Liddie Matthew Evans, a 31-year-old woman originally from Flint, Michigan, was murdered on December 17, 1977. Her body was discovered three days later in the Flint River in Fayette County, Georgia. She had been shot in the head, placed in a sleeping bag, and her leg was chained to a concrete block. For over two decades, the case remained cold, a painful mystery for her surviving children.
Investigators initially had suspicions about a roofer named Carl Millard Patton Jr., especially after finding blood in the trunk of his car, but the forensic technology of the time could not definitively link it to Evans. Patton was arrested shortly after the discovery of Evans' body but was released due to a lack of evidence. The case languished until October 2002, when a cold case investigator, Major Bruce Jordan of the Fayette County Sheriff's Office, decided to re-examine the evidence. Advances in DNA technology allowed investigators to compare evidence from the original investigation with DNA samples from Evans' family members, which finally provided the link needed to move forward.
In February 2003, more than 25 years after the murder, Carl Millard Patton Jr. was arrested and charged with the murder of Liddie Evans. Following his arrest, Patton's wife, Norma Patton, agreed to testify against him in exchange for immunity. She revealed a chilling story of multiple murders. According to her testimony, her husband and his associate, a firefighter named Joseph Cleveland, who was also Evans' live-in boyfriend, had committed several murders. She stated that on the night of the murders, Patton lured both Evans and Cleveland to their home and shot them both with a shotgun. Norma Patton admitted to helping clean up the crime scene and dispose of the bodies.
Carl Millard Patton Jr. was implicated in a series of contract killings motivated by greed. In addition to the murders of Liddie Evans and Joseph Cleveland, he was also charged with the deaths of Betty Jo Ephlin and Fred Wyatt. Ultimately, Carl Patton pleaded guilty to the murders of Evans and Cleveland and was sentenced to two life terms in prison. This was in addition to two other life sentences he received for the murders of Ephlin and Wyatt. He later confessed to a fifth murder. Carl Patton died in prison in 2024.
