Do you know who killed Adan Delgado Villa in 2003? On a warm July morning in 2003, bank employees arriving for work at Community First Bank, at the busy intersection of Sheep Farm Road and Highway 123 near Seneca in Oconee County, South Carolina, noticed a car that had sat unmoved in the back of the lot for several days. A foul odor drifted from the vehicle, prompting a call to the Oconee County Sheriff’s Office. Deputies secured the car and obtained a search warrant.
When investigators opened the trunk, they found a body sealed inside a sleeping bag, already in an advanced state of decomposition. The victim was identified as Adan Delgado Villa, a Hispanic male who had been killed by multiple gunshot wounds to his upper body.
The discovery upended what had been an ordinary workday at the bank and quickly became the center of a cross-state investigation. Autopsy results confirmed the manner of death as homicide, with several gunshot wounds clustered in the upper torso. Within days, relatives from the Atlanta metropolitan area contacted authorities to report a missing cousin whose disappearance seemed to match the circumstances of the body found in the trunk. Clues recovered with the remains pointed investigators toward that family, and Oconee County Coroner Karl Addis ultimately confirmed the identity of the victim as Adan Delgado Villa using medical records and X-rays from a hospital in Georgia.
Though his body was discovered in Oconee County, Villa’s life was rooted in Woodstock, Georgia, where he had been living before his death. Once the identification was made, Oconee County investigators traveled to Georgia and joined forces with local law enforcement, interviewing his friends, family members, and acquaintances in an effort to reconstruct his final days. Despite those efforts, very little solid information surfaced. Authorities determined that the bank parking lot was almost certainly not the location of the killing; the car appeared to have been left there deliberately, and Sheriff Mike Crenshaw later said he believed the site was chosen specifically to delay the discovery of the body.
From the beginning, investigators worked under the assumption that someone—possibly several people—outside Oconee County knew exactly what had happened to Villa. The Oconee County Sheriff’s Office has repeatedly profiled the case publicly, describing it as an open, unsolved homicide and appealing for information from anyone who might recall a conversation, rumor, or detail about a man killed elsewhere and left in the trunk of a car at a rural South Carolina bank. Over twenty years later, no suspects have been publicly named, no arrests have been made, and no charges have been brought in connection with his killing. Adan Delgado Villa’s death remains an unresolved mystery that crosses state lines, with investigators still hoping that a witness’s conscience or a long-held secret will eventually bring answers to the trunk of that car in Oconee County and to the family who lost him.
