the likelihood that they would be available to report immediately. Those selections were not ‘random’ in any sense of the word.”
The Oconee Circuit District Attorney, which prosecutes cases in Telfair and six other South Georgia counties, is seeking the death penalty against Towns.
The Runions, who lived in the Wendwood subdivision off Holly Springs Road, were married for 38 years. According to their obituary, in 1991 the Runions founded Forever Greatful Ministries, which helps families in need in the Marietta area. He was retired from AT & T and she was a preschool teacher at Johnson Ferry Christian Academy.
They were longtime members of Mt. Paran Church of God North on Allgood Road.
Get Our Free E-Mail Newsletter!
Every Sunday we round up the week’s top headlines and preview the upcoming week in the East Cobb News Digest. Click here to sign up, and you’re good to go!
