Vane’s Wake · Case File 001 · Bartow County, Georgia
Two shotgun attacks. One extended family. And a connection investigators said they had not ruled out.
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Featured image: AI-generated illustration inspired by a north Georgia highway at winter dawn. It is not a photograph of the incident or a verified view of the location.
On the morning of January 20, 1993, Johnny Mitchell Jenkins was driving north along U.S. Highway 41 south of Adairsville, Georgia. Around 7:30 a.m., according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s case account, gunfire came from another vehicle near CCC Road. Jenkins’s vehicle left the highway and struck a tree.
At first, the wreck appeared to be an ordinary traffic accident. It was not. At Floyd Medical Center, doctors discovered that Jenkins, 45, had suffered multiple shotgun wounds. He died.
Jenkins owned a transport business in Adairsville. Investigators examined whether the shooting had been deliberate and whether his business dealings might have supplied a motive. Those were investigative possibilities, not established findings.
An earlier attack
The next detail changes the shape of the story. On July 21, 1992—almost six months earlier—a woman driving on Halls Station Road from Adairsville toward Kingston was shot by someone in a passing vehicle. She survived.
Contemporary reporting identified her as Melinda “Sissy” Jenkins, the wife of Johnny’s nephew. A January 1993 Rome News-Tribune report described the earlier attack as near-fatal and said she had been wounded in the face. The report also stated that she had driven trucks for Jenkins Transport.
That last fact gives the incidents a second documented point of contact. The two victims were related by marriage, and the newspaper reported that Sissy had worked for Johnny’s business. It does not establish whether her employment had any bearing on either attack.
What investigators said in 1993
In a contemporaneous report titled “Business dealings probed in highway slaying,” staff writer Jack Warner quoted Bartow County sheriff’s investigator Ron Coleman. Coleman said investigators were examining Jenkins’s business activities and had not ruled out a possible connection to the earlier shooting.
The article also described the family’s grief and the transport company’s history, including an employee’s account of earlier Chapter 11 proceedings. An employee’s account is not a bankruptcy finding, and financial difficulty alone is not evidence of a motive for murder.
The January 1993 reporting identified Jenkins’s vehicle as a 1991 Lincoln Town Car. We have not established the identity of either attacking vehicle from the newspaper articles available to us.
Two connections—and important unknowns
The family relationship is supported by both the 1993 press coverage and later family obituaries: Sissy was married to Don Jenkins, son of Johnny’s brother Hugh Dennis Jenkins. The reported employment relationship comes from contemporary newspaper reporting.
Neither connection proves that the shootings shared a perpetrator, weapon, or motive. We have not examined the original firearms evidence, case assignment records, or laboratory reports. We do not know whether usable shotgun shells, pellets, or other physical evidence survived, or whether the two attacks were compared forensically.
A family member has publicly described receiving investigative notes and says the earlier shooting file was marked closed in 1994 for lack of further evidence. We have not seen those notes ourselves, so that reported closure remains a lead, not an independently verified finding. It should not be confused with the present status of Johnny Jenkins’s homicide investigation.
Another Bartow County case in the records
The research also led us to the April 1990 deaths of Robert Montgomery Woody and Patricia Ann Woody near Cartersville. A contemporary newspaper account identifies Ron Coleman as a Bartow County criminal investigator discussing that case. Nearly three years later, the Rome News-Tribune quoted Coleman about the Jenkins investigation.
That is a documented overlap in law-enforcement personnel—not evidence that the crimes were connected, nor proof that Coleman was the lead investigator in the Jenkins case. Investigators in the same county routinely work on multiple unrelated cases.
A separate Cartersville cold case, the killing of Patricia Ann Hanlon in 2000, also remains in our research index. We have not established any investigative-personnel overlap between her case and the Jenkins or Woody cases, so it should not be presented as part of a connected series.
