Linda Jenkins, a 57-year-old Black woman, was found dead on March 25, 2016, just beyond a wood line near Entelman Street and Fenwick Avenue in Savannah, after someone reported discovering her body that evening. At first, police treated the case as a suspicious death. Patrol officers, violent-crimes detectives, and forensic personnel responded, while investigators waited for autopsy findings and worked to understand what had happened in those quiet woods where she was found. Before long, the case took on a darker and more certain shape: authorities ruled her death a homicide, turning what began as a troubling discovery into a murder investigation.
For Linda Jenkins’ family, the case appears to have stretched into years of uncertainty. Public reports say detectives kept working it long after 2016, revisiting the file until they identified a suspect nearly four years later. On January 2, 2020, Savannah police announced the arrest of Gerald Tyrone Carter, then 53, and said he had been booked into the Chatham County jail on a murder charge in connection with Jenkins’ death. Police publicly described the arrest as the result of persistence by investigators on an unsolved case, a sign that the investigation had never gone cold in the eyes of those assigned to it.
What the online sources make clear is the long arc of the case: a woman found dead in Savannah, a death first shrouded in uncertainty, and then a homicide ruling that set detectives on a years-long path toward an arrest. What is less clear in the public reporting available online is what happened after that arrest. In the sources located, Gerald Tyrone Carter is the named suspect and the reported arrest is the key development, but I did not find clear public online reporting that established a later trial outcome, plea, or conviction in Linda Jenkins’ case.
