A murder case with no body: Macon’s most unusual trial in years is set to begin Tuesday

A general misconception when it comes to murder cases is “no body, no crime.” The thinking being: How can you prove someone was killed when that someone has vanished?

Such a question — or whether such a proposition can or cannot be proven — will in coming days be posed to jurors in a Bibb County courtroom.

The question involves the alleged murder of a 53-year-old Macon man named John Lewis Fleming III.

Fleming was last seen alive on September 19, 2018.

A blood-stained Chevrolet Prizm that Fleming was thought to have been driving that day turned up weeks later on Oct. 9. The car had been abandoned at an empty warehouse on Waterville Road, which parallels Broadway and runs beneath Eisenhower Parkway on the south side of downtown Macon. Fleming was never found.

But about a month after the car was discovered, Raymond Eugene Leverett, of Warner Robins, an acquaintance of Fleming’s, was charged with his murder.

Leverett, now 39, is set to go on trial Tuesday on charges that include armed robbery and an accusation of stealing Fleming’s PlayStation 4 video game console and pawning it in Houston County six days after Fleming disappeared.

One hurdle for prosecutors will be whether they can prove the blood found inside the Prizm belonged to Fleming and, possibly, whether the amount of blood found was enough to have been fatal. One of the country’s leading bloodstain-pattern analysts is on the prosecution’s list of witnesses.

In the years leading up to trial, authorities have hinted at evidence they say ties Leverett to the alleged killing.

At a bond hearing about a month after Leverett was jailed, an assistant Bibb district attorney said that Leverett had told investigators he had never been in the area south of downtown where the Prizm was found. The prosecutor said “pings” from a cellphone, however, indicated Leverett was in the area the day Fleming vanished as well as multiple other times in the days before the Prizm turned up.

Prosecutors also told of preliminary matches that linked a pair of bullet shell casings found in the car to a gun that belonged to the girlfriend of Leverett’s roommate — a gun that investigators said Leverett admitted borrowing around the time Fleming went missing.

A relative of Fleming’s has told The Telegraph that Leverett, a frequent visitor at Fleming’s east Macon home, was a “shade-tree mechanic” who had done some work on Fleming’s Chevrolet Caprice Classic and “messed up everything.” The relative said Leverett had owed Fleming some money concerning the Caprice.

At Leverett’s December 2018 bond hearing, Leverett’s lawyer said that Leverett, a former trucker and automobile mechanic, had a drinking problem but his record was for the most part clean save for a DUI.

In describing Leverett’s connection to Fleming, Leverett’s lawyer, C. Alan Wheeler, mentioned that in the days before Fleming vanished that Leverett had been bitten by a rattlesnake. Wheeler said that on the morning of the day Fleming disappeared that Leverett had asked Fleming for a ride to a Macon hospital for a follow-up doctor’s visit regarding his bite wound.

Wheeler said that according to Leverett’s version of events, Fleming had dropped off Leverett at the Medical Center in downtown and then left.

“Mr. Fleming was supposed to come back and pick him up. He didn’t,” Wheeler said at the 2018 hearing, where Leverett was granted a $100,000 bond, which he later posted. “That was the last physical contact my client had with Mr. Fleming.”

Wheeler added that he believed “without any hesitation that we’ll be able to get records that my client was actually at the Medical Center between 9:30 and 10:30 on the morning of Sept. 19.”

The Telegraph has reported in the past in the wake of Fleming’s vanishing that Leverett, according to his arrest warrant, had been “picked up” by someone while he was walking in the area where the Chevy Prizm was later found.

Information from Telegraph archives contributed to this report.

This story was originally published August 15, 2021 at 8:00 AM.

Joe Kovac Jr.

The Telegraph

Joe Kovac Jr. writes about local news and features for The Telegraph, with an eye for human-interest stories. Joe is a Warner Robins native and graduate of Warner Robins High. He joined the Telegraph in 1991 after graduating from the University of Georgia. As a Pulliam Fellowship recipient in 1991, Joe worked for the Indianapolis News. His stories have appeared in the Washington Post, the Seattle Times and Atlanta Magazine. He has been a Livingston Award finalist and won numerous Georgia Press Association and Georgia Associated Press awards.