Skull found in March may be that of missing Macon man believed murdered in 2018
Pieces of a human skull found in a roadside ditch three months ago in eastern Bibb County may be those of a Macon man who vanished under suspicious circumstances nearly four years ago.
John Lewis Fleming III went missing in mid-September of 2018. A few weeks later, a car he was thought to have been driving at the time of his disappearance was found abandoned — its interior blood-stained, with bullet shell casings inside it — near a warehouse off Broadway south of downtown.
No other trace of his body ever surfaced.
However, the Telegraph has learned that bone fragments discovered on March 28 by land surveyors along Riggins Mill Road near the Macon Downtown Airport are awaiting examination at a crime lab to determine whether they are Fleming’s remains.
Law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation also said forensic analysts may use DNA from items that belonged to Fleming or, possibly, rely on familial DNA for comparison in their effort to determine whether the skull bones are Fleming’s.
The sources said that the spot where the remains were found were in an area not far from where Fleming’s cellphone last “pinged.”
A few months after he vanished, in November 2018, despite Fleming’s body never being found, a suspect in his slaying, Raymond Eugene Leverett, was arrested and charged with murder.
The charge was an extraordinary one considering murder-without-a-body cases are rarely prosecuted.
Leverett, who turns 40 next month and is from Warner Robins, had been set to go on trial last August. The trial was postponed when a key witness contracted COVID.
At the time, word around the courthouse was that if Leverett had been convicted of murder it would have been just the second successful prosecution in Georgia history in which a murder victim’s body was never found.
Leverett was recently released on bond, at least in part because his trial was further delayed so that the skeletal remains found in March could be examined.
Fleming, 53, who lived near historic Fort Hawkins and not far from the Macon Coliseum, was an acquaintance of Leverett’s.
Relatives of Fleming’s, in the days after he went missing, told The Telegraph that they were suspicious of Leverett, a shade-tree mechanic who had been working on a Chevrolet Caprice Classic that belonged to Fleming.
One of Fleming’s nieces said Leverett had also owed Fleming money.
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At a bond hearing not long after Leverett was arrested in 2018, a prosecutor said Leverett had told investigators he had never been in the area south of downtown where the blood-stained car Fleming had been driving was found. It is unclear whether blood in the car has been tested to see if it was Fleming’s.
The prosecutor said at the bond hearing in the wake of Leverett’s arrest that “pings” from a cellphone linked to Leverett indicated he was in the area along Waterville Road, east of Broadway, the day Fleming vanished — as well as multiple other times in the days before the bloodied car, a Chevy Prizm, turned up.
The place where the Prizm was located lies roughly 7 miles from where the human skull parts were discovered in March.
Leverett has also been accused of stealing a PlayStation 4 from Fleming and pawning it in Warner Robins in the days after Fleming disappeared.
Information from Telegraph archives was used in this report.
This story was originally published June 24, 2022 at 1:48 PM.