Christine Jenkins, a 15-year-old African American girl, was killed in Burke County, Georgia, on the night of September 10, 1995, in a small house in Vidette where she was living with her mother, Brenda Jenkins Palmer, and her baby half-sister. Court records say the house had become a hiding place after Brenda separated from her husband, Willie Williams Palmer, filed for divorce, and obtained a restraining order against him.
In the weeks before the killings, witnesses later described Palmer as furious and threatening, saying more than once that he would find Brenda and kill her. On the night of the murders, prosecutors said Palmer drove toward Vidette with his nephew, Frederico Palmer, armed himself with a. 22-caliber rifle, had the telephone line cut, kicked in the door, and shot Christine in the face before going into the back room and killing Brenda as she held the baby. By morning, Christine and her mother were dead, and the toddler was found alive inside the house, curled up near Christine’s body.
The investigation moved quickly once the bodies were discovered on September 11, 1995. GBI agents processed the scene, recovered shell casings, and began interviewing the people closest to the family. At first, Willie Williams Palmer and Frederico Palmer gave investigators an alibi, claiming they had gone to Augusta the night before. That story began to fall apart when Frederico was interviewed again on September 13 and confessed his involvement, then led officers to Brushy Creek Bridge, where the rifle was recovered from the water. Days later, officers also recovered gloves and shoes that had been thrown from the bridge, and ballistics testing tied the rifle to the shell casings at the house and indicated that the bullet removed from Christine’s skull was probably fired from that same gun. Witnesses also placed Willie Palmer’s distinctive blue Chevy Caprice near the house that night.
As for arrests and suspects, the case centered on two men. Willie Williams Palmer, Christine’s stepfather, was identified as the main suspect and was indicted by a Burke County grand jury on April 17, 1996, on charges that included two counts of malice murder, two counts of felony murder, burglary, kidnapping, child cruelty, possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime, and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. Frederico Palmer, his nephew, was arrested as an accomplice and, according to contemporary reporting and later court decisions, was arrested with Willie Palmer on September 12, 1995, after confessing. On October 26, 1995, Frederico pleaded guilty to two counts of felony murder and received two consecutive life sentences in exchange for cooperating and testifying truthfully against Willie Palmer.
The legal history that followed stretched for decades. Willie Williams Palmer’s first trial in 1997 ended in a mistrial. Later that year, at a second trial, he was convicted and sentenced to death. Those convictions were upheld on direct appeal, but habeas proceedings eventually led to a new trial. In 2007, he was tried again, convicted again, and again sentenced to death. That result also did not end the case. After additional litigation, he received yet another new trial, and in February 2023 a fourth trial ended with another round of guilty verdicts. This time the court sentenced him to consecutive terms of life without parole for the murders, along with additional prison time on the related charges. In March 2024, the Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed those 2023 convictions, rejecting arguments that investigators had unfairly focused on him while ignoring other possible suspects and rejecting claims tied to lost evidence from the crime scene. In the end, the long-running case left Christine Jenkins remembered not only as a teenage victim of a brutal domestic-violence killing, but as one of the two lives at the center of a prosecution that took nearly three decades to reach its latest final judgment.
