Fargason release stirs emotion from Macon girl’s death

As convicted killer Teresa Bowman Fargason left prison this week, unsettled feelings returned for those who knew her little girl.

Taylor Fargason was found dead June 10, 1991, on Interstate Parkway. The discovery came less than an hour after her mother reported her missing from the Kroger grocery store on Forsyth Road.

The killing unnerved Middle Georgians worried an abductor snatched the 6-year-old girl.

Suspicions abounded, but investigators honed in on inconsistencies in Fargason’s statements.

About 18 months later, she was arrested after prosecutors believed they had enough evidence that Taylor was suffocated by her mother.

In 1993, an out-of-town jury agreed. On Wednesday, Fargason was released on parole.

Not everyone is convinced of Fargason’s guilt.

“We didn’t feel like she’d done it. We’d never seen anything, but we didn’t know them that much,” said Felton Watson, who lives across the street from Taylor’s old house in Bibb County.

Fargason’s cozy, one-story home was where investigators say the girl died at the hands of her mother.

Next door, Jeanette Brown still struggles with the thought.

“I really didn’t want to believe she did it, and I still don’t want to believe it,” Brown said. “I’m not saying I don’t believe she did it, either. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt.”

After nearly 24 years, Brown still misses the friendly little girl with long brown hair who rode her bike on Brown’s driveway.

“It took a long time to get over Taylor’s death,” said Brown, with a renewed sadness.

She remembers happier times when the little girl shared the house next door with her parents.

Charlie and Teresa Fargason split up about a year before the little girl was killed.

Prosecutors contend Taylor was interfering with her mother’s love life.

Brown, whose adult daughter died of a heart attack about five years ago, would never have imagined the lady next door could have taken her child’s life.

Brown’s son, Khalil, who was a teenager when Taylor was killed, has little doubt.

He reminded his mother of the knock on the back door they got late one night, a couple of months before the murder.

Taylor, clutching a blanket and a flashlight, told them she woke up, and her mother was gone.

They tried to reassure the child, saying her mother probably had to go to the store or something.

“She was a smart little girl,” Jeanette Brown said. “She said if her mother had to go somewhere, she should have woken her up.”

The girl bedded down on a futon and went back to sleep in the Browns’ den.

They put a note on Fargason’s door letting her know they had Taylor at their house.

Khalil Brown remembers it was daylight the next morning, about 7 a.m., when Fargason returned without explanation.

Jeanette Brown testified about that night at the trial.

“When Teresa came, she just picked her up and hugged her. I didn’t hear what she was saying, but she acted like she was sorry,” she said.

That was one of her last encounters with Taylor.

Although Brown’s daughter had previously baby-sat the girl, Fargason started leaving her with others after that, she said.

Khalil Brown, who worked at the Kroger where the girl was reported missing, never believed the mother’s story.

“Everyone in the store knew Taylor because she’d break stuff regularly,” he said. “Basically, it was, ‘Clean up behind Taylor,’ a lot.”

If she had been in the store, he is confident one of his co-workers would have remembered seeing her.

Capt. Jimmy Barbee of the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office will never forget what he saw at the crime scene with Macon police crime lab technician Mickey McCallum.

“Mickey and I put that baby into the body bag that night, and it was tough,” said Barbee, who at the time was a homicide investigator for the former Macon Police Department.

A woman driving down Interstate Parkway saw something at the edge of the road and turned around.

If Taylor had been about 25 feet over into the grass, Barbee thinks the body might never have been found.

He brushes off Fargason’s post-conviction allegations that investigators ignored evidence that a police officer abducted and killed the girl.

“We had already accounted for his whereabouts,” Barbee said. “That’s something she threw out there. ... They had every opportunity to bring that up in court.”

A team of federal, state and local investigators compiled a mound of evidence -- a tire track on Taylor’s arm matched the mother’s car, the girl had one of Teresa’s hairs in her hand and Taylor’s blood, saliva and some of the girl’s forcibly pulled hairs were on her blanket, as if she were smothered with it.

Barbee noticed comments decrying Fargason’s release, but it does not bother him.

“She’s done her time,” he said. “My job isn’t to keep them in prison. My job is to gather the facts as we can.”

It is one homicide Barbee does not voluntarily talk about but finds it deeply resonates with people.

“Anytime you have a child that is murdered ... it’s going to stick with a community,” he said. “It’s just something that happened a long time ago, but it won’t ever leave my mind.”

This story was originally published January 29, 2015 at 5:43 PM with the headline "Fargason release stirs emotion from Macon girl’s death ."