Editor’s Note: Sandy Hodson’s 14-part investigation into how justice is administered in the Brunswick Judicial District continues today with Part 8. This story looks into the case of 6-year-old Christopher Barrios who was raped and murdered in 2007. The other two cases mentioned early in the story will be the subjects of later stories. Earlier installments of the series can be found elsewhere in The Augusta Press website. Series stories will be published on Sundays and Thursdays.
In a span of six months in and around 2007, the Brunswick Judicial Circuit faced three difficult cases:
–A murder indictment against a Camden County physician in an overdose death that occurred nearly a year earlier, an indictment District Attorney Stephen Kelley pushed for.
Golden Isles Injustice
Part 8
–A capital murder case that had gone into complete meltdown. The case was against a Brunswick man found passed out cold on the street and covered in blood less than a mile from where a woman was stabbed to death.
–And the crime that sickened the whole community and that made national headlines: the rape and murder of a 6-year-old boy.
The evening of March 8, 2007, Christopher Barrios, 6, disappeared from the Canal Mobile Home Park, a small cluster of trailer homes near the county airport. Several residents saw Christopher that afternoon up to around 6:15 p.m., just before dark. The first police officers arrived around 8:30 p.m.
Investigator Ray Sarro walked from the trailer where Christopher lived with his father to the trailer where his grandmother lived just yards away. Sarro saw a toy light saber like the one Christopher had been carrying. It was lying in the yard of 121 Horseshoe Lane, the home of Peggy and David Edenfield and their adult son, George. Sarro said he could see people peeping out the windows. He had them come outside, separating George from his parents and their friend Donald Dale. The Edenfields seemed overly protective of George, Sarro said.
George, his family said, has the mental capacity of a small child. Both Edenfields have intellectual disabilities, although both graduated from high school after completing special education classes throughout.
George told Sarro that he had heard a voice in his head, that the devil told him to kill Christopher.
The police soon discovered George and his father had both been convicted of child molestation in different cases. Two other registered sex offenders also lived at the trailer park, but only the Edenfields and their friend Dale were arrested.
In the following hours and days after Christopher disappeared, repeated searches of the Edenfields and Dale’s properties and vehicles failed to produce any physical evidence of Christopher or what happened to him. They couldn’t find any blood or signs of violence, nor did massive and repeated searches of the rural area around the trailer park lead to Christopher’s body, although George, his father and Dale were taken to the area to show officers where they put Christopher.
From the night Christopher disappeared through March 16, each of the Edenfields and Dale were repeatedly questioned, often for hours at a time. Investigator Mike Owens would later testify that they were suspicious because the suspects had trouble answering questions directly. They also told the police several different accounts of what happened to Christopher.
The police were treating the Edenfields and Dale as adults with normal intelligence. But they were not. George Edenfield’s disability is so extreme that nearly a decade after his arrest, he remains incompetent to stand trial.
Staff photo by Sandy Hodson
Dale also gave investigators incriminating statements, although the police knew from the beginning that he had nothing to do with Christopher’s murder, Dale’s attorney, John Wetzler, said. He had been at Disney World with his family when he saw the front page of USA Today with the story of Christopher’s killing.
“They knew Donald Dale didn’t do it – he had an alibi for the entire time. They were watching the Edenfields home when Dale got there,” Wetzler said.
They knew Dale hadn’t done anything, but they kept him locked up, charged with capital murder, Wetzler learned as he studied the discovery.
It wasn’t just the reports that convinced Wetzler his client was innocent. A tape recording turned over to the attorney in discovery showed Glynn County Police Department investigators had neglected to turn off the recorder. Wetzler listened as GCPD investigators laughed and mocked Dale. They said they had to come up with something to keep Dale locked up so he couldn’t breed. GCPD Chief Matt Doering called a press conference to call Wetzler a liar on TV. Wetzler responded by having the recording transcribed by a professional court reporter and filed it in the court case for all to see.
