Suspect in Macon whodunit mum in court

A young man the police believe is the mystery murder suspect who had eluded them since Christmas was in court Saturday.

In his first-appearance hearing before a Bibb County Magistrate judge, the young man mumbled maybe four words.

“OK, you are Torrance Deon Rouse?” Judge Barbara Harris asked at the start of a proceeding that lasted all of one minute.

“Yes, ma’am,” Rouse answered.

Told that he was charged with murder and asked if he understood, Rouse, who is 20, again replied, “Yes, ma’am.”

Rouse was arrested Friday morning at a house in Montrose, a small town about 35 miles southeast of Macon at the edge of Laurens County.

He is accused in the Dec. 22 slaying of Deleon Wiley Hudson.

Hudson, who was 43, was shot in the head as he sat in a Nissan SUV on Lakeshore Drive, not far from Recreation Road and the old Lakeside Park in east Macon.

Authorities think that whoever killed Hudson may have tried to rob him and then set the SUV on fire.

Someone appears to have in recent days tipped off authorities about Rouse as a suspect.

“Fortunately somebody came forward,” Sheriff David Davis said Friday.

It wasn’t fully clear exactly how Rouse came to investigators’ attention.

He had been arrested on unrelated charges and jailed in Twiggs County in January, a few weeks after Hudson’s slaying, but released.

That arrest was for a probation violation, but it was immediately known how long he stayed locked up.

Rouse was also arrested on similar probation-related charges in September of last year and in April and November of 2014.

The kinds of cases those charges involved wasn’t noted in arrest records.

This story was originally published May 21, 2016 at 3:50 PM with the headline "Suspect in Macon whodunit mum in court."