Boyfriend on trial in 2019 strangulation death of UGA professor near Milledgeville
Jury selection began Monday in Baldwin County Superior Court in the trial of a man accused of murder in the 2019 death of a University of Georgia professor at another man’s house on the outskirts of Milledgeville.
The man on trial, Marcus Lillard, a former car salesman, is accused of strangling renowned entomology professor Marianne Shockley, whose body was lying near a poolside hot tub after rescuers were called to the house in the wee hours of Mother’s Day 2019.
Investigators have suggested that Shockley, 43, may have been dead for a couple of hours before someone called 911 from the house on Watson Reynolds Road, which lies just east of the Oconee River.
Lillard, now 44, has been in jail since his arrest in the case, which generated headlines across the country and has been featured on the podcast “Blood Town.”
In the hours before Shockley was found dead, she and Lillard were said to have traveled to the eastern edge of Milledgeville to the home of an acquaintance of Lillard’s, a former psychologist named Clark Heindel.
Heindel, 69, was there with Lillard when authorities arrived. But soon, after giving sheriff’s deputies a brief statement, he went inside his house and committed suicide.
Shockley and Lillard, who since his arrest has grown a ponytail and now sports a goatee, met in college. At the time of her death, they had been dating for about a year after reconnecting.
They arrived at Heindel’s place the evening of May 11, 2019, and according testimony at a June 2019 court proceeding they listened to music, smoked marijuana, drank beer and ended up in Heindel’s hot tub.
A GBI agent said in court at a hearing nearly three years ago that, early on, Lillard’s recollections or accounts about that night varied.
Lillard was said to have sent text messages and made phone calls seeking advice on what to do to revive someone who is not breathing.
Those communications happened shortly after 11 p.m. on Saturday, May 11, 2019, investigators have said, but no one called 911 from the home at 115 Watson Reynolds Road until after 1 a.m. on May 12.
Michael Maybin, the GBI agent who testified at Lillard’s June 2019 probable-cause hearing, that day described what authorities first encountered at Heindel’s house as “a very weird scene.”
Lillard was reportedly helping do CPR to revive Shockley, but footage from sheriff’s deputies’ body cameras also showed Lillard, for reasons not clear, touching Shockley’s genitals.
Maybin testified Lillard said that he had stepped out of the hot tub and gone into some nearby woods to collect firewood to build a fire, and that when Lillard returned Shockley was slumped over in the pool. Lillard also was said to have told GBI agents that when he went to lift Shockley out of the hot tub he dropped her and she cut her head.
Heindel told the cops that he and Lillard “thought she was gonna come around,” or be revived, officials have said.
Shortly after speaking with the cops, while the officers and paramedics were still there, Heindel walked inside the house and shot himself to death. He left a suicide note, but the note shed little light on what may have happened to Shockley.
“He just said that he did not know what happened to Marianne, but it had happened on his watch and he can’t live with it. He said he’d had a good life and it was time for him to go,” Maybin, the GBI agent, testified in June 2019.
At the poolside the night of Shockley’s death, investigators found beer bottles, scattered clothing, bloody towels and, perhaps strangest of all, hydrangea flowers and leaves.
Lillard, according to investigators, said he and Heindel shook the flowers over her body in “some kind of ceremonial” rite that Heindel had learned of, possibly in South America.
“That’s what they were doing instead of calling 911,” Maybin said during his testimony in 2019.
Lillard has denied strangling Shockley, Maybin said at the time, and Lillard also said he didn’t think Heindel had harmed her or had sex with Shockley.
According to Maybin’s testimony, in a statement to the cops Lillard said he and Shockley had not had sex but that they had kissed.
Investigators have in the past hinted that Lillard strangled Shockley during a sexual encounter that night.
Lillard’s defense strategy may be to raise enough reasonable doubt by suggesting that Heindel, who committed suicide after the cops arrived, was the killer.
The case will almost certainly delve into Lillard’s sex life and drug use. Some of the women he has had intimate relationships with are expected to testify that he choked them during intercourse in what the GBI’s Maybin testified in 2019 were for the most part consensual encounters.
On Monday, defense lawyer Matthew A. Tucker asked some people in the prospective jury pool whether a person who might by some be considered “wild behind closed doors” would make them view that person differently.
He also asked similar lines of questions about “spanking or doing other fetishes.”
Many in the courtroom, upon hearing the inquiries, snickered.
Assistant Baldwin County District Attorney Tammy Coffey asked potential jury members if the trial were to include talk of sexual behavior “outside of your comfort zone” whether could they consider that testimony with open minds.
“I would,” replied one of the prospective jurors, a man. “But I wouldn’t want to.”
A jury of nine men and five women — two of whom were alternates — was impaneled Monday afternoon.
Opening arguments began at 9 a.m. Tuesday.
Information from Telegraph archives was used in this report.
This story was originally published April 5, 2022 at 9:21 AM.