Twiggs County husband and wife shot and killed during home robbery were ‘targeted’
The investigation into the mysterious and violent deaths of Fred and Peggy White, a Dry Branch couple found with fatal gunshot wounds to their heads in the countryside not far from their home Saturday morning, took a new turn Monday when police appealed to the public for help identifying a murder suspect.
Home-security video footage released by the Twiggs County sheriff along with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation shows a man toting a pistol, wearing white gloves and a dark fabric mask, walking onto a patio-like sunroom on the backside of the couple’s house on Riggins Mill Road just after 7 a.m. Saturday.
About two hours later, sheriff’s officials received a call about a possible burglary at the home.
The picturesque farmhouse, built in 1998 and situated behind a wrought-iron gate on five acres, includes a wood-lined pasture. The property lies three and a half miles east of Interstate 16, not far from the northern end of Sgoda Road and the 212-year-old Stone Creek Baptist Church.
Sheriff Darren Mitchum said Monday that about half an hour after the 9 a.m. burglary call, sheriff’s deputies received another call from some hunters a few hundred yards east of the White home on Riggins Mill.
The hunters had happened upon Fred White’s 2019 Ford F-150 pickup truck, which had been parked and hidden behind an abandoned house. Peggy White, 65, was dead inside inside the truck.
“From there our investigation began,” Mitchum said, later noting that a $10,000 reward was being offered for information leading the cops to the killer or killers.
Fred White, 69, was later found dead just down Riggins Mill, across the road from the Baptist church, at the edge of some woods near Sgoda Road.
Mitchum told The Telegraph the killings were particularly “heinous and senseless.”
Investigators were not certain on a timeline tracing the couple’s whereabouts early Saturday. Nor was it known whether the couple had been abducted from their home or from elsewhere at some point prior to when the suspect in the security-cam footage was seen at their back door.
“It’s been a large undertaking for us and the family as well,” Mitchum told reporters at an afternoon news conference in Jeffersonville on Monday. “We’ve been continuously interviewing people and running every lead that we can find. ... We’re not gonna stop until we have the person or persons that’s responsible.”
The sheriff reassured locals that he believes the shootings were an isolated episode and a “targeted” incident.
“We know it’s not a random thing,” Mitchum said.
He said the robber or robbers appear to have been in search of “guns and cash,” later noting that investigators knew of no threats that anyone had made against the pair.
Of the couple, Mitchum said, “I knew them personally. They were very good people. They helped a lot of people.”
Fred and Peggy White owned Fred White Construction — a Macon company on Mead Road on the city’s southeast side — which specialized in demolition services.
“They were the kind of people that if work was slow for the company, they would have some of their employees do work around their home just so they would have a paycheck,” the sheriff said. “So it’s personal for me. ... I can’t understand why somebody would do this to a couple like this. They were very good people.”
Asked if there may be a connection in the case to the family’s business, Mitchum said it was too soon to tell.
“Until we can narrow this down a little more, everybody and everything is possible,” he said.
He later added: “It’s gonna be a burglary-slash-robbery. It was an intended, isolated, targeted issue. That’s what (the perpetrator) went there for ... to burglarize the home and commit robbery of the things that were taken.”