Two women named Patricia Ann
The Woody case has another unusual—but not necessarily meaningful—parallel with a separate Cartersville killing. The woman who died alongside Monty Woody was Patricia Ann Woody. A woman killed in Cartersville in 2000 was named Patricia Ann Hanlon. It is the same first-and-middle-name combination, not merely the same first name.
There is no public evidence that the two murders shared a suspect, motive, weapon, or investigator. Names repeat; coincidence is not a connection. But a careful investigation should name the coincidence accurately before deciding what, if anything, it warrants.
Questions about evidence
In our February 2025 reporting on the Woody murders, Astra Obscura described allegations that DNA material had disappeared and clothing evidence had been destroyed. Those accounts came from sources not identified in the published article. We have not obtained an original evidence inventory, chain-of-custody log, or destruction authorization to corroborate them. The GBI’s public Woody synopsis does not verify those alleged losses.
The appropriate question is therefore not who deliberately concealed evidence. It is more basic: What evidence was originally collected, what remains, and what do the official property and laboratory records say happened to each item? An allegation of mishandling is not proof of misconduct, much less proof that the Woody and Jenkins crimes were connected.
A daughter’s memory
A public comment by Kristi Culver, who identified herself as Sissy Jenkins’s daughter, gives the events a human dimension that the case summaries cannot convey. She described being seven years old when she witnessed the aftermath of her mother’s shooting. “It still haunts me to this day,” she wrote.
Culver said she later received 36 pages of investigative notes attributed to former GBI agent James Garmon, which she understood to show that her mother’s shooting investigation had been closed in 1994 for insufficient evidence. She said her family had believed the inquiry remained open. Astra Obscura has not independently examined the notes or verified the reported closure, assignment, or current administrative status. Her account is presented as her account, not as an official case finding.
Garmon later faced federal criminal proceedings over improper firearm sales, including contemporary reporting about a sawed-off shotgun without a required acquisition record. Those transactions occurred more than a decade after the Jenkins shootings. The reported accounting violation is not firearm registration, a ballistic comparison, or evidence that this gun was used in either attack. No such connection has been established. The original federal case papers would be needed even to settle which firearm was involved in that recordkeeping count.
The questions matter because the surviving families have had to live with uncertainty for decades. They deserve records that can be examined and answers that distinguish what investigators actually found from what later observers suspect.
The trace that remains
More than three decades later, the strongest documented question is the one investigators themselves reportedly asked in January 1993: Were the two attacks connected?
An answer would require the underlying records: what witnesses saw, what physical evidence was collected, what comparisons were made, and how investigators eventually assessed the possible link.
For now, the evidence supports a narrower conclusion. Two members of an extended family were attacked on north Georgia roads with shotguns about six months apart; a contemporary newspaper reported that one had also worked for the other’s company; and investigators considered a connection. The record we can presently inspect does not tell us what they ultimately determined.
Every event leaves a trace.
Sources and disclosure
Primary case narrative: Georgia Bureau of Investigation — Johnny Mitchell Jenkins, Unsolved Homicide.
Contemporaneous reporting: Jack Warner, Rome News-Tribune, “Business dealings probed in highway slaying” (January 1993), photographed newspaper clipping provided for research; see the January 22, 1993 archive record and January 21 record.
Family relationship: January 2014 obituary of Hugh Dennis Jenkins, R. Dudley Barton & Son Funeral Home, identifying his son Don and daughter-in-law Sissy Jenkins. Related-case personnel reference: contemporary clipping headed “Couple Found Dead in Bartow,” identifying Ron Coleman in the Woody investigation; edition and page details are still being established.
Additional sources: GBI Woody case summary; Astra Obscura, Woody evidence reporting (2025), containing allegations not independently verified here; contemporary reporting on James Garmon’s separate federal firearms case. Kristi Culver’s public comment was supplied for research; the underlying GBI notes have not been examined.
Editorial note: This is an ongoing documentary inquiry, not an allegation against any named living person or investigator. The two road images are AI-generated illustrations and are not crime-scene photography. We do not publish private residential or social-media information. Case status, underlying investigative files, and forensic comparisons require further confirmation.