Execution-style slayings near Mercer University still haunt community 25 years later

EDITOR’S NOTE: The slayings of two young men at the northern edge of the Mercer University campus one January morning in 1995 remain unsolved. Four years ago, Telegraph reporter Justin Baxley revisited the crime and wrote this story, which was originally published Aug. 20, 2016.

Early one Saturday morning in 1995, a man driving along Montpelier Avenue in Macon glanced to his left and saw two bodies in the middle of a side road.

It was about 7:30 a.m. Jan. 28. The man hurried to the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office, about a mile away, and reported what he’d just seen.

When police got to the short dead-end street just past Mercer University, they found Joseph “J.J.” Andrews Jr. and a friend, Kyle St. John, both shot to death. Their bodies were lying in the rain.

A woman who lived nearby on Carling Avenue told police that she’d heard gunshots about 4 a.m. — then a scream and a truck speeding off.

What brought the two friends into the neighborhood has remained a mystery for 21 years.

Why were they killed? Who fired the fatal shots?

Over the years, investigators have followed several leads in the case, to no avail. The slayings are now assigned to Bibb sheriff’s Lt. Shermaine Jones, a 15-year veteran.

In the months after the 19-year-old Andrews died, his mother, Dee Dee Wrigley, set up a memorial next to the crime scene. It was on a fence atop an embankment along Interstate 75.

Andrews’ picture and a wooden cross were adorned with a sticker that read, “Someone I loved was murdered.”

Wrigley hoped the memorial — replaced off and on over the years — would prompt someone to come forward with information.

St. John, 20, left behind two sisters. They were 11 and 14 years old at the time and have now spent more years living without their brother than they did with him.

Liz St. John Hosley finds some comfort in a cassette tape of songs played by St. John’s band, Dip Me Twice, sent to her family after her brother’s death.

“I can still listen to his voice,” she said. “My favorite part of the tape is hearing him cough in the background.”

‘Very ambitious’

More than two decades after her son was killed, Wrigley still carries a set of Elvis Presley commemorative stamps in her wallet. Andrews gave them to her because he thought he looked like the King.

Six feet tall with jet-black hair and a “big beautiful smile,” Andrews grew up in Perry and attended Perry High School.

A hard worker who enjoyed playing golf, he landed a job at a golf course when he was 12.

“He was just a good kid,” Wrigley said of her only child. “He was very ambitious.”

When he wasn’t working, Andrews could often be found in his room playing his Les Paul guitar. He was a Metallica fan. The first song he learned to play was Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train.”

St. John’s sisters said the redhead had a way of charming people with his smile and sense of humor.

A young man of average height, he seemed larger than life to the sisters who looked up to him as they grew up in Connecticut.

“With the nine-year age difference, … he would flare his nostrils just to torment me from across the room or torture me with tickles,” said Rachel St. John, the youngest of the three. “I remember feeling loved by him.”

He was “funny, rambunctious and entertaining to the people around him,” she said.

After a stint in community college, Kyle St. John joined the Navy and was stationed in San Diego, where he met Andrews, who also was in the service.

Rachel St. John said her brother didn’t seem like the type of person who’d join the military.

“He was artistic and didn’t seem keen on obeying authority,” she said. “It may have been a rash decision after his best friend died in a car accident.”

Hosley, the middle child, said her brother created art in a number of forms — watercolors, charcoal, ceramics, colored pencil, sculpture, poetry and stories.

He sang, played the piano and taught himself to play the guitar.

He had a rock-star attitude.

“Back then he was so much bigger than me,” Hosley said. “But when I think back on him now, I see a kid.”

‘I love you, Mom’

After completing basic training, Kyle St. John was injured and medically discharged from the Navy. Andrews left the service for personal reasons about the same time.

In the fall of 1994, the friends moved into an apartment on Arlington Place in Macon near the College Street post office.

Along with their two roommates, they worked at T.K. Tripp’s restaurant, a now-shuttered eatery off Riverside Drive.

Andrews started classes at what was then Macon State College, the predecessor to Middle Georgia State University.

He joined a band with some high school classmates. He was a car lover, and his parents had just gotten him a Datsun 280Z that he planned to restore, but he never got the chance.

Wrigley said Andrews was considering going to culinary school. His favorite meal was salmon croquettes, homemade mashed potatoes and Le Sueur English peas.

“I grieve for what he lost,” Wrigley said. “They took his life. He didn’t even get to graduate college. He’ll never marry. He’ll never have kids. He’ll never grow old with someone he loves.”

Living thousands of miles from his family, St. John didn’t see his parents or sisters again after he moved to Macon.

Rachel St. John said she last saw her brother when he was home on leave before heading back to San Diego.

“He came and woke me up to say goodbye,” she said. “He kissed my cheek with his scruffy face.”

Wrigley last talked with Andrews a few nights before he was shot.

“The last thing I said to him was ‘I love you,’ ” she said. “We never hung up without telling each other that we loved each other.”

The last words she heard from her son were, “I love you, mom.”

The case turns cold

Nearly four hours had passed that January morning before the man driving down Montpelier, headed toward Pio Nono Avenue, saw the men’s bodies.

Macon police Officers Lee Mock and Keith Woodford were riding in a squad car when they heard a call go out on the radio: “Two persons down.”

Thinking back, Mock said he and Woodford both figured they’d find “two drunks passed out.”

“When we got down there, it was a homicide,” said Mock, who’s now retired.

