Rarely does a murder occur with almost no real evidence pointing to a motive or suspect leads as indicated in police reports, but the brutal slaying of Isaiah Randolph Selman Jr., 28, in the summer of 2006 is precisely one of those cases.
A full 15 years later, no one other than the killer knows why Selman was bound, murdered and then set on fire.
Around 11 a.m., July 10, 2006, a maintenance employee of the Living Word Christian Center, Manwell Jones, arrived at the church to pick up a lawnmower. According to the coroner’s report, Jones stated to authorities that he was at the church for about 20 minutes when he noticed what appeared to be a small brush fire at the nearby Augusta Greenwood and Mulch Company, located at 3011 Old McDuffie Rd.
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Once firefighters were able to contain the blaze, they made a grizzly discovery: the charred remains of a human being. The body was still smoldering when the Deputy Coroner Charlena Graham arrived on the scene.
The body would later be identified through fingerprinting as Selman, according to the coroner’s report.
An autopsy ruled blunt force trauma as the official cause of death. Selman had been struck on the head with an unknown object, and he had also been shot in the left temple. Further, Graham’s examination showed that Selman had duct tape over his eyes, mouth and nose that prevented him from breathing. His hands were also bound by duct tape and his body showed abrasions along his ride side to include his shoulder, torso and arm.
Selman was not only murdered, but according to the coroner’s report, he had been ravaged by violence, killed and then doused with an unknown accelerant and set on fire before being left out in the open to be discovered almost immediately.
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Considering the busyness of the location in the south Augusta business area near Bobby Jones Expressway, especially during the typical Thursday midday, investigators told the press at the time that they believed Selman was killed the night before and his body was dumped at the location the following day.
Selman’s mother Sonya Baker said she had spoken to her son two days prior and invited him over to get something to eat, but he had never called back as he promised he would.
Baker told authorities that while her son did have a job at a car wash on Peach Orchard Road, he was practically homeless. He had numerous girlfriends and spent most nights with one of them, his mother said. On some occasions, he would spend the night at the family home.
According to Baker, her son had long struggled with substance abuse – specifically alcohol and crack cocaine. However, she was unaware of him having any enemies.
The crime against Selman was particularly heinous in that it involved overkill, a term that criminologists continue to debate. The term overkill refers to an assault that occurs over and above what would cause an immediate death. In other words, overkill is using more than one instrument or method to cause death and a perpetrator continuing to attack long after fatal wounds had been administered.
According to current Augusta/Richmond County Coroner Mark Bowen, Selman’s death could not be attributed to just one cause as the man had been beaten, shot and asphyxiated, and any of those violent actions could have killed him.
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According to Dr. Joshua Reynolds, co-author of a peer reviewed article published in the academic journal Applied Psychology In Criminal Justice, nothing really separates overkill from what most would consider a murder of passion.
In other words, according to Reynolds’ research, statistics show that the Selman murder could have been just a random act by a random psychopath.
According to Reynolds’ study, “Investigators Beliefs of Homicide Crime Scene Characteristics,” it is impossible to say whether Selman’s murder was over kill or a crime of passion, and it is also impossible to know, in the absence of other evidence, whether the victim knew his killer.
Reynolds concedes that his study was limited to only 400 cases, and his results can only be labeled as “inconclusive” or ungeneralizable, meaning his findings cannot be used to analyze any cases other than those he and his colleagues studied.
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Bowen, on the other hand, reviewed autopsy reports on the longtime cold case of Selman, which occurred before he became the coroner of Augusta/Richmond County, and said every bit of his instinct leads him to believe that Selman’s murder was not a random act or crime of passion.
“The body of evidence shows me that this was planned, and it was executed in a manner that would not only cause a prolonged death, but also be in some way symbolic. I have no doubt after reviewing the records that (Selman) was killed by someone he knew and maybe even someone he knew intimately, like a family member or a girlfriend or maybe even multiple girlfriends,” Bowen said.
If you have any information about the murder of Isaiah Selman, please contact the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office at (706) 821-1020 or contact The Augusta Press at (706) 834-8677.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Reporter of The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com. Anna Porzio is a researcher and editorial assistant. Reach her at anna@theaugustapress.com.
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