On March 15, 2007, a week after Christopher disappeared, his body was found in a black trash bag left beside Canal Road less than a mile from the trailer park. Doering told news reporters he had driven by the site three days earlier and didn’t see the bag. According to the reports, the area had been searched several times.
The next day, Sarro tossed a picture to David Edenfield across a table. It was a picture of Christopher’s body inside a black plastic bag. When the TV news announced that Christopher’s body had been found, other inmates at the jail tried to break through his cell door to get to him, Edenfield told Sarro.
David Edenfield had told investigators the same story repeatedly: he went to work, came home, picked up his wife and son, they went to the cable company, to the sheriff’s office to change George’s address as a registered sex offender, to dinner, and then returned to the trailer park where his wife and son failed at setting up the TV cable box and decided to call Dale. But after seeing the picture, he slowly began to confess.
David Edenfield first said his son George and Dale killed Christopher and put his body in a trash bag.
David Edenfield said they used a trash bag because, “Well, usually like you see on television, you put it (a body) in a bag and bury it.”
When pressed why they used a trash bag instead of blanket or suitcase, he said, “Well see, well see, sometimes I watch movies on television.”
Sarro worked on David Edenfield, supplying details given by the others, to reach the confession that he and his son sexually molested Christopher then strangled him together.
David Edenfield said afterward that Christopher’s body was wrapped in several plastic bags then dumped away from the trailer park. Christopher was found inside a single trash bag that was not the same brand found at the Edenfield home. The discrepancy was never explained.
David Edenfield was the only one charged to stand trial.
His wife, Peggy, testified that all four of them disposed of Christopher’s body, which couldn’t be true if the GCPD was already watching the Edendfield home when Dale arrived, as Dale’s attorney said. Dale’s ‘boss also supplied a timeline that meant Dale wouldn’t have arrived at the Edenfield home until after the police got to the trailer park. Peggy Edenfield also testified Christopher’s body was put in two trash bags, which also wasn’t true. When she plead guilty, she was supposed to tell what happened to Christopher’s cloths. She didn’t or couldn’t.
Richard Allen was Peggy Edenfield’s attorney for the capital murder charges she faced. The Georgia Supreme Court found his work in defending a man sentenced to death in 2005 so ineffective his death sentence was reversed. Her sister proclaimed at her sentencing that it was all unfair because Allen had only seen her sister twice in five years. A state psychologist reported Peggy Edenfield’s IQ to be 62.
When she testified against her husband, Peggy Edenfield rambled on and repeatedly contradicting herself. Judge Stephen Scarlett called the attorneys to bench at one point.
“She’s totally incredible,” he told them.
One of David Edenfield’s attorneys complained that District Attorney Stephen Kelley had told them he wasn’t calling Peggy as a witness and never said differently until the day she was called to the witness stand, according to the trial transcript.
MORE: Golden Isles Injustice: Evidence disappears in 2003 Brunswick Judicial District murder case
Although Scarlett deemed Peggy Edenfield incredible, he allowed her testimony to continue.
Some of Peggy Edenfield’s statement to GCPD was played for the jury, including a portion of tape left running after Peggy was left alone in an interview room.
She rambled while she waited: “I did nothing to go to jail for. I got to use the bathroom. I’m going to jail. Come on. I got to use the bathroom, please. I got to put clothes in the dryer, take the colors out and dry the whites if I don’t go to jail. I am going to jail. Have you been to jail before? I say, ‘No, sir.’ You’re going now. I wonder where David is. Probably down in the jailhouse. Oh Lordy, I was going to go too. Don’t get to. I got to go to jail. Damn anxiety makes me belch.”
In October 2009, David Edenfield was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. His initial appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court was denied. A habeas petition is pending in Butts County Superior Court.
Peggy Edenfield is still serving 60 years in prison. Her son, George, remains institutionalized. Dale, his attorney said, was released into the care of a family who have since adopted him. He pleaded guilty to making a false statement to law enforcement and was sentenced to five years in custody.
Sandy Hodson is a staff reporter covering courts for The Augusta Press. Reach her at sandy@theaugustapress.com.
