Book paints chilling portrait of ‘evil’ Macon mother who masterminded shotgun murders
The shotgun slayings of Macon newlyweds Ronald and Juanita Akins in 1974 were the climax of a bizarre murder plot hatched by Ronald Akin’s ex-wife.
The ex-wife, Rebecca “Becky” Machetti, would in the months after her marriage to Ronald fell apart move herself and their three daughters to south Florida.
There, according to cops, she wold later con two men — her new husband and a former lover — into driving to Macon and murdering Ronald Akins.
Ronald was lured to an under-construction subdivision off Forsyth Road and shot to death. Juanita, who had ridden with him but was not thought to have been a target in the attack, was also slain.
Rebecca Machetti and one of the killers, her new husband Tony, would later be sentenced to die. Tony, also known as John Eldon Smith, was executed in 1983.
Rebecca Machetti’s sentence was later reduced. In 2010, when she was 71 years old and after serving 36 years in prison, she was released from prison and is now living in northeast Georgia.
‘Pure evil’
A story of her life, which portrays her as an abusive mother and a con artist supreme, is told in a recently-released book, “Pure Evil: The Machetti Murders of Macon, Georgia.”
Based on court transcripts and extensive interviews with police, friends and relatives — including one of Rebecca Machetti’s daughters — the book in exquisite detail paints a picture of a domineering mother and wife, a tempest and a master manipulator who in the end was an unrepentant, cold-blooded killer.
The daughter, Valerie Akins, described years of her and her sisters’ torment at the hands of their mother — habitual lying, beatings, death threats — who lived in an almost dream world, believing she could change her name to the Italian- and mafia-sounding “Machetti” and will or con her way into the Miami highlife. She failed. Miserably.
Though she did weave an alluring enough fantasy of mafia life to enlist her new husband, John Eldon “Tony Machetti” Smith, into serving as the hit man to knock off her ex-husband.
A tribute to Ronald Atkins
The book meanwhile is something of a tribute to the slain couple: Ronald Akins, a hard-working and loving father, and his new wife, Juanita, a school teacher from north Georgia.
Macon of the 1960s and 1970s comes to life in the hands of writer and former Atlanta-area cop Jaclyn Weldon White, whose exhaustive research includes the recollections of since-deceased Bibb County Sheriff Ray Wilkes.
Telegraph reporter Joe Kovac Jr. recently spoke to the author.
Her remarks from their conversation, lightly edited for clarity, appear in the paragraphs below:
It’s a book about a woman who had a very strange fantasy life and tried to get other people involved in her fantasy life, who even succeeded at one time to get two men to commit murder for her. But along with that, her real life was being the mother of three girls that she abused horribly until their late teens.
In 2005, Sheriff Wilkes told me about the case, and I had some time and I said, “Let’s see what this is.” I always start with the old newspaper articles. Bless the newspapers, because that’s where you find the real story. You don’t get just the soundbites.
I was incredibly lucky to find Valerie Akins, the daughter, because she wanted her father’s story told. She was very concerned about how people were gonna feel about her and her sisters when the book came out. And I said, “Valerie, have you ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome? Y’all were hostages from the day you were born.” With their mother’s threats over the years like, “I’ll send you to an orphanage and you’ll never see your family again,” why would they not believe her? She did everything else that she threatened to do, including kill their father.
One of Valerie’s friends, Alan Barfield, came to a book signing I was doing and I must have mentioned that I was looking into the Machetti case. He came up to me and said that I should talk to his friend Valerie, and he put us together.
What intrigued me after I started doing the research was this whole fantasy life that Becky had. Like she was never present in today. Her life was not the life that everybody else was living. Ever. She had to have been awfully charismatic to talk these two guys that she had just met into the fantasy of becoming mafia hit men.
It was like she was living this whole Rat Pack fantasy out of Las Vegas. They had a bar in their living room and Sinatra and Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. all on the jukebox.
I think the most important part of the book is how mistreated these children were. They had 14, 15, 16 years of torture. The girls were too scared to say anything.
Becky always wanted the next thing better. And Ronny Akins worked two and three jobs to provide it. He was even a disc jockey for a country radio show. I think Ronny Akins was a very good man. I think he tried to do everything he could to make Becky as happy as he could. Even though he had to have known after a while that there really wasn’t any love lost between the two of them. But I really think he wanted those girls to grow up in an as ideal a family as possible. But all that stuff took money, and Becky kept wanting more and more, and he kept trying.
I think she was just evil. I really do. Because how could you treat your children that way? How could you treat other people that way all your life? Or all the life that we know about? She went to school while they lived in Macon to become a nurse and got expelled for cheating. But she told everybody she had graduated and was a registered nurse.
I hope that readers who were around Macon in the ‘70s will recognize the time. Macon was more or less becoming a big city by then. I hope it’s evocative of that time. I tried, but you never know if you succeed.
This story was originally published September 14, 2020 at 6:00 AM.