The image of two bodies on the pavement, each with multiple gunshot wounds, has stuck with Mock over the years.

“Cases like this we remember. It is not your typical bang-bang, shoot-’em-up, found dead call,” Mock said. “In my opinion, it looked like an execution.”

People who lived near the crime scene told Telegraph reporters at the time that a wallet belonging to one of the men was found near the bodies, and that the men’s pants pockets were inside out.

Andrews was in the process of buying his grandfather’s 1991 Nissan truck. He’d spent all weekend cleaning it to make it shine.

Police found the truck several blocks away on Chestnut Street a few hours after Andrews and St. John were found dead.

Wrigley said investigators told her they weren’t able to lift fingerprints from it in part because of the Armor All that Andrews had applied earlier that night.

The woman on Carling Avenue who said she’d heard six gunshots told Telegraph reporters at the time that she did not go outside.

A police officer later wrote in a report that the woman was afraid the person who had killed Andrews and St. John might shoot her, too.

“I’m upset and I’m scared,” she told the reporters.

Early on, investigators considered whether the slayings might be related to the fatal shooting of two Mercer University students at Lake Juliette in Monroe County. Grant Hendrickson, 22, and Michelle Cartagena, 19, each sustained multiple gunshot wounds after being ambushed in a car early on Jan. 3, 1995, less than a month before St. John and Andrews were killed.

Police later ruled out a connection. Andrew Allen Cook, the man convicted of the Monroe County killings, was sentenced to death and executed in 2013.

The neighborhood where Andrews and St. John died was a known drug area.

Charles Halligan, the lead detective from 1995, explored multiple possible motives, including drugs, robbery and possibly a gang initiation, Jones said. Halligan retired in 2012 and died earlier this year (2016).

Wrigley, who kept in touch with Halligan over the years, said he told her that her son could have been killed because he and St. John were mistaken for two other men.

She said she has talked to people who lived in the area at the time and they have information — but were frightened and haven’t come forward.

Halligan identified four suspects, two that “he was looking at hard,” Jones said.

Of those suspects, one has since died, and another was cleared because he was in the hospital at the time of the shooting.

As he continues work on the case, Jones said Halligan’s suspects remain suspects, and the men suspected as being the “trigger pullers” are still alive, as far as he knows.

‘The ultimate case’

Jones likens cold cases to thousand-piece puzzles. They force detectives to search both in and out of the box for the final pieces.

“When you find that one piece and you’re able to find it and put it in there and it all fits, it is exhilarating,” he said.

Jones, who oversees detectives who are responsible for more than 50 cold cases, has one solved cold case to his credit.

In 2009, he found that the man who’d killed Macon businessman Waldo Sheftall in 2007 had been killed himself in a Warner Robins armed robbery attempt in 2008.

The amount of time that’s passed since Andrews and St. John were killed has made it hard to find credible sources to interview — and has made the case especially hard to solve.

“This is the ultimate case for an investigator, when you have an unsolvable case … that a generation of investigators couldn’t figure the puzzle pieces out,” Jones said. “They passed the torch. We want to keep the race going until we can finish it.”

Jones said new investigators are told about the killing when they start work in the bureau.

It’s a different kind of case, he said, one that he compares to the 2011 slaying and dismemberment of recent Mercer University law school graduate Lauren Giddings. Her neighbor, Stephen McDaniel, pleaded guilty to murder and is serving a life sentence.

Investigators have followed up on leads as recently as 2009 and 2012, but neither one led to an arrest. There aren’t any active leads, but Jones said he’s not giving up.

“We still want to bring that family justice,” he said. “We can’t bring them back, but we can make those responsible pay the price of committing the crime.”

Something you never get over

Wrigley was at a family birthday party in Jonesboro, sitting on a swing outside, when her husband called to her and told her to come inside. Unbeknownst to her, authorities had notified her sister of Andrews’ death, and she’d called looking for Wrigley.

“In that instant I knew,” she said.

Something just told her that her son was dead.

“I was like, ‘No, I’m not coming in.’ ”

That morning, St. John’s mother had called the phone at his apartment with the rest of her family gathered around.

It was a routine, planned phone call. They had not called in a couple weeks and wanted to check in.

St. John’s roommate answered and handed the phone to a detective.

Hosley remembers her mother asking the detective, “Is he alive or is he dead?”

“I will never forget hearing those words and knowing he was dead,” Hosley said. “It was horrible.”

Two decades later, she thinks about her brother nearly every day.

“Sometimes a song brings back a memory. Sometimes it’s a redhead I meet. If I cross paths with someone named Kyle, I get filled with emotion,” she said. “When I hear a gunshot on TV, I still flinch. If I’m standing behind a cop in a store, my heart races because of the gun he is carrying.”

Hosley said she and her sister have talked about traveling to Macon to meet with detectives.

Wrigley still visits her son’s grave at least twice a month.

“It is the only way I can show I love him,” she said.

Although the memorial to the men has been defaced and torn down over the years, Wrigley replaces it each time.

She said the memorial is a way for her to speak out about her son’s death.

“He is my son. I love him and I won’t rest,” she said. “They won’t defeat me. I am his voice now.”

She said she’ll never get over the fact that her only child is gone.

“I don’t think that’s something you ever get over. You learn to live with it,” she said. “I don’t want to go to my grave not knowing.

“I want to be able to settle that for J.J., to say I did all I could do.”

This story was originally published January 27, 2020 at 10:35 AM.