New twists in 1991 vanishing of Macon teen Sabrina Long as suspect is granted bond
A suspect in the 1991 disappearance and alleged murder of Sabrina Long was granted bond Tuesday in a criminal case whose prospects appear tenuous at best to ever go to trial.
Melinda Hill McSwain had been a schoolmate of Long’s at Macon’s Southwest High in the late 1980s and early ‘90s.
McSwain, now 49, had not even remotely been considered a suspect in Long’s Aug. 14, 1991, vanishing. She was never on investigators’ radar. That is until 27 years later in the fall of 2018 when she was charged with kidnapping the 19-year-old Long and, later, with killing Long after investigators in another murder case apparently interviewed McSwain and, out of the blue, she volunteered information in the decades-old Long disappearance.
McSwain, a motel housekeeper and mother of four, left Macon years ago and was living in Broxton near the south Georgia town of Douglas when the Georgia Bureau of Investigation began looking into that unrelated slaying.
Now nearly three years after her arrest, the murder case against her appears hampered, at least in part, by revelations of disproved claims she allegedly made implicating people who could not have been involved.
Despite her alleged confession in the case, little verifiable other evidence in Long’s vanishing appears to exist linking McSwain to the crime. Efforts by investigators to find the whereabouts of Long’s remains have proved futile.
McSwain was arrested Oct. 18, 2018. Her lawyer has said that McSwain has no record of violence and that her brushes with the law stem from alcohol and drug use and mental health issues.
At a bond hearing on Tuesday in a courtroom at the Bibb County jail, where McSwain has been incarcerated for nearly three years, details that had not previously been made public emerged.
Before a judge set bond for McSwain at $100,000 and ordered her to home confinement, Bibb prosecutor Greg Winters, in arguing against bond, said McSwain had confessed “to a number of folks” that she had a role in Long’s disappearance.
But Winters emphasized that portions of McSwain’s claims of knowledge about the Long case have since been refuted.
“She has said different individuals were involved,” Winters said, adding that the GBI has excluded “some of these people” because they were either in jail or “just not around” when Long went missing. “So we were able to disprove some of that.”
Another possible suspect
Judge Howard Z. Simms, in summarizing the allegations against McSwain, made observations that point out some of the apparent holes in the state’s case. Namely, McSwain’s potential inaccuracies.
“You’ve got somebody here who claimed to have participated in but never claimed to have actually committed the offense, I don’t think, but claimed to have participated in a part of this,” Simms said. “And then the people that she has named, at least the most recent ones, I believe, could not have been involved because they were in the penitentiary at the time.”
Winters, however, in his argument that bond be denied, said McSwain’s alleged confession remains an important cog in the case against her, saying that McSwain knows “some facts (about the case) that were not widely known to the public.”
Another possible participant’s name emerged at a bond hearing for McSwain in early 2019. Prosecutors at that hearing 18 months ago said that McSwain, in interviews with the GBI, had admitted that a neighbor and friend of Long’s named Keith Loyd “was involved” along with McSwain in the abduction and murder of Long.
In the early ‘90s, Loyd lived with his parents a few doors down from where Long and her stepfather lived at the south end of Ashland Drive below Rocky Creek Road in southwest Macon.
Long was last seen alive the night of Aug. 14, 1991. She called her mom sometime around midnight and said she was going over to visit Loyd, who Sabrina had said wanted her to help him with a birthday gift for his mother.
In recent years, Loyd was interviewed on multiple occasions by the GBI, which routinely re-examines cold cases. Loyd had been scheduled to be questioned again in September 2017, but on the day of that interview, the authorities have said, Loyd committed suicide. He died when he was run over by a freight train in downtown Macon.
At the February 2019 bond hearing, McSwain’s attorney said that Loyd may have “left some letter indicating his responsibility in [the Long case], maybe indicating that Miss McSwain may have participated.”
In the years following Long’s disappearance, Bibb sheriff’s investigators cleared Loyd as a suspect, noting that his alibi checked out — that he was with a girlfriend. The investigators have also said Loyd passed polygraph examinations.
‘Henchmen and cohorts’
At Tuesday’s hearing, Judge Simms said that as he sees it, “I don’t think that right now the case is triable.”
Not surprisingly, McSwain’s lawyer, Gregory L. Bushway, agreed.
He said information from interviews that investigators conducted with McSwain revealed that McSwain said Long was abducted because a known criminal associate of McSwain’s and “his other henchmen and cohorts” believed Long was “an informant.”
Said Bushway: “The people that Miss McSwain said actually committed this murder and orchestrated this murder — at least two of them — were in the penitentiary.”
Information from Telegraph archives was used in this report.
This story was originally published September 1, 2021 at 5:00 AM.