In the early autumn of 2014, the quiet of a mostly empty strip mall in Stone Mountain, Georgia, was broken by a grim discovery. On September 27, the body of 53-year-old Calvin Gholston, a male known to his loved ones as 'Butterball,' was found in a breezeway of the Spring Mill Village shopping center on Memorial Drive. He had been shot multiple times in what police described as a brutal homicide.
His family was devastated, explaining that while Gholston lived with his brother, he suffered from schizophrenia and would occasionally leave home for days at a time. They could think of no one who would want to harm the man they described as gentle and caring.
For weeks, the case grew cold. DeKalb County investigators had no working surveillance cameras at the shopping center to provide leads and exhausted all available information. The family made emotional public pleas for anyone with information to come forward to help find the 'punk, cowardly person' who took his life for no reason. In the meantime, a sense of fear began to grip the metro Atlanta area as a series of seemingly random and violent murders occurred. In November, two homeless men, Dorian Jenkins and Tommy Mims, were shot and killed as they slept on the streets of Atlanta. Then, in early December, a hairstylist named Karen Pearce was fatally shot as she walked to her car in Decatur.
The breakthrough in the string of killings came from a stroke of luck. In mid-December, a MARTA police officer spotted a man trying to slip through a fare gate at a downtown rail station without paying. When apprehended, the man, identified as 34-year-old Aeman Lovel Presley, was found to be carrying a loaded revolver and ammunition. Ballistics testing quickly linked the weapon to the murders of Jenkins, Mims, and Pearce. During his interrogation, Presley confessed not only to those three killings but also to the murder of Calvin Gholston back in September. He told investigators that Gholston was his first victim.
Aeman Presley, a struggling actor, revealed a chilling motive. He said he had initially set out to commit a robbery but, after shooting the sleeping Gholston, he experienced an adrenaline rush and a 'bloodlust' that drove him to kill again. Though police considered Gholston to be homeless, his family maintained that he had a home and was simply misunderstood due to his mental illness. Presley was indicted for all four murders. To avoid the death penalty, he ultimately pleaded guilty to the killings in both Fulton and DeKalb counties and received multiple life sentences. At his sentencing, Presley made a statement that infuriated Gholston's family, claiming he thought he was helping Gholston by sending him to 'a better place than to be homeless or on drugs.' His words offered no comfort to a family still mourning the senseless loss of a brother.
