Break in 1980s Middle Georgia cold case solves part of long-mysterious vanishing

The body of a man shot in the head and left on a remote dirt road between Forsyth and Gray 33 years ago has been identified as a missing Florida man.

The Telegraph has learned that a DNA analysis of the man’s remains, completed earlier this year, matched that of William Maholland, who was reported missing from Fort Lauderdale in June 1984.

Maholland, who was 28, is thought to have been killed in May of that year and dumped in Jones County, nearly 600 miles north of his hometown.

A fisherman found the body in the Oconee National Forest, a few miles southeast of Ga. 18 and U.S. 23. The fisherman had seen buzzards circling near Jarrell Plantation and Caney Creek Road.

Investigators suspected that the dead man — whose body was shirtless — was from out of town because of his Bermuda shorts and a belt with swordfish on it. Authorities estimated that he had been dead about a week.

The FBI was called in to help identify the body because it was discovered in a national forest.

A GBI forensic artist used Maholland’s skull to make a facial reconstruction of what he might have looked like. That picture was posted on websites such as the DOE Network, a nonprofit website meant to bring awareness to missing and unidentified people.

By 1987, the case had gone cold. Leads were few and infrequent.

Jones County sheriff’s investigator Earl Humphries thought the chances of identifying the slain man were slim.

“You don’t ever give up hope,” the investigator said.

In 2006, the GBI exhumed Maholland’s body and collected his DNA.

At some point, Fort Lauderdale police took a DNA sample from Maholland’s mother and entered it into the National DNA Index System.

Last November, forensic scientists at the University of North Texas matched Maholland’s DNA with the sample from his mother.

Earlier this year, in March, a GBI agent called Humphries and gave him the news.

“It’s still a cold case,” Humphries said. “We’ve just gotten one step further now that we know who the victim is.”

‘The perfect deal’

Phil Schultz knew something terrible had happened to his best friend when he found Maholland’s parrot dead.

The parrot, a yellow-naped Amazon named Damien, had starved to death inside Maholland’s apartment.

“That poor bird,” Schultz recalled in a recent phone conversation. “He opened every kitchen cabinet, went through the garbage. He ate every chicken bone scrap he could find, drank all the water out of the toilet.”

A safe in Maholland’s bedroom had been pried open, then thrown in a dumpster.

Maholland had been dealing cocaine at a time when massive amounts of the drug were being smuggled into Florida from South America.

Schultz said Maholland, his friend since high school, peddled small amounts of cocaine to supplement income he made working for fishing companies. Maholland was selling the drug to friends and rock bands that passed through Fort Lauderdale.

Sometime in May 1984, Schultz talked to Maholland by phone for the last time. Maholland had said he was going to make “a perfect deal” and would call when he returned.

“I said, ‘Dude, you promised you wouldn’t sell anything more than a gram,’ ” Schultz recalled. “He goes, ‘I know, but this is a perfect deal.’ … He said, ‘I’ll call you when I get back tonight.’ But I never heard from him.”

A week went by. Schultz started to worry.

“Everybody was calling me, including his mom,” Schultz said. “I couldn’t tell anybody where he went.”

What became of Maholland remained a mystery to Schultz for 33 years until Monday afternoon, when a Telegraph reporter called his electrical wiring business in Pompano Beach to talk about his friend.

“You guys found Billy?” he said. “That’s awesome.”

Lost at sea

Nearly a month after Maholland’s body turned up in Middle Georgia, a New York woman called the Fort Lauderdale Police Department to report him missing.

Diana Deis, 22 at the time, was Maholland’s ex-girlfriend.

But she told police she was his sister, according to a missing persons report filed June 30, 1984.

Early that May, Maholland told Deis that he planned to go to the Cayman Islands to do some diving, the report said. Detectives later learned that Maholland bought a plane ticket but never used it.

When she hadn’t heard from him for weeks, Deis called Schultz, who then went to Maholland’s apartment.

“I remember him calling me really, really upset when he found the bird,” Deis said of Shultz. “I just assumed that (Maholland) had gotten involved with some very, very, very bad people. We all did. Then it was just a matter of trying to find closure for his mother.”

Over the next couple of decades, Diana Maholland hired more than a dozen private detectives to search for her son.

The last time she spoke to him was May 13, when he called her in London to wish her happy Mother’s Day.

Diana Maholland, a Venezuelan national, was working in England at the time of her son’s disappearance. She moved back to Florida to look for answers and come to terms with what police were saying about his involvement with drugs.

“I’m not going anyplace until I find my son,” she told the Miami Herald more than a month after he was reported missing. “I don’t want to go on without him. ... He’s all I have.”

It wasn’t the first time Maholland had disappeared.

It also wasn’t his first time making the news.

In January 1981, a little more than four years before his death, Maholland and three other men went out swordfishing. The boat’s motor failed, and they were stranded off the east coast of Florida for 12 days.

No one knew they were missing because of a mix-up at the dock. Family, friends and Deis, Maholland’s then-fiancee, thought the trip would take a week, the Miami Herald reported.

Rescue came as the Coast Guard spotted a fire the men had started by burning their clothes on the bow of the boat, which was about 60 miles north of Grand Bahama.

“The worst part was for the family and friends,” Maholland told a Herald reporter a week after the rescue. “We knew we were alive. They didn’t. My mother said she aged 20 years.”

Diana Maholland died at age 86, never knowing what happened to her son.

This story was originally published September 28, 2017 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Break in 1980s Middle Georgia cold case solves part of long-mysterious vanishing."