TELFAIR COUNTY, Ga. — The trial for a nine-year-old murder case may be delayed again.
Telfair County's district attorney hoped to take Jay Towns to trial in September, but new evidence found in a creek in April may delay the trial.
Towns was indicted for the murder of an elderly couple in 2015.
Bud and June Runion were apparently lured to Telfair County to Cobb County and were killed. Their car and bodies were found off Webb Cemetery Road.
Nine years later on April 14, a man who was magnet fishing found a .22-caliber rifle in the creek on Old Prison Camp Road. Two days later, the same man found a bag containing driver’s licenses and credit cards that belonged to the Runions.
Ocmulgee district attorney Tim Vaughn said he sent the evidence to an FBI lab for analysis. He and other lawyers involved in the case will meet with a Telfair County judge on Tuesday for a status update.
While Vaughn, who’s still seeking the death penalty, is hoping to bring Towns to trial in September, he said the judge may push the trial back again.
The man who found the possible evidence in April got in contact with former Telfair County Sheriff Chris Steverson after he says the sheriff’s office didn’t pick up.
"For whatever reason the sheriff's office was unable to respond,” Steverson said in April. “I don't know if they were busy or what but, I felt like law enforcement needed to be here immediately because this was a very important part of evidence for one of the biggest cases in this county's history. This was potentially all the missing links in that case.”
Steverson said that both were found less than a mile from where the Runions’ bodies were found.
"I'm glad that it was been discovered the family will have that closure," Steverson said.
The trial has been delayed before. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the trial until the preliminary hearings happened in 2023. Before then, delays occurred due to the indictment being thrown out due to a violation in how the jurors were selected.
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After only 16 of the 50 jurors showed up, former Telfair County Superior Court Clerk Belinda Thomas used a list of jurors that were scheduled to appear another day.
"I called people that I thought could get here in a hurry. It was not that I specifically selected them for a reason," Thomas said.
Appeals were eventually filed, which resulted in a re-indictment in 2020, before the pandemic shut the trial down once again.
Towns, who was denied bond in 2015, is still held at the Dodge County Jail.