Edward Thomas “E. T.” Norman, a 42-year-old white man from Moultrie, Georgia, died on May 14, 1954, in a burst of violence that shook Colquitt County over two days. Online records identify his death as a homicide caused by slashing injuries, and his burial is listed at Westview Cemetery in Moultrie. What survives in the record gives the case a grim, hurried feeling: Norman’s killing was not treated as an isolated act for long, but as one piece of a wider rampage that also took the life of J. D. Croft on the same day and, by the next day, claimed Walter C. Rowland and Gladys Rowland as well.
The man authorities came to focus on was Tom Williams of Colquitt County. Online historical references describe him as a paroled murderer, and one newspaper archive summary says he was wanted in connection with four brutal slayings before being captured. Another local historical account says bloodhounds were an important part of the manhunt, remembered as one of the biggest in the county’s history. The same newspaper archive material ties Williams especially to the Rowland murders, noting that the Rowlands had employed him years earlier, which deepened the sense of betrayal around the killings and helped fix the case in local memory as more than a single murder but a spree that tore through familiar lives and households.
As the case hardened into history, Williams was linked not only to the Rowlands’ deaths but also to Norman’s killing and the murder of J. D. Croft. Online sources describe him as responsible for five known murders spanning 1940 to 1954, with the 1954 attacks marking his final and deadliest outbreak of violence. Records of his punishment are consistent that he was apprehended in 1954, convicted of first-degree murder, and ultimately executed in the electric chair at Georgia State Prison in Reidsville on April 15, 1955. One execution register specifically lists him as executed for the murders of Walter C. and Gladys H. Rowland and adds that he was also suspected in the earlier double murder in which Edward T. Norman and Jefferson Davis Croft were killed in an all-night diner. That leaves Norman’s death in the online record as both part of a solved spree and, in a narrower legal sense, a killing wrapped into the larger shadow of the Rowland case that brought Williams to his end.
