‘It was black as midnight.’ Macon man tells of grim discovery of human skull in creek
Paul Corey, in mud boots and toting a pickax, trudged into the muck of a small, rain-swollen creek that runs behind some homes in northwest Macon.
It was Friday, a couple of hours before dark.
The man Corey was doing some work for at vacant house had, as the day wound down, asked Corey to bust up some beaver dams that had clogged the stream, flooding backyards in a neighborhood off Forest Hill Road.
So Corey, 61, donned his boots, slogged into the creek and began hacking away at the dams.
“I’m just pulling out limbs and branches and pieces of tree, sticks and limbs and concrete,” he said.
As he waded upstream, pickax in hand, he plunged it into another jam of debris.
“It went thooomp,” Corey recalled Monday. “I thought, ‘That sounds funny.’”
Then he reached down and picked up the object he had struck.
“It looked like a bowling ball,” Corey said. “It was black as midnight. I’m thinking, ‘Where in the hell did these beavers find a bowling ball to put in the dam?’ Then I reached down and pulled it out and I turned it around and it had teeth. I’m like, ‘Oh, crap.’”
Then he called the police and spent the next couple of hours outside the house at 1218 Lake Valley Road while the authorities investigated.
“That’s the last thing you think you’re gonna uncover,” Corey said.
‘We’re still looking’
Bibb County sheriff’s officials have considered whether the skull, which was believed to be largely intact save for its bottom teeth and jaw, may have washed to the place it was found from somewhere else.
Last week’s deluge from the remnants of Hurricane Sally dumped more than half a foot of rain on parts of Macon.
The skull was in the bed of a small stream that flows out of tiny Forest Lake — a roughly four-acre body of water ringed by two dozen houses. The spot lies about a quarter-mile west of Forest Hill United Methodist Church.
From the place where the skull was discovered, the stream it was in runs another 600 feet or so before it joins Sabbath Creek, which, on its two-mile northeasterly run to the Ocmulgee River, flows under Interstate 75.
“It looked like it might have come up during the high water,” Sheriff David Davis said of the skull. “We’re still looking (at) any missing persons reports or anything like that. Right now the horizon is broad as to what it could be. ... It’s wide open.”
‘It was discolored’
No other bones or remains were thought to have been found nearby.
“It could have washed from anywhere,” Davis said. “The lower part of the jaw is missing, so we have some upper teeth that we can maybe match.”
A law enforcement source familiar with discovery said it was possible that dental implants in the skull’s teeth may be traceable, but Davis declined to confirm that.
There were also possible signs that the skull may have been burned, but Davis said further examination will be needed to determine that.
“It was discolored, but that’s something for the GBI, the anthropologists and folks like that to look at and see what happens to a body when it decomposes or what kind of elements it’s been in,” Davis said. “Whether it was burned or however the coloration got on there, we’ll see.”
A handful of notable local cases have over the years involved murders where victims have been decapitated, their heads never found. Slain Mercer University law school graduate Lauren Giddings’ torso was found in a trash bin outside her apartment in June 2011. Her head and other extremities vanished and were thought to have been thrown in garbage cans or disposed of in other ways.
‘It’s sad’
As for Friday’s grim discovery, Davis said that it was within the realm of possibility that the skull had washed up from a long-forgotten cemetery or family burial plot.
“There are more abandoned cemeteries around here than anybody ever thinks about,” the sheriff said.
Country churches at one time had cemeteries dotting the rural landscape, and some have long since given way to development.
“This is one of those mysteries,” Davis said, “that hopefully with the anthropologists’ help and with anybody that may know something” can help solve.
He said there were no obvious signs of trauma such as bullet holes or blunt force.
“We’re certainly not calling this a homicide right now,” Davis added.
Meanwhile, Corey, who found the skull, said Monday that he doubted it had been burned.
For one thing, he said, much of the dam he was busting up was also black, as was the skull that was resting in it.
“Except for the teeth,” Corey said.
He figured the skull, as best he could tell, hadn’t been in the elements more than a decade or so at the most.
“I think if it’d been there that long it’d have been decayed more,” Corey said. “It was still in pretty good shape. ... You could make out all the details of the skull. It had the eye holes and cheekbones.”
He was, however, curious to know how it got there.
“It’s sad to think that somebody’s missing,” Corey said. “They had to have a family.”
This story was originally published September 22, 2020 at 5:00 